The Beatles albums George Harrison called “awful”
Such is the breadth of The Beatles that it’s hard to truly love everything they’ve done. They flew the flag for artistic evolution and constantly eluded sonic expectations. That being said, even the albums that die-hard fans might consider duds still have genuine artistic merit, making it difficult to truly lambast any of their work.
While each record has its own sense of individuality, there’s a clear distinction between the two eras in which to categorise. When they turned from mop-topped pop heartthrobs to the princes of psychedelia, injecting splashes of technicolour into their otherwise palatable rock and roll soundscape.
“I liked when we got into Rubber Soul, Revolver — each album had something good about it and progressed,” George Harrison said in a 1977 interview. The former being released in 1965, the year in which they first tried LSD, subsequently altering their brain chemistry to become more expansive and abstract creatives.
As Harrison alluded to, what followed Rubber Soul was a prolific album that continually pushed the envelope of conventional rock, with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour and their self-titled, also referred to as The White Album, coming in consecutive years after Rubber Soul.
But not every record in that newfound landscape of creative freedom sat well with Harrison. There is, of course, a fine line between musical expansion and outright incoherence. The bureaucratic powers that be arguably mistook their hallucinogen-induced openness for apathy, altering the publishing of records for greater financial gain—without worrying that the artistic sentiment might become collateral damage.
“There were albums which weren’t any good as far as I was concerned, like Yellow Submarine,” Harrison said. “We put all the songs together into an album form — I’m talking about the English albums now, because the States we found later that for every two albums we had, they’d made three because we put fourteen tracks on an album, and we’d also have singles that weren’t included on albums in those days. They’d put the singles — take off a bunch of tracks, change all the running order and then they’d make new packages like ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Today’, just awful packages.”
As a quarter of music’s most innovative studio band, it’s no wonder that Harrison also looks back on the early records with relative indifference. When asked about any further records he wasn’t fond of, he explained: “Those old records weren’t really stereo,” he noted. “They were mono records and they were rechanneled.
He continued, “Some of the stereo is terrible because you’ve got the backing on one side,” he said. “In fact, when we did the first two albums — at least the first album — which was Please Please Me, we did straight onto a two-track machine.”
A craftsman eye will always notice the intricate blemishes long before the audience, but therein lies the essence of The Beatles’ success. Always in the present with one eye on the future, they are a band who helped define the reverence of a studio album. While ‘mono’ in their composition, the tracks on Please Please Me are equally as defining as the more genre-bending songs that they later released and platforms a band brimming with ideas, charisma and originality.
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