The Beatles classic that upset George Harrison: “He seemed annoyed”
The back half of The Beatles’ career tends to be where everything gets slightly ugly. From artistic differences to management problems, the Fab Four had clearly grown into completely different entities than the four-headed monster they once were, which wasn’t helped when Yoko Ono started showing up to rehearsals. While her subsequent ridicule is a little hard to watch with fresh eyes, there can be no doubt that her presence upset the gorup’s balance. But things were boiling over way before that, and there was already a bit of tension in the studio once the band laid down the breezy 1964 track ‘I’ll Follow the Sun’.
Granted, was anyone having fun by the time they were making Beatles For Sale? Just look at the expressions they are all making on the cover. Gone were the days of the fresh-faced moptops just looking for a good time. After two hectic years of Beatlemania, these guys were burned out, and it was about time for them to get a break when they were rushed back into the studio to get the next album going.
That might be why half of the album is made up of covers again, usually taken from their live show as they did on their first records. Since John Lennon and Paul McCartney hadn’t had time to workshop as many songs, most of the sessions would morph into songwriting sessions as well, usually finishing up a song like ‘Eight Days a Week’ in the studio rather than flesh it out at home.
This did give them an opportunity to delve into their back catalogue, and McCartney had ‘I’ll Follow the Sun’ lying around since before they became famous. Coming up with it in between sets, the group thought it was good enough to put on the album, featuring a predominantly acoustic foundation throughout the tune.
While George Harrison’s sliding guitar solo was one of the rare electric moments of the song, he had to fight tooth and nail for it. Since everyone wasn’t really on board with it, Harrison was being cast to the side, which especially didn’t help when Lennon stepped up to try to record the solo.
When talking about the sessions in Here There and Everywhere, engineer Geoff Emerick remembered how tense that day was, saying, “Despite the overall good vibe of the day, George Harrison seemed annoyed, perhaps because he hadn’t been given much to do. At one point, he marched into the control room and complained loudly, ‘You know, I’d like to do the solo on this one. I am supposed to be the lead guitarist in this band, after all’”.
Maybe Harrison was being pedantic or maybe he saw himself being pushed to the side a bit too much. It’s not like he was far off since McCartney would play lead guitar on a handful of Beatles tracks and eventually begin dictating to Harrison how he thought the guitar should be played at any specific moment.
Even though Harrison eventually got his way, his way of playing couldn’t have been better for the song. Lennon may have been used to playing rhythm guitar, and hearing ‘The Quiet Beatle’ slowly speak through his guitar midway through the song feels like the sun breaking through the clouds. A bit on the nose for a song like this, but it works.
