Every song by The Beatles featuring George Harrison on bass guitar
In The Beatles, nobody seemed to want to play the bass guitar. After Paul McCartney, George Harrison was probably the second most accomplished on the rhythmic instrument, though John Lennon also occasionally had a twang. With such a powerful legacy of multi-instrumental command and songwriting prowess under his belt, it can be easy to forget that McCartney was The Beatles’ bassist. When he first joined Lennon’s high school band, The Quarrymen, in 1957, he took a position on the six-string but soon fell into the bassist role by necessity.
In the Quarrymen and the very earliest days of The Beatles, Stuart Sutcliffe played bass in a five-piece formation with Pete Best on drums. In 1961, he left the band to focus on his most prominent passion, painting, taking classes in Hamburg. Tragically, he passed away from a cerebral haemorrhage the following year. “Nobody wants to play bass, or nobody did in those days,” McCartney noted in Many Years From Now. “Bass was the thing that the fat boys got lumbered with and were asked to stand at the back and play…so I definitely didn’t want to do it, but Stuart left, and I got lumbered with it. Later, I was quite happy.”
Continuing in his book The Lyrics, McCartney remembered how a romantic relationship also influenced Sutcliffe’s decision to leave The Beatles. “When we were in Hamburg, Stuart fell in love with a local girl called Astrid and decided he was leaving the group. So we were now without a bass player. We couldn’t have three guitars and no bass. Nobody wanted to be the bass player in those days because it was always the fat guy playing bass. There seemed to be some sort of stigma attached to it.”
Despite his reservations, McCartney became attached to his iconic Hofner violin bass but always favoured the piano or guitar as his main songwriting tool. “I’ve never composed on the bass. Never. Not to this day,” he revealed. McCartney began to take the role of the bass guitar more seriously in 1964 when The Beatles recorded ‘She’s a Woman’, the first of many creative basslines that departed from simple root note repetition.
As the band’s all-rounder, McCartney also took on drumming duties in several songs when Ringo Starr wasn’t available and performed piano and guitar parts in profusion, especially later in the Beatles’ catalogue. Likewise, the other members frequently migrated from their stations. Although George Harrison was primarily the lead guitarist and John Lennon generally took rhythm duties, both became competent on bass, lead, rhythm and keys. Starr even showed his skills on the ivory in ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ and used the piano when writing ‘Octopus’s Garden’.
Over the past six decades, Beatles fans have frequently argued over which member was the best singer, which was the best guitarist and whether McCartney was really better at drumming than Starr. Indeed, occasionally, one member might take the reins from another in order to get a part right in the studio. For instance, when McCartney recorded the lead guitar parts for Harrison’s song ‘Taxman’. However, for the most part, the duties befell anyone who had their hands free and could manage it at the time.
As the secondary bassist, Harrison sometimes wielded McCartney’s four-string when the latter was preoccupied with the piano or guitar during group recordings. Ever the perfectionist, McCartney was no stranger to bass overdubs but had plenty of confidence in Harrison’s bass skills.
Below, we list the 13 Beatles songs to which Harrison contributed bass parts, whether in overdubs or in full band recordings. Present on the list is ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, one of McCartney’s songs from the Abbey Road sessions that drove the other three members up the wall. Not only did they have an aversion to the song, but at McCartney’s insistence, they spent hours trying to record the perfect take. “Sometimes Paul would make us do these really fruity songs,” Harrison reflected in a conversation with Crawdaddy in the 1970s. “I mean, my God, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was so fruity.”
The Beatles songs George Harrison played bass on:
- ‘Back In The USSR’
- ‘Rocky Raccoon’
- ‘Honey Pie’
- ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’
- ‘Oh! Darling’
- ‘Golden Slumbers’
- ‘Good Day Sunshine’
- ‘Carry That Weight’
- ‘She Said She Said’
- ‘Two of Us’
- ‘Hey Jude’
- ‘Maggie Mae’
- ‘Old Brown Shoe’
