The Beatles songs Paul McCartney didn’t want to play on: “He suddenly likes them now”
George Harrison always needed to have something to be proud of whenever he finished writing one of his songs.
He was not going to sit back and write in the same professional capacity as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but whenever he did speak up, it spoke volumes well beyond anything that his bandmates could have done. But even though his lyrics had a lot of food for thought, that didn’t mean that he had to be in love with whatever the final product was when he got finished.
Then again, it’s rare that you hear a songwriter discovering themselves in real time the same way that Harrison was back in the day. He was still picking things up when he first started working on ‘Don’t Bother Me’ off of With The Beatles, and while it’s far from the greatest song in the world by any stretch, it’s easy to see him starting to bring a different flavour to the band’s catalogue whenever he got to sing it.
But whereas Lennon and McCartney had people to work off of and be inspired by, Harrison was always interested in sounds that were a bit more unusual. He had already begun making brilliant tunes like ‘I Need You’ all the way back to the days of Help!, but when he first started to notice the Indian instrumentation in one scene of the film, he started to go down the rabbit hole of what that kind of music could be like in a Western context.
So many artists had tried to make different sounds with their guitars, but when Harrison first brought in the sitar for ‘Norwegian Wood’, he was clearly working more intimately with that style of music. No one had heard anything like that before, but as far as Harrison was concerned, all that mattered was blending the spiritual side of his music with the secular side, which often came out when making songs like ‘Within You Without You’ or ‘The Inner Light’.
When looking at the lyrics on their own, Harrison had gone well past the typical love song formula. He wanted to make the kind of music that made people feel something on a spiritual level, but since there was one person in the group deadset on making whimsy, it’s not like every one of Harrison’s ideas was going to fly
If you were to ask Harrison, one of the biggest ones to push back on his inspirations was McCartney, saying, “In fact, I think it was John who really urged me to play sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood’, which was the first time we used it. Now, Paul has just asked me recently whether I’d written any more of those ‘Indian type of tunes’. He suddenly likes them now. But at the time, he wouldn’t play on them.”
Compared to every other musical movement on a Beatles record, it was probably a lot more difficult for McCartney to get his head around working on those kinds of tunes. He had years of Western harmony ingrained in him, and no matter how hard Lennon may have pushed his bandmate to explore new territories, there was always going to be a bit of friction between McCartney’s pop-focused mind and whatever Harrison was doing.
Then again, the beginning of Wings was all about starting from scratch, so seeing Macca become interested in Harrison’s Indian textures may as well have been an olive branch. He was never going to completely understand it on the same intimate level that Harrison did, but there was nothing wrong with appreciating it from afar.
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