The decade George Harrison thought never lived up to the 1960s: “It’s all monotone”
In a world full of rock and roll divas, George Harrison was normally the one who was the most level-headed of anyone.
Being in one of the biggest bands in the world is probably not that easy, but when you listen to him singing or giving interviews, he seems to be one of the most mild-mannered people who happened to be the most iconic guitarist of his generation. But even though he had some of the most singable lead breaks of any of his contemporaries, Harrison felt that his greatest gift was being able to understand what a song needed every time he performed.
He didn’t want to be stuck with a bunch of mediocre songs for the rest of his life, and if he was building all of his greatest works off of a bunch of guitar solos, he wouldn’t have gone very far. He wanted the chance to be able to make something unprecedented, and out of all the solo Beatles careers, Harrison seemed most in tune with what he wanted to do every single time he made one of his records.
Not all of them were knockouts, and there were more than a few times when he would have rather been anywhere else but in the studio, but he felt that there was a lot more for him to explore when he wasn’t chasing after trends. That was reserved for the pinup stars of the world, but after spending the late 1960s on vacation, he did notice that some of the great songwriters did help him come out of the woodwork.
Jeff Lynne is half the reason why Cloud Nine exists today, and the Traveling Wilburys was Harrison’s idea of having some fun with a bunch of his mates, but that wasn’t what the rest of the world wanted to hear. As the 1990s began, the nostalgic side of rock and roll was replaced by the cynicism of alternative music, and while that style definitely had its place in culture, Harrison could see music becoming a lot more manufactured as he kept going.
You have to remember that grunge swooped in right around the time that the boy band craze was starting, and while Nirvana became one of the biggest bands in the world, you also had to deal with acts like New Kids on the Block cluttering up MTV. And with the advent of shows like TRL, Harrison felt like the industry had lost its way from the revolutionaries that he had heard growing up.
There weren’t real knockouts out there anymore, and Harrison had no problem calling out the next generation, either, saying, “These days you can listen to three years on the radio and you’d hear three songs which in the 1960s would have been average songs, but now they sound like great songs because there’s very little material that has any statement or production value. There doesn’t seem to be anything creative. It’s all monotone or that’s how it seems to me. There’s a couple of tunes where I think, ‘Well, that’s good.’ Back in the 1960s, there were a lot of good records.”
And when you look at the bands that Harrison was talking about, you can see where he was coming from. Oasis are still regarded as one of the greatest rock bands to come out of the 1990s, but compared to what The Beatles had done before, there’s a good chance that Harrison was only seeing flashbacks of what he was doing during the Beatlemania days, only this time with a singer that he didn’t like very much.
There are bound to be more adventurous artists every single generation, but Harrison wasn’t looking to see artists that were merely good enough to be on the hit parade. He wanted something that would move him, but the days of having folk-rock troubadours like Bob Dylan or rock and roll legends like Carl Perkins were gone forever.
