The genres George Harrison said he would never play: “It’s not high tech”
After The Beatles broke up, George Harrison was officially done with taking orders from anyone.
He had spent the last decade of his life playing second fiddle to John Lennon and Paul McCartney every time he played, and while his work on those early records was phenomenal, he hated the idea of always lingering in the background and not getting his songs out there. He had the potential to be a star in his own right, but there were always going to be a few lines that he wasn’t going to cross once he started gaining traction off of All Things Must Pass.
First things first, Harrison was not interested in being the frontman of his own outfit. Wings was a great opportunity for Macca to live out the same rock star fantasies that he used to have in the past, but Harrison wasn’t nicknamed ‘The Quiet One’ by accident. He felt comfortable in the confines of a band, but he wanted to make sure that he was writing the kind of songs that he could stand behind.
Not all of his records may have been a labour of love all the time, but even when he was phoning it in on records like Gone Troppo, you could still hear the person underneath it all. He could be cynical when he wanted to, he could be spiritual when he wanted to, and even on the rare occasion, he could be pretty goddamn funny, especially when he kick-started ‘Weird’ Al’s career a decade before he got started on ‘This Song’.
But it felt that Harrison wasn’t all that equipped for the modern age when he entered the 1980s. The MTV generation wasn’t his cup of tea most of the time, and even with the Traveling Wilburys, half the songs he wrote were about reliving his glory days as a kid who loved listening to skiffle back in the day. And he wasn’t going to be caught dead working on any processed instruments.
The 1980s might have been the dawn of inventions like the sampler, but Harrison was more interested in songs that could be played on guitars instead of worked out on a computer, saying, “I still do it the same as we did 30 years ago. It’s still in the old school of music. It’s in the 1960s and 1970s way of doing stuff. It’s not high tech, and it’s not a rap or techno version of it. There’s acoustic guitars played by people onto tape.”
While Harrison does sound like someone complaining about how music was so much better back in his day, it’s not like his music doesn’t warrant that kind of treatment. He had already embarrassed himself by trying to change with the times on ‘Teardrops’, and since that was met with apathy or unintentional laughter depending on who you ask, it was better for him to work with some of his favourite session guys like Jim Keltner than worrying about how to program a drum machine.
That said, it’s not like those rap and techno kids didn’t have the power to make some interesting music, either. Trent Reznor may have been using Pro Tools when he started, but he wanted to use it as a tool rather than taking the easy way out. And if you look throughout every era of hip-hop, people have found ways to restructure sounds in a different way, whether that’s The Bomb Squad working on Public Enemy’s greatest records or J Dilla incorporating the greatest samples anyone had ever heard in the 2000s.
Harrison might have seen the new technology as cheating, but if he looked a little bit harder, there were bound to be people who had a better idea of how to use the new toys lying around the studio. The Beatles had done the same thing when working with the Mellotron and the Moog synthesiser, and just because the next generation was using computers didn’t mean that they couldn’t find a way to wow us.
