“I like that a lot”: The one band George Harrison said would live on forever
Nothing that George Harrison ever made was meant to cash in on trends.
The Beatles may have started out riding the wave of rock and roll, but by the time they had done all they could do together, Harrison was dead set on making music that he felt could stand up 100 years down the road. That definitely came from his spiritual side every time he picked up his guitar, but he felt that some of the greatest secular artists of all time could hit upon a certain universal truth every time they wrote one of their tracks.
That’s not to say that Harrison didn’t still have a deep love for the more flashy pieces of rock and roll. He was knocked out by Elvis Presley from the first time he heard him on the radio, and while ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ might not be the most complicated song in the world, it was enough for Harrison to get the ball rolling. And while a lot of his songs for The Beatles started off a little bit primitive, he was more than willing to hone his craft until he landed on something that could actually mean something.
Which is why a lot of his songs don’t always feature the most natural chord progressions or anything. He does have a few fairly mindless pop tunes in his discography, but the ones that have stood the test of time are the ones that take the listener on a bit of a different journey. Nothing else can really capture the feeling of ‘Beware of Darkness’, but those existential questions Harrison poses demand to be felt just as much as the typical love songs of the day.
That kind of songwriting all came from internalising all types of music, but when you go through All Things Must Pass, some of the best songs are the ones that could be played with only an acoustic guitar and still work. Harrison definitely had a folksy side when he started making his own music, and while he was heard singing along to Bob Dylan in between the Get Back sessions, he was also interested in what The Band were doing around the same time.
Music From Big Pink was already turning into one of the greatest rustic albums ever made, and most of the band didn’t need Dylan’s help to make it sound great. There were a few token songs from their former bandleader, but the magic of a song like ‘The Weight’ is hearing every member finding the perfect spot in the mix, whether it’s the gorgeous piano work or everyone harmonising when they are at the end of the chorus.
And while Harrison had a much firmer idea of what he wanted, he knew that The Band had found the key to musical immortality with an album like that, saying, “I want stuff that there is a long life to it. That’s why I valued The Band’s music. I think, in that context, when you have all these different voices coming and going, it carries an album. It makes it hold the interest and I like that a lot. But I don’t think when I first heard it I was really aware of what was really going on. I was just absorbing the sound. I was just being carried along by what I was hearing.”
Granted, it didn’t take long for Harrison to fully grasp what was going on, or the rest of his former Fabs, for that matter. Songs like ‘Behind That Locked Door’ and ‘Run of the Mill’ have that kind of rustic edge to them, and even Lennon’s ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ from the final Beatles sessions had a sound that seemed far more indebted to what The Band had been doing on those first few albums.
Whether the songs are going to live on until the end of time is still up for debate, but there’s no doubt that there will still be people eager to hear tunes that have real voices behind them. Because as much as The Band might sound dated to modern ears, there’s no real substitute for people that are playing the purest rock and roll that they can and singing from the heart whenever they harmonise.
