The one genre George Harrison couldn’t stand listening to: “It’s a whole other train of thought”
George Harrison was always looking for something with more depth whenever he got into the music business.
After being a member of The Beatles for the first third of his life, he had enough wisdom under his belt to realise that the best music that he ever heard wasn’t about trying to make the best hook possible. It was about stirring something that was deep within your soul, and when listening to some genres of music, Harrison felt that there wasn’t as much substance to what he had heard on the radio.
Granted, Harrison could be even more merciless than John Lennon when talking about the biggest stars in the world. He didn’t mince words about how he couldn’t handle listening to people like Neil Young or Elton John, and when looking at his record collection, it was a lot easier for him to gravitate towards the rock and roll favourites that he heard as a kid. So when looking at the pop charts, Harrison felt that they had lost their lustre after a while.
Then again, what Harrison went through isn’t all that different from every other rock and roll star that reaches the next generation. He never stopped putting out great music, but there comes a point in every pop star’s life when they start looking around the charts and see a lot of people who only want to become the biggest star in the world rather than worrying about what their music should sound like.
Compared to what he was doing with someone like Ravi Shankar, Harrison felt that there was no reason to listen to much pop music outside of Smokey Robinson, saying, “It’s a whole other train of thought that comes from the music. In simpler terms, there’s people, I like people who just convey in their music some sort of sincerity. I’m a big fan of Smokey Robinson just because musically he is so sweet, he makes you feel nice, he makes me feel good, whereas a lot of music I listen to, which is popular music, just makes me uptight.”
And looking at what Harrison did during the late 1970s, it’s easy to see why Robinson would have been the lone exception to the pop song rule. Whereas Lennon and Paul McCartney started within the parameters of rock and roll, Harrison did show a surprising knack for soul music on some of his records, even if a few like Extra Texture seemed to fall a little bit flat when put next to All Things Must Pass.
But for all of the great pop music that he made, a lot of it came from him learning lessons from what Shankar was doing. Not everyone might have been in love with the idea of the ‘Quiet One’ becoming infatuated with Eastern textures, but had he not thought about music in a different way, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have got the strange multi-metre breakdown of ‘Here Comes the Sun’ or the beautiful slide guitar licks that he would play throughout his solo career.
And when he did eventually return to the pop charts, it’s not like he was trying to compete with the flavours of the day. It was strange enough to see him include a few of his songs on a Madonna movie soundtrack, but when Cloud Nine and especially the Traveling Wilburys records came out, he was far more interested in making music that paid tribute to some of the biggest stars that he grew up listening to.
So while pop music today probably would have been nothing but noise to Harrison, that doesn’t mean that he discarded everything on principle. He figured that the best artists in the world are the ones who had something to say, and if he felt that they were saying something important, it wasn’t hard for him to give his seal of approval.
