“I have a problem with all that”: The one song George Harrison never wanted to release
There are plenty of people who would kill to have nearly anything that George Harrison touched when he was still with us.
Every member of The Beatles doesn’t even feel like a human half the time, and when anyone has the luxury of being in the presence of one of them, chances are even the most stable fan would have their knees shaking just a little bit. But while Harrison was willing to let his fans know about different parts of his life, he felt that some of the songs that he wrote down needed to be a bit more private than others when people started going through his back pages.
Because, really, Harrison was never that willing to be in the spotlight from the moment he started with the band. He was a fantastic guitarist and was willing to do whatever he could to make a song better, but he always felt more comfortable in the back, padding out the sound, than being the person at the front of the stage. That’s why he was a bit more leery of being the emcee at The Concert for Bangladesh, but if he could be uncomfortable to help out a good cause, that was a light burden to bear.
But when listening to a lot of his records, Harrison didn’t really leave anything to the imagination. All Things Must Pass is full of pieces of his inner psyche, and while he does do a lot of preaching that could get on some people’s nerves, it’s not like he’s trying to convert anyone to his cause or anything. He wanted everyone to experience some communication with a higher power, even if it didn’t happen to align with the one that he followed every single day.
Granted, there’s also a fair bit of warnings scattered throughout the record. The dissolution of The Beatles was never going to be easy to navigate, and while ‘Wah-Wah’ did have more than a few cheap shots at Paul McCartney for not seeing his friend in pain, a lot of the more serious songs were being saved for later in the track listing. ‘My Sweet Lord’ was the poppy single, but ‘Beware of Darkness’ is the kind of tune that feels almost too mystical to understand.
Then again, what Harrison is singing about isn’t all that cerebral or anything. He was only telling people about the horrors that exist out in the world that people take for granted, and since the entire world is surrounded by maya, it’s better to melt all of that away and develop a relationship with God. So when people were hounding Harrison about his demo of the song, it felt like they were deliberately not listening to what he was saying.
The demo forms of his songs were a private matter, and he didn’t want the public to see that side of his work, saying, “Actually I didn’t even know it was recorded at the time. It came out later on a bootleg, and it’s strange when something you didn’t ever consider to be a record is suddenly something somebody digs out and plays as what’s supposed to be the record. I have a problem with all that.”
But that has more to do with the fact that Harrison wasn’t all about big business on principle. ‘Taxman’ already showed his problem with people that were interested in greed over everything else, so seeing the same thing happening in his own solo career is probably why he ended up taking a sabbatical from music for a few years before finding the love for it again when working on records like Cloud Nine.
He was more than happy to play his music to those that appreciated it, but it wasn’t about trying to get the most money out of his fans. If they happened to like his music, that was fine, but there was a line that tended to get crossed when people started viewing his music as a product rather than a legitimate extension of his personality.
