“No finesse”: The punk band George Harrison felt sorry for
By the time that The Beatles disbanded, none of them were going to be going in the same direction. John Lennon may have used George Harrison on some of his first solo records, and Ringo Starr was always happy to drum with any of his old mates, but in terms of the style and structure of their material, there was no point in breaking up if they were going to rehash the same thing. What they were doing needed to be different, and all eyes were glued to Harrison after All Things Must Pass came out.
Since he was the most successful right out of the gate with his triple album, most people were waiting with bated breath to see if Harrison could top his masterpiece. At the same time, when you look at the road that led to him making his massive debut, is there any reason to think that he was going to make another odyssey all over again? Those tunes were being fleshed out during The Beatles’ tenure, and he had years to work on them, so asking him to do the same thing in two years is not realistic at all.
But when he finally found time to continue his career, he was far more interested in using his music to describe his situation. Living in the Material World helped him make sense of his spiritual side during his rise to the top, and while Dark Horse had a bit of a dip in quality due to the state of his voice, it did a good job of describing the pain that he felt watching his wife leave him for Eric Clapton.
Despite his penchant for great hooks, though, the music industry was still changing outside of his walls at Friar Park. Led Zeppelin had become one of the biggest names in music, but right when bands started to get over-indulgent, punk came in to throw caution to the wind and spit in the face of anyone trying to coax off of their legacy as a rock and roll star.
“I felt very sorry when the Sex Pistols were on television, and one of them was saying, ‘We’re educated to go into the factories and work on assembly lines’, and that’s their future. It is awful.”
George Harrison
And when looking at The Beatles’ reaction, none of them had the same outlook on the genre. Paul McCartney was certainly nervous about keeping up with the times when making tunes like ‘Spin It On’, but Lennon took one look at Sex Pistols and figured it wasn’t all that different from what the Fab Four had been doing in the Cavern Club when they were starting out, only this time with safety pins through their noses.
Once Harrison heard tunes like ‘God Save The Queen’, though, he was ice cold, saying, “As far as musicianship goes, the punk bands were just rubbish – no finesse in the drumming, just a lot of noise and nothing–I felt very sorry when the Sex Pistols were on television, and one of them was saying, ‘We’re educated to go into the factories and work on assembly lines’, and that’s their future. It is awful.”
Harrison can feel sorry for them, but most of the time, that frustration was what made the tunes work more often than not. For all of the boneheaded things that John Lydon has said in the past, ‘Anger is an energy’ is one of his major nuggets of truth, and being able to use that sense of rage to change the world around you is normally when you write some of the best songs.
But as far as music was concerned, Harrison felt there was room for both of them on the charts. Some young kids thought that phoney Beatlemania had bitten the dust by the end of the 1970s, but the fact that Harrison was able to have hits like ‘Blow Away’ around the same time showed that there was enough variety to go around.
