The song George Harrison said was too jazzy for The Beatles: “It wasn’t really rock and roll”
It’s hard to understate just how important albums like Rubber Soul and Revolver were for The Beatles.
Together, they provided the axis upon which they could pivot their sound entirely. Stepping away from the blues-rooted pop sound that had garnered them outrageous global popularity, and moving forward into a more experimental world. A world that would allow them to work exclusively in the studio and create a catalogue of work that would cement their legacy as the most influential band of all time.
With the beauty of retrospect, I know how important these albums are. In fact, I’m not afraid to admit that I simply do not listen to The Beatles’ back catalogue prior to the years 1965. But at the time, the screams of their popularity were so deafening that the idea of them wholly abandoning their innocent pop sound would have seemed like madness. Their commercial success was so bulletproof that to depart from that in pursuit of innovation seemed like career jeopardy.
But it wasn’t as knee-jerk as many die-hard fans would have liked to believe. Of course, the fatigue of their touring undoubtedly played a role in expediting their desire to make more experimental, studio-based music, but really, they were shaping their interest in the esoteric long before that.
George Harrison was perhaps the most curious of the bunch, finding creative enlightenment in India, under the teachings of Ravi Shankar. But it seemed that travel was always a source of creative inspiration for Harrison, and it was perhaps a trip to America in 1963, before The Beatles took on the States, that sparked a chain of events that later resulted in their sonic expansion.
He explained, “In 1963, the year before the Beatles first came to America, I took a trip to St. Louis to visit my sister, how was living there at the time. The whole Beatlemania thing had really begun in the UK, and we’d had three or four hit singles.
“So while visiting my sister I went around to all the music shops looking for new singles and especially albums that were really hard to find in Liverpool. And that’s where I finally found the James Ray album If You’re Gonna Make A Fool of Somebody.”
It was an album that lit a spark of intrigue for Harrison, for its jazzy profiles got him thinking about how the musical approach of his own band could develop.
“There were a couple of good tracks on it, and one that I really liked was a song called ‘Got My Mind Set On You’,” Harrison added. “It would have been great for the Beatles to cover, except it wasn’t really rock and roll; it was trying to rock, but it sounded like it was produced by somebody who was basically a jazz musician — it had all these squawky horns and stuff. But the song stuck in my mind.”Years later, in 1987, when I was working with Jeff Lynne on the Cloud Nine album, I finally decided to try and put more of a rock edge on the song.”
By the time The Beatles had got to a point in their career where they could celebrate the use of squawky horns themselves, they were long past the point of covers, and so Harrison’s suggestion would have inevitably fallen on deaf ears. But thankfully, for the arc of his own story, he found a time and place to put his idea to use.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.