The three artists George Harrison said were tarnished by greed when they became entangled with The Beatles
One of the first songs of The Beatles that really managed to capture the hearts of listeners was ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’.
It was already a hit in the UK, but it went global when the band crossed the pond and played the track on the Ed Sullivan Show. Listening back, it’s hardly the most complex of songs, but the rhythm, the melody, the gorgeous harmonies, it’s all hardly a surprise that people were so instantly hooked.
“‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ came on the radio in 1964,” said Bruce Springsteen, recalling the first time that he heard the iconic track. “That was going to change my life because I was going to successfully pick the guitar up and learn how to play.”
Of course, while this may have been the band’s first worldwide hit, the reason that they’ve had such longevity and are so commonly referred to as the biggest act in the world is because of how much their style evolved over time. They became a lot more experimental with their approach to music, and it led to the creation of some of the most ambitious albums of all time, one of the most exciting of which was Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
This was arguably the first concept album ever made, as The Beatles created a fictional band and then wrote songs as if coming from those fictional characters. As well as the narrative carried throughout the record, it also had an iconic cover, where the band wore colourful outfits and stood out as figments of Paul McCartney and Co’s imagination. People listening knew that they were witnessing history, and so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to find out that a lot of people wanted to try to document the monumental album.
One of these attempts at preservation came in 1978 with the film adaptation of the same name. Here, The Bee Gees, Peter Frampton and Robert Stigwood all acted as the band and performed songs as if they were fictional musicians. There were many who thought that it was an insult to the album itself; however, George Harrison had other reservations.
He had seen firsthand how much success could corrupt even the greatest minds, and he was worried that that’s what happened to those who performed in the movie. He feels that the careers of a lot of those artists who acted in the film were tainted when they had a taste of how lucrative being in a band like The Beatles could be.
“I just feel sorry for Robert Stigwood, The Bee Gees and Pete Frampton for doing it, because they had established themselves in their own right as decent artists and suddenly… it’s like the classic thing of greed,” said Harrison. “The more you make, the more you want to make, until you become so greedy that ultimately you put a foot wrong. And even though Sgt Pepper is no doubt a financial success, I think it’s damaged their images, their careers, and they didn’t need to do that.”
No one had a better understanding of the tribulations that can come when playing in a band like The Beatles, and so maybe Harrison had a point when it came to the careers of those in the film. They still went on to make good music following the release of the 1978 classic, but many would argue that they had peaked prior to this.
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