It’s hard to really pick apart the flaws when listening to any record by The Beatles.
Although there are bound to be pieces that don’t hold up as well if you’ve listened to an album for the 1000th time, a lot of what the Fab Four did once they left the road was about more than making another catchy tune. They had begun making artsy experiments every time they walked into the studio, but Paul McCartney didn’t think every part of their work was necessarily perfect, either.
Granted, both John Lennon and McCartney were probably the last people to talk to when judging the quality of their tunes. Despite Lennon being cynical about the way that his music was handled in the band half the time, Macca was an avid perfectionist and was preparing to move the Earth if it meant getting the right take. And it’s not like the rest of the band didn’t suffer for that standard.
As much as McCartney believed in his own tunes, it was easy for everyone else to be left by the wayside to make sure his tracks were exactly right. Both George Harrison and Ringo Starr talked about how excruciating it was trying to put together ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, and even when Harrison presented classics to the group like ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, he needed to bring in someone like Eric Clapton to make sure everyone was paying attention.
Then again, Harrison seemed to exist in his own little bubble half the time. He didn’t have a creative partner to bounce ideas off of, and while that made him have a rough start to his songwriting career, his tunes ended up being far more fleshed-out than usual, especially when throwing various Indian influences into the mix, like the strange time signatures on ‘Here Comes the Sun’.
And while Harrison was never on board with the concept of Sgt Pepper, even the rest of the band had to admit that ‘Within You Without You’ was a step above everything else. There was a whimsical feeling to the rest of the record, but this delve into Indian spirituality was the perfect blend of Eastern and Western music coming together, especially the instrumental break with the strings bouncing off the sitars and tablas.
McCartney may have been proud of his musical little brother, but he admitted that part of it was undercut by the addition of laughter at the end, saying, “‘Within You Without You’, George’s track. There happen to be these peals of like, uncontrollable laughter, and of course, it was like, ‘Well, look, we’d better not have all that laughter ‘cos it spoils this very serious, Indian, Eastern mood of George’s.’ But I mean, George wanted it and stuff, you know, it had to be.”
In all fairness, the laughter does seem a little bit tacky to throw at the end of the tune, but it does help give a bit of lightheartedness to the tune as well. This was always going to be a sharp contrast coming after ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’, but even if it was a lot more experimental, the idea of a crowd laughing at the end does help maintain the illusion of a fictional band playing.
But as we would see in the next few years, Harrison’s bit of self-deprecating humour was not going to be around for long. He was quickly becoming one of the best songwriters in the group, and by the time of working on Abbey Road and eventually All Things Must Pass, he had become as strong a songwriter to match or even surpass what Lennon and McCartney were doing.
