If you want to make yourself sound interesting at dinner parties, start a conversation around the table, asking people to pick their favourite Beatle, and when they finally get around to asking you in return, defy them all and say George Harrison.
He is, by all accounts, the more interesting Beatle to like for his smaller percentage of hits. But let’s get it straight, that by no means results in artistic obscurity. When he was finally given the chance to put his songs centre stage, he delivered classics that threatened the dominant position of Lennon and McCartney.
‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is as iconic a guitar line as any, ‘Here Comes the Sun’ may be their best pop song, and well, ‘Something’ is as Frank Sinatra described “the greatest love song of the past 50 years”. All that chart-topping brilliance came after several decades quietly occupying the shadows rather than brazenly presenting any idea that stuck a chord or two; he honed his guitar playing and patiently decided what it was he wanted to say with it.
Famously, the curiosity was churned towards a resolve after a life-changing trip to India, where, under the stewardship of sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, he became a more worldly artist. Armed with a deep understanding of how conventional Western pop music can be shaped by more diverse influences, his writing became nuanced, and suddenly, he was a creative force to be reckoned with.
“It really did help me as far as writing strange melodies and also rhythmically it was the best assistance I could have had,” he said of the experience, providing proof that he had a hand to play in The Beatles’ more experimental journey.
But while the sitar and Eastern influences played a key role in the melodic growth of Harrison, the nuance of his lyrics can’t be forgotten. ‘Something’ tapped into the universal psyche for the very fact it captured that concentrated essence of humanity.
He understood how his lyrics related to the inner workings of the human mind, or as author of Revolution In the Head, Ian MacDonald explained, “Of the songwriting Beatles, Harrison was the one with the most coherent belief system and the one most likely to think his lyrics through. This makes his lyrics perhaps more dogged than Lennon and McCartney’s, but at least the listeners of the future have more chance of working out what he was driving at.”
It comes as no surprise that somewhere in a list of his favourite songs, sits a track of obscure and profound poetry, like ‘Black Cross’, a renowned piece from American stage performer Lord Buckley. Over a solo female voice singing and humming the spiritual “Kumbaya”, Buckley tells the story of an old, mysterious figure named Hezekiah Jones, who lived in a dilapidated dwelling on a hill.
Sure, it’s completely unlike any of the tales of love and life sung by The Beatles, but it’s the sort of introspective take that inspired a deep thinker like Harrison. In fact, Buckley’s esoteric and spiritually comedic take on the world led him to visit his home Crackerbox Palace, which later became the inspiration for his own track of the same name.
