Sippican Quotes Me

I'm honored.

He's right that George Martin, the Beatles' producer, admits to having been beastly to George Harrison in the early years. The youngest member of The Beatles, very much in the shadow of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, Harrison's early songs weren't stellar, most of them never recorded.

But Harrison became a more than competent songwriter, of course. Frank Sinatra called Something the greatest love song ever written and the Chairman of the Board knew something about love songs. (The rhymes on Harrison's last LP, posthumously released, are often stunning, though overall, I found the release so unsatisfying that I couldn't justify buying it.)

What was frustrating about Harrison as a solo artist to me is that he produced LPs that were either altogether wonderful or almost completely crap, those in the latter category occasionally containing only a salvageable tune or two. 33-1/3 and Extra Texture were particularly horrible, Dark Horse only marginally and sporadically better. All Things Must Pass, though far too long (the same complaint that Harrison made to McCartney of the latter's concert appearances, by the way), is an undeniable classic, and Cloud Nine, produced by ELO's Jeff Lynne, is a fun listen. Of course, Harrison's first Traveling Wilbury project with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Lynne was simultaneously fresh and thick with nostalgia. Harrison's compositions on the first release were outstanding. (The second release was mediocre.)

To his credit, after the breakup of the Beatles, instead of returning comfortably to form, Harrison developed his own signature guitar style. Think high-pitched whole notes. That's the post-Beatles Harrison way of playing guitar. I never particularly cared for that sound, but it was his, an important statement from a proud man insistent that he wasn't George Beatle.

The Wilburys projects point out an important fact about Harrison: Although he was a curmudgeonly personality who, as McCartney said, "didn't suffer fools," he also was someone who loved to collaborate with others. It was he, sickened by the egomania he saw especially in McCartney, who invited Billy Preston to sit in on the often contentious Let It Be sessions. It was he too, who asked Eric Clapton to add that haunting solo to While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

Harrison was also an innovator in the Beatles days. He brought a sitar into the studio with the Fab Four for the first time and he was the one who suggested the use of synthesizers on Abbey Road.

Harrison was usually contemptuous of the Beatles, claiming that he'd worked with much better musicians than his old bandmates ever were. (He probably did. But he never worked with any set of musicians who were more impressive complete packages: performers, composers, arrangers, personalities.) When he wrote his autobiography, Harrison was feuding with Lennon and so, that Beatles bandmate was largely overlooked in his book, an unaccountable oversight. That's always stunned me and demonstrated how hateful Harrison could be when he wanted to be. (This isn't to argue that Lennon was any less so. In fact, I suspect that the only one of the four I might like as a person is Ringo Starr.)

For all of Harrison's acidic dismissals of "the Four Moptops" though, he relished the airing of the massive video history on the Beatles. Before its release, he boasted that it would show mere mortals like U2 what real musical success was like.

Sippi may be right that It Don't Come Easy, the 45 which triggered this whole discussion, is mostly a Harrison tune, though recorded and co-composed by Ringo Starr. But another great rock ditty, Back Off Boogaloo, based on a buzz word of Mark Bolen's, is pure Ringo.