John Lennon once expressed a bit of guilt about how he treated George Harrison. Paul McCartney didn’t share the same perspective.
One of George Harrison’s biggest problems with being in The Beatles was that John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t take his songwriting seriously. They poured focus and effort into their songs but were reluctant to pay Harrison’s music the same respect. In 1969, though, Lennon seemed to show a little guilt about his treatment of Harrison. McCartney didn’t feel the same way.
John Lennon acknowledged the way he and Paul McCartney treated George Harrison
In the first half of the 1960s, Lennon and McCartney wrote nearly all of The Beatles’ songs. Harrison admitted that he wasn’t all that interested in songwriting in the band’s early years. By the second half of the decade, though, he was more interested in contributing songs to their albums. Lennon and McCartney weren’t all that enthusiastic about this, which Lennon acknowledged in 1969.
“We always carved the singles up between us,” Lennon told McCartney, per the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “We have the singles market, they [George and Ringo] don’t get anything. I mean, we’ve never offered George’ B’ sides; we could have given him a lot of ‘B’ sides, but because we were two people you had the ‘A’ side and I had the ‘B’ side.”
McCartney didn’t have the same qualms, though. He didn’t think Harrison deserved spots on the albums.
“Well, the thing is, I think that until now, until this year, our songs have been better than George’s,” McCartney said. “Now this year his songs are at least as good as ours.”
Harrison, who was present for the conversation, fired back at McCartney.
“That’s a myth, because most of the songs this year I wrote last year or the year before, anyway,” he said. “Maybe now I just don’t care whether you are going to like them or not, I just do ’em.”
George Harrison frequently felt frustrated with John Lennon and Paul McCartney
Harrison found it incredibly frustrating that Lennon and McCartney ignored his songs. He felt ready to leave The Beatles long before the band split up.
“There was too much restriction [in The Beatles],” he said, per Express. “It had to self-destruct … I could see a much better time ahead being by myself, away from the band … It was like a straitjacket.”
He also noted that one of his biggest problems with Lennon and McCartney was their inability to see beyond their own collaborations.
Paul McCartney eventually said he underestimated George Harrison
While McCartney didn’t admit to overlooking Harrison in 1969, he later said he underestimated his bandmate. He viewed Harrison as a younger brother, which led to their uneven power dynamics.
“I think it was easy to underestimate George because me and John had always written most of the stuff and had had most of the singles,” McCartney said on The Howard Stern Show. “George was a late bloomer as far as writing was concerned. He wasn’t that interested in the beginning. But then he started to get interested and boy, did he bloom. He wrote some of the greatest songs ever.”
