George Harrison always had the reputation of being the lone wolf within The Beatles. Everyone in the band presented themselves as a united front whenever they played onstage, but looking back at the way things were conducted, Harrison’s abilities as a songwriter were always going to be overshadowed by whatever John Lennon and Paul McCartney brought to the table. Even though Harrison was diplomatic about his songs where he could be, he felt that he never got the credit he deserved for contributing to these Beatles masterpieces.
Compared to the other writers in the group, though, Harrison was the one who started discovering his knack for writing in real time. Since Lennon and McCartney had spent years peddling away on songs that they had written, ‘Don’t Bother Me’ was the first time that Harrison tried to consciously write a song, later admitting that the version they ended up wasn’t nearly as good as what he heard in his head.
Then again, Harrison did have a few moments as a guitarist that could justifiably be considered songwriting on the group’s first hits. The chord structure may have belonged to the Nerk Twins, but listening to a track like ‘And I Love Her’, the only reason why the tune comes alive is because of that riff that Harrison plays throughout on his nylon-string guitar.
That’s not to say that the rest of the band didn’t manage to help him out as well. Throughout his tune in the group, Lennon was the one who always stood by Harrison’s songwriting, eventually suggesting different pieces to fill in for a song like ‘Taxman’ or coming up with the line about a mind being able to blow clouds away on his eventual solo song ‘All Things Must Pass’.
Once everyone called it quits, though, Lennon grew resentful over the fact that Harrison never gave him credit for tunes like ‘Taxman’. Since Lennon already had more classics under his belt than anyone knew what to do with, though, Harrison had more than a few songs in the pipeline to throw right back at his partner that should have warranted at least a casual acknowledgement.
Despite it being distant history, Harrison said that he deserved credit for some tunes, saying, “I also didn’t say how I wrote two lines of ‘Come Together’ or three lines of ‘Eleanor Rigby’. I wasn’t getting into any of that. I think in the balance, I would have had more things to be niggled with him about him than he would have with me.”
Though ‘Come Together’ does hold together as a quintessential Lennon song, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ does have pieces that do scan as Harrisonian in some spots. There had been pieces that Ringo Starr came up with involving Father McKenzie donning his socks in the night with nobody there, but lines about not knowing where all the lonely people come from do feel like something that could have come from the existential side of Harrison.
But Harrison was never going to be bothered with getting into finances. As one of their songs implied, all of them were rich men, and even if not all of them saw the same royalty checks, they managed to become one of the biggest bands in the world thanks to that group effort on every tune.
