The fallout of The Beatles wasn’t exactly cordial. Although the band may have brought so much joy to whoever wanted to listen, the amount of business admin they needed to shovel through towards the end of their career led to a lot of animosity from which they never fully recovered. While George Harrison had a bitter fallout with Paul McCartney about such matters, he always kept John Lennon close.
Three years Harrison’s senior, Lennon was a mentor figure for the young guitarist when they were both coming up in the band that used to be called The Quarrymen. Getting drafted in thanks to his chops playing along to the instrumental ‘Raunchy’, Harrison would eventually write his original songs for Beatles albums, breaking down the barrier that Lennon and McCartney had on the group dynamic.
While Harrison would improve from one release after the next, he started to feel creatively stifled when working on the album Let It Be, leaving the band before being convinced to come back when the group met at his house. Despite contributing two songs to the next album, Abbey Road, Harrison had his plans for his solo career.
Releasing All Things Must Pass, the young guitarist created a musical tapestry informed by his experience with spirituality. Although Harrison would be one of the first Beatles to have a hit single with ‘My Sweet Lord’, he kept returning to Lennon, lending an occasional guitar part to the album Imagine.
Once Harrison took to the road, though, he paid tribute to Lennon by performing The Beatles’ classic ‘In My Life’. Being a favourite amongst Lennon and McCartney, Harrison performed the song with a slightly different arrangement while also changing the lyrics of the pivotal final line.
In the context of Rubber Soul, Lennon sang the song as a reflective ballad, looking back on the elements of life and promising his lover that he will love them far more than any of the friends he has met in ages past. Since Harrison had been dipping his toes into Eastern spirituality for most of his solo career, he occasionally changed the lines from “I love you more” to “I love God more”.
Harrison would also change the lyrics to his classics from The Beatles catalogue on that tour. After a bitter divorce with Patti Boyd that inspired the album Dark Horse, the guitarist swapped the lyrics to ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, changing it to the morbid “while my guitar tries to smile”.
Although Harrison and Lennon were on good terms after the breakup, things quickly turned sour when Harrison published his autobiography, I Me Mine. Not mentioning Lennon once, his former bandmate thought that Harrison was implying that he didn’t take any influence from his bandmates.
Despite the rift towards the end of Lennon’s life, Harrison would pay him the ultimate compliment with ‘All Those Years Ago’, written shortly after Lennon’s murder to chronicle all the happy times they shared. Although Harrison wouldn’t tour extensively for the rest of his solo career, the fact that he even included ‘In My Life’ in his setlist is a testament to the power that Lennon and McCartney captured in this tune.
