This is dumb to say and I know Paul loves George and misses him but it does sometimes feel like he forgets about George :/ and I do think George was a big part of his life even taking away the Beatles so it confuses me when John gets honorary mention and he doesn’t. Maybe cause I’m a George fan so to me it looks kinda meh but that’s just the vibe I get like he didn’t even write a song about George like he did with John?
No, it’s not a dumb thing to say because it does feel like that sometimes and you could be forgiven for thinking that it indicates that Paul loved John more than he loved George. But I don’t think that’s true, so I’m gonna stick up for Paul a bit here…
Paul does talk about George, but largely (particularly in the world outside of the ‘proper’ Beatles fandom) people are still much more obsessed by the whole Lennon-McCartney thing, the McLennon. So in interviews, two things happen - first interviewers want a nice John-and-Paul story, so they will ask Paul things to make him talk about John - eg. songwriting, etc, where as Paul didn’t write songs with George. Then secondly, when Paul does say something about John (even things that he’s mentioned time and time again) it gets reported widely and frequently. Quite often it will become the headline of the article - why? Because the media knows John-and-Paul stories sell.
To illustrate, here’s the top news results on a Google search for Paul McCartney:
Obviously, Paul’s been in the spotlight a lot recently as he’s busy promoting Egypt Station, but still two of the six results are John-and-Paul stories, and in the pictures at the bottom, you have John there most prominently on the left hand side and a few Beatles pictures too.
Paul does mention George and talk about him too, but these stories are not picked up as often as the John ones, particularly by non-UK media outlets, who seem more interested in John and not so much about George - so they just don’t get spread around so much.
Here’s a nice quote from Paul which came out around the 6th October 2018:
“I often have dreams about John or George. I often dream about people who aren’t here anymore. They tend to be very good. And it’s only when you get to wake up you go, ‘Oh yeah, it was a dream.’”
Paul mentions John and George equally here, but when you read it in newspapers stories, like this one, they concentrate far more on John and Paul again.
I think also this has a lot to do with how John died, and also the fact John and Paul had a quite public feud in the years following the break up of the Beatles.
As a last comment on this aspect, Paul - always a highly skilled self publicist - is aware that mentioning John in an interview can and often does have this effect, so when he has something to sell, like he does currently with his new album - he knows mentioning John (and secondarily the Beatles and George and Ringo too) it will work in his favour to help promote whatever he’s selling. And it works - number one album on the US Billboard 200, his first since Tug of War in 1982.
And then secondly, I wonder if Paul’s also aware of something else that could be a factor…
“Thing is, there’s a lot about me and George that the public don’t know about, and I like it better that way.”
(This is part of a bigger quote where Paul is talking about the last time he saw George).
As you’ll know, George was not a fan of gossip. He didn’t offer tantalising stories about his bandmates if he could avoid it. He didn’t talk about personal things very often. And I think Paul is aware of this and because of that, and what he thinks George might not like him to talk about, it may possibly cause Paul to self-censor stories he offers about George. It doesn’t mean he loves or misses George any less, it’s actually more respectful of George and what one might suppose George would want.
Plus I think it’s lovely that George and Paul do have this whole private shared past and memories which still exist only for them. I’m sure there is a lot that happened between Paul and George (maybe good and bad) which is not public knowledge.
Finally, as for writing a song for George, well - no, he hasn’t done a song which directly addresses George in the way that Here Today does for John, but there is one song worth mentioning….
Friends To Go was a song written by Paul which appeared on his 2005 album, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. This was the first album Paul released after George had passed away, four years earlier. Paul dedicated the song Friends To Go to George, and has said it was influenced and/or inspired by George. Paul said about the song:
“To me it just started to sound like a George Harrison song… I was just sat down to write and the feeling of George came over me and I just kept writing it thinking, ‘George could have written this!’ […] I just got this feeling, this is George. So it was like I was writing – I was like George – writing one of his songs. So I just wrote it, it just wrote itself very easily ‘cause it wasn’t even me writing it.”
And to end, here’s a few things Paul has said about George before…
“George was always the one who brought John and me back down to earth when we were about to get too big-headed. Without George I wouldn’t be who I am today.”
“I have big photographs of George behind me when I do the song ‘Something’, his song, and I look at them, and it’s so sad because he’s not here. But it’s lovely to look at those pictures and think: ‘God, my mate George, isn’t he a good-looking boy?!’ You think all the things you couldn’t think when you were a kid, because the bravado aspect forbade it. I do think of them [John and George] quite a lot.”
“He is really just my baby brother.”
“He was my little baby brother, almost, because I’d known him that long.”
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