#harrisongs

Photo by Olivia Harrison.

~c. 1974

Well… whenever there’s a song written about someone, someone else seems to pop up and say, ‘no it wasn’t…’ but here’s a list of all the songs where I can find anyone ever saying they were written by George for or about Pattie. 

1. SOMETHING

Most famously Something, which George did say he’d written about Pattie and then later retracted it and said it was about God instead.

“While the Beatles were recording the White Album, George wrote a song called ‘Something’, which he released as his first single. He told me, in a matter-of-fact way, that he had written it for me. I thought it was beautiful - and it turned out to be the most successful song he ever wrote, with more than a hundred and fifty cover versions. His favourite was the one by James Brown. Frank Sinatra said he thought it was the best love song ever written. My favourite was the one by George Harrison, which he played for me in the kitchen at Kinfauns.”

[Pattie, Wonderful Today]

Pattie was at Beatleweek this year and she was asked about George retracting saying the song was about her. Pattie replied that when George was ‘cross’ with her he would say things like that, but that she still knew the song was written for her. 

2. FOR YOU BLUE

This song is attributed as being about Pattie in The Words and Music of George Harrison by Ian Inglis, saying that George “unashamedly states his love for [Pattie]” and that George tells her, “I loved you from the moment I saw you”, and by the last verse, “Pattie’s] ‘sweet and lovely’ personality makes her irresistible … he now loves her 'more than ever.’”

Typically for George, he doesn’t comment on the lyrics in I, Me, Mine, saying the song is just “a simple twelve-bar song following all the normal principles except it’s happy-go-lucky!” Interestingly though, the original title for the song was ‘George’s Blues’, which could lend itself to the theory it’s about Pattie. 

3. I NEED YOU

I’ve seen both these next two songs attributed as written about Pattie, particularly I Need You, but it’s my opinion that neither of these songs are about Pattie. 

I Need You is a lament for a lost love, and to my/common knowledge, Pattie and George did not break up during the time George wrote and composed the song. Some have also said before George wrote it while missing Pattie when he was away filming Help in the Bahamas. However, as the first recording session for I Need You was on 15th February 1965, a week before the Beatles went to the Bahamas, this cannot be true. 

I think what is telling about I Need You is that it’s the only song missing from I, Me, Mine (as far as I know). Why would he miss it out? Maybe because it was an early song and he thought it was rubbish - but other early songs are included - or maybe because he’d lost the lyrics to it? Or maybe because he didn’t want to discuss it, even years later, and then you have to wonder why.

4. IF I NEEDED SOMEONE

If I Needed Someone isn’t a million miles away from I Need You - it seems to be another break up song, but instead of missing and lamenting his lost love, here George is more casual about it and saying leave me your number and maybe I’ll call you (but don’t hold your breath, because I have someone else now). In this way, it is about Pattie - my theory is possibly George is saying goodbye to a previous love because he’s met someone new (Pattie). 

“Songwriting for me, at the time of Rubber Soul, was a bit frightening because John and Paul had been writing since they were three years old. It was hard to come in suddenly and write songs. They’d had a lot of practice. They’d written most of their bad songs before we’d even got into the recording studio. I had to come from nowhere and start writing, and have something with at least enough quality to put on the record alongside all the wondrous hits. It was very hard.”

[George, Anthology]

Other sources say that George is telling his never-ending line of willing Beatles groupies that he doesn’t need them anymore, and/or that this song is the first example of a ‘jaded’ pop song - the pop star fed up of the pop star life (which may be true). 

I think both If If Needed Someone and I Need You were about the same woman who George had a kind of relationship with around the time he’d met and was dating Pattie. It’s not in any books, there is pretty much zero evidence for it, but I still think it could be true. That woman was an actress and singer called Joey Heatherton. This is purely my own speculation, so don’t quote me… But, still… 

5. IT’S ALL TOO MUCH

I think this is a flimsy one to attribute to being about Pattie. It’s because of the line “With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue,” which is actually a quote/line lifted from the Merseybeats’ song Sorrow. I don’t think it is about Pattie. It’s a song more about the Summer of Love, psychedelia, 1960s hippie ethic and all that. I think its inspired more by LSD than Pattie.

6. SO SAD

People tend to forget George’s solo songs when they make lists about George’s songs for Pattie. There’s actually probably more songs overtly about Pattie in George’s solo work than in his Beatles oeuvre. So Sad was recorded in 1974, not very long after George and Pattie called it a day on their marriage, but George wrote it in 1972. It is undoubtedly about the problems in their marriage and their growing apart. It’s an unusual song for George as it is so explicitly about something that was happening to him at the time and the loss he was feeling, going through it. 

“I started So Sad in New York City in 1972. I like this song a lot as a melody and lyrically, except the only problem with it is it’s depressing. It is so sad. It was at the time I was splitting up with Pattie.”

[George, I Me Mine]

7. GREY CLOUDY LIES

I think there are quite a few songs from this time period you could interpret as indirectly about or influenced by Pattie. This is one of those, plus also other things that were happening in George’s life - ie. the death of his mother that I think he was still grieving over. It would be just a sad little song, except the use of ‘grey cloudy lies’ changes the meaning. Lies Pattie was telling him? Lies he was telling her? And lies he was telling to himself. George wrote it in 1973. 

“Now I only want to livewith no tear-drops in my eyesBut at times it feels like no chanceNo clear blue skiesGrey cloudy lies.”

Happy 60th anniversary to Revolver!

The album features three Harrisongs — “Love You To,” “I Want To Tell You,” and the lead track, “Taxman”…

Q: “‘Taxman’ is far and away one of the best tracks on Revolver. How did that songwriting topic spring to mind?” George Harrison: “Well, because when your goal is to make some records, and hopefully have a job by making records and being in a band, which was what we set out to do – I never really wanted to be a policeman or a fireman or anything like that. And when it started happening it was good, we were actually getting paid for this, you know! Money for nothing and your chicks for free! [laughter] And then we started making money but suddenly found out that we actually weren’t getting any of the money – we were just paying taxes! In those days, in the early ‘60s before they went decimal, there used to be 20 shillings in one pound, alright? We were paying 19 shillings and three pence tax! I thought, hey, that’s not fair, what is this?! Are we being punished for something that we don’t know about? So that song just came out: [recites] ‘Let me tell you how it will, one for you, 19 for me!’ [big laugh]” - Goldmine (1992) “My son Dhani reckons it was me [coughing at the start of ‘Taxman’]. He says, ‘I’d recognize that cough anywhere!’ [Laughs] But I don’t remember.” - George Harrison, Billboard (1999) “Between my dad, John, Paul and Ringo, there was pretty much no musical stone they left unturned. I remember saying to my dad: ‘The backwards solo guitar on that Hendrix thing is just the stickest thing I ever heard.’ Dad just replied, without looking up from his tea: ‘I did the first backwards guitar solo on “I’m Only Sleeping.’” - Dhani Harrison, Evening Standard Magazine (2006) ”[George] would play the solos normal, then we’d flip the tapes and he’d listen to them backwards, just to see how they sounded. This would go on for maybe 70 takes, turning the tape over, listening, turning it back again - it would take literally hours to accomplish.“ - Richard Lush (sound engineer), Acoustic Guitar Magazine (February 2003) The Grammy award winning cover art is, of course, by Klaus Voormann. In his German-language only book Warum spielst du Imagine nicht auf dem weißen Klavier, John?, he recalls showing The Beatles drafts of the cover art… “George was the first to speak. ‘I like the one with all the hair best, that one’s great.’ ‘Yeah, me too!’ Paul exclaimed.” Once he presented the finished cover design to them, plus Brian Epstein, a week later… “Everyone was transfixed by my, no, their Revolver cover. They were moved. My Gid, what a feeling. […] Brian regained his composure and approached me.  ‘Klaus, I don’t know what to say. This cover expresses so much and is something special. It says more than the visions I had in my head. I knew what he meant. He confirmed my first impression when I heard the new songs in the studio. This was a significant turning point.” - translated from Warum spielst du Imagine nicht auf dem weißen Klavier, John? (2003)

Edited to add (since the question of the "Taxman" guitar solo came up in the comments section on Instagram):

George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach and Al Kooper at FPSHOT during the Somewhere in England sessions, 1980; photo 1 from Kooper’s Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards: Memoirs of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Survivor, all photos courtesy of Al Kooper. (The Los Angeles Thunderbirds recently posted a color version of the group photo on Instagram.)

Photo 1 by Mary DeVitto, photos 2 and 3 (Olivia Harrison and Stevie Nicks in Acapulco, 1977) courtesy of Olivia’s Instagram, photo 4 (Olivia and George in Acapulco, 1977) courtesy of The Write Thing, photos 5 and 6 (in Acapulco, 1977) by Sam Emerson.