George Harrison Dissed Fellow Beatles’ Songs: “Not the Greatest”
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The Saturday Evening Post article reads, “George plays lead guitar for the Beatles, often with a look of unconcern that seems to reflect a desire to be strumming elsewhere. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘the songs that Paul and John write, they’re all right, but they’re not the greatest.’”
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The Beatles’ style evolved a lot during their 10 years together, and Harrison’s comment about Lennon and McCartney’s songs being “not the greatest” was given early in their career. As reported by American Songwriter , he later said during a 1974 interview with Lennon , “I enjoyed things like ‘Strawberry Fields [Forever].’ I enjoyed the ones which were inventive, which were new. I enjoyed ‘Norwegian Wood’, because I felt where it was coming from.”
Both of those songs are credited to Lennon-McCartney, though Lennon was the primary songwriter for both.
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Harrison once said that he knew his own songs weren’t so great initially because he didn’t have as much experience writing as Lennon and McCartney coming into the band.
“They’d had a lot of practice. They’d written most of their bad songs before we’d even got into the recording studio,” Harrison said, according to American Songwriter . “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.”
That said, the musician wrote songs for the Beatles that are beloved classics today, including “Here Comes the Sun,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and “Something.”
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In a 2021 interview with The New Yorker , McCartney admitted that he and Lennon decided together to be the songwriters of the group.
“I remember walking through Woolton, the village where John was from, and saying to John, ‘Look, you know, it should just be you and me who are the writers,’” he said. “We never said, ‘Let’s keep George out of it,’ but it was implied.”
The 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back shows the band working on their final album, 1970’s Let It Be . Harrison’s frustration with his bandmates is obvious in some of the footage. He even briefly leaves the group only to rejoin after five days.
As for the fourth Beatle, Ringo Starr , he wrote two songs for the band—”Octopus’s Garden” and “Don’t Pass Me By—on his own and has co-writing credits on four other songs.
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In 2019, The Guardian reported on a tape recording of a 1969 meeting among Harrison, Lennon, and McCartney. Starr wasn’t able to make it, so Lennon recorded the proceedings for the drummer to listen to later. The tape is notable, because it sheds light on the final days of the Beatles, and it also includes an exchange between Harrison and McCartney about songwriting.
“I thought until this album that George’s songs weren’t that good,” McCartney says during the meeting, in reference to 1969’s Abbey Road . (It was the last album they recorded, but the second to last they released.) Harrison responds, “That’s a matter of taste. All down the line, people have liked my songs.”
After the band broke up in 1970, all of the Beatles went on to solo careers that saw them writing their own songs. Today, McCartney and Starr are the two surviving members of the band. Lennon was murdered in 1980. Harrison died of cancer in 2001.
