George Harrison says Beatles bandmates didn’t like his White Album contributions

The difficulty George Harrison had in getting his songs onto The Beatles‘ albums is well-documented, but the Quiet One once suggested it was simply because his bandmates did not like his work. Harrison, who worked with Ringo Starr, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney for just shy of a decade as a member of The Beatles, believes the trio took issue with his originals on The White Album.

This coincided with Harrison actually beginning to enjoy writing music again. The White Album would include Harrison originals like While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Piggies but he had to fight to get those two songs on the Lennon and McCartney-heavy album. Speaking with Crawdaddy Magazine about the experience, Harrison would let rip on his bandmates and was convinced that they were not fans of his work.

He said: “I found I was starting to be able to enjoy being a musician, but the moment I got back with the Beatles it was just too difficult. There were just too many limitations based upon our being together for so long. Everybody was sort of pigeon-holed. It was frustrating.

“The problem was that John and Paul had written songs for so long it was difficult. First of all, because they had such a lot of tunes and they automatically thought that theirs should be a priority. So for me, I’d always have to wait through ten of their songs before they’d even listen to one of mine. That was why All Things Must Pass had so many songs, because it was like I’d been constipated.

“I had a little encouragement from time to time, but it was very little. It was like they were doing me a favour. I didn’t have much confidence in writing songs because of that. Because they never said, ‘Yeah that’s a good song.’ When we got into things like While My Guitar Gently Weeps, we recorded it one night, and there was such a lack of enthusiasm. So I went home really disappointed because I knew the song was good.”

Harrison was not the only person to notice that he struggled to get his songs onto The Beatles’ albums. His friend and collaborator Bob Dylan would note just how hard it was for the Wah Wah songwriter to get any of his efforts onto the album. Harrison had optioned All Things Must Pass for Abbey Road but it was rejected by Lennon and McCartney.

Speaking in 2007, Dylan said: “George got stuck with being the Beatle that had to fight to get songs on records because of Lennon and McCartney. Well, who wouldn’t get stuck? If George had had his own group and was writing his own songs back then, he’d have been probably just as big as anybody.”