George Harrison once outlined that former bandmate Paul McCartney was the problem in the studio in the final days of The Beatles.
The so-called quiet one of the band would release the likes of All Things Must Pass and Living in the Material World shortly after leaving The Beatles, but his time there was sullied somewhat by McCartney. Though Harrison and the Wings frontman would create some all-time great songs together, the animosity in the studio was made clear when, in 1977, Harrison revealed all on his ex-bandmates’ studio habits. For McCartney, it seemed to be a dictatorial approach to music-making, with the Let It Be hitmaker telling the rest of the group to simply “do this” when the time called for collaboration.
Harrison explained the effect of this in an interview with Crawdaddy Magazine, just a year after the release of his Thirty Three & 1/3 album. He said: “No, I didn’t play. We laid the track because what Paul would do, if he’s written a song, he’d learn all the parts for Paul and then come in the studio and say, ‘Do this.’ He’d never give you the opportunity to come out with something.”
While it would be difficult to challenge McCartney on where a song should go or how it should sound, Harrison says he managed to break through this with one unlikely Beatles hit. He added: “But on Drive My Car I just played the line, which is really like a lick off Respect, you know, the Otis Redding version — and I played that line on guitar and Paul laid that with me on bass.
“We laid the track down like that. We played the lead part later on top of it. There were a lot of things… like on a couple of dates Paul wasn’t on it at all, or John wasn’t on it at all, or I wasn’t on it at all. Probably only about five tunes altogether where one of us might not have been on.”
Harrison and McCartney would be frank when talking about their studio relationship in interviews given after the end of The Beatles. Speaking during the Anthology documentary series, McCartney said: “In fact, he was about one and a half years younger than me. That’s quite a big age difference at that time.
“I suppose I used to talk down to him a bit, as you do to a kid who’s one and a half years younger than you. He was fourteen-and-a-half and I was sixteen. It might have been a failing of mine, to tend to talk down to him because I’d known him as a younger kid.”
Harrison added: “He was always nine months older than I. Even now, he’s still nine months older than me.”
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