They may have been in arguably the greatest rock band of all time, but George Harrison once approached John Lennon to do it all over again.
The proposal didn’t come out of nowhere. Harrison had worked with Lennon in the studio on his solo albums following the breakup of The Beatles. But the suggestion of a new group featuring the so-called quiet one and the Imagine hitmaker fell to pieces almost immediately. Such an offer to Lennon left him embarrassed, especially given Harrison had seemingly asked him to found a group more than once.
Lennon was asked whether he enjoyed the times he performed with Harrison and Ringo Starr following The Beatles’ split, and while he did, he found the constant pressure from the All Things Must Pass hitmaker annoying. Harrison would, eventually, form a supergroup but without any of his former bandmates. The Traveling Wilburys appeared to scratch the itch Harrison had for collaborating.
He told Playboy Magazine: “Yeah, except when George and Billy Preston started saying, ‘Let’s form a group. Let’s form a group.’ I was embarrassed when George kept asking me. He was just enjoying the session and the spirit was very good, but I was with Yoko, you know. We took time out from what we were doing. The very fact that they would imagine I would form a male group without Yoko! It was still in their minds…”
Yoko Ono would be a constant in Lennon’s solo career, appearing for a jam with Chuck Berry and featuring heavily on his studio albums, from Unfinished Music to Double Fantasy. Harrison, meanwhile, would work with everyone from Eric Clapton to Bob Dylan. He frequently collaborated with Ringo Starr too and was invovled in The Beatles’ Anthology project, which is the closet he got to reuniting with Lennon as a member of a band.
Lennon had been dead almost a decade by that point but his home recordings were used as the basis for three more songs by The Beatles. Despite asking Lennon to form a band with him, Harrison would go on record as saying he would never want to be in another band with Paul McCartney.
He said: “It’s all a fantasy, the idea of putting the Beatles back together again. If we ever do that, the reason will be that we are all broke. I’d rather have Willie Weeks on bass than Paul McCartney. That’s the truth, with all respect to Paul. Paul is a fine bass player but he’s a bit overpowering at times. To tell the truth, I’d join a band with John Lennon any day, but I couldn’t join a band with Paul McCartney. It’s nothing personal; it’s just from a musical point of view.”
McCartney later commented on how he saw his relationship with Harrison and drummer Starr, saying he would “talk down to” Harrison. He said: “So, being close to each other in age, we talked — although I tended to talk down to him, because he was a year younger. (I know now that that was a failing I had all the way through the Beatle years).
“If you’ve known a guy when he’s thirteen and you’re fourteen, it’s hard to think of him as grown-up. I still think of George as a young kid.”
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