By the time George Harrison departed The Beatles, he didn’t have much nice to say about all that. In his diary on January 10th, 1969, the guitarist wrote unceremoniously, “Got up, went to Twickenham. Rehearsed until lunchtime – left The Beatles.”
Obviously, he came back, or at least came back so they could at least finish their final records and get things all wrapped up officially. But by that point, Harrison had simply had enough of feeling underappreciated.
Bob Dylan explained it best when he said, “George got stuck with being the Beatle that had to fight to get songs on records because of Lennon and McCartney.”
Dylan added, “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.”
That was really the crux of it. By the end of their time together, Harrison felt he was constantly battling Lennon and McCartney just to get them to pay attention to his songs. That tension is visible in the footage from the making of Let It Be, but it is also clear in the long list of great songs the Beatles passed on that later found a home in his solo work.
However, despite the tension and despite praise between the four becoming rarer, there were still moments when Harrison and Lennon found common ground. Even as their relationship grew frostier, the two guitarists could occasionally connect through the music, remembering why they were friends and why they admired each other beneath it all.
For Harrison, one of those clear moments came during the making of the band’s White Album. This was arguably the time when everything started speeding towards an inevitable and disastrous end as the relationships began to get strained. But then Lennon would come into the studio and blow him away.
“John played a brilliant solo on ‘Honey Pie’,” Harrison reflected to Guitar Player in the 1980s. It’s only a brief moment in the track, which is mostly a McCartney piano piece with an old-school swing feel. But in the middle, Lennon takes the spotlight, and to Harrison, it stood out.
“Sounded like Django Reinhardt or something. It was one of them where you just close your eyes and happen to hit all the right notes,” he said of the musical moment, referencing the legendary Belgian jazz guitarist, adding, “Sounded like a little jazz solo.”
It was one of those moments where it all fell back into place. It was a reminder of their love for one another’s work, but also of the world of mutual references and influences they’d been building together since their youth, pulling on a niche name and making it work in this shared creative realm they’d made together.
Though things were getting tough between the two, it was instances like this, when the music was just so good, that kept them trying to make it work, even just for a little bit longer.
