version, that is, not the truncated American issue). George was the sole guy, he had no one to work with.” Which proved to be a good thing, given the two strong, absolutely necessary songs George contributed to the universally acclaimed breakthrough album Rubber Soul (the original U.K. John and Paul had each other to play against, their collaboration was more of a competition. In 1964, George’s second song, “You Know What to Do,” was, in Thomson’s words, “swiftly recorded and equally as swiftly rejected.” Although it’s sung with jubilant energy and has a more positive, loving message (“I’ll stay with you every day … make you love me more in every way”), it wasn’t deemed good enough for a place on Beatles for Sale (1964) and doesn’t surface in the repertoire until the first volume of The Beatles Anthology some 30 years later.ĭuring this period (call it BRS for Before Rubber Soul), there was “never any suggestion that either Lennon or McCartney would,” as Thomson puts it, “deign to write with him.” Beatles producer George Martin saw him “as a kind of loner …. While “Don’t Bother Me” is plotted around the standard she-left-me-on-my-own plotline, it comes across as a dispatch from the combat zone of Beatlemania by a singer with no interest in holding hands or making nice: “So go away, leave me alone, don’t bother me … don’t come near, just stay away.” So there he was, at 20, the youngest member of a band dominated by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, a compositional dynamo producing hit songs with titles like “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” “Thank You Girl,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You,” and “From Me to You.” Laid up with a head cold while the Beatles were playing “a summer season in Bournemouth,” as he recounts in I Me Mine (Chronicle Books 1980, 2002), Harrison gamely sets about writing the first chapter of his own narrative, a subtext in song with a distinct point of view. In George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door (Overlook 2015), Graeme Thomson notes that “Don’t Bother Me” was “written out of sheer necessity” at a time when “the insatiable appetite of Beatlemania” was “really beginning to bite.” As someone who “would never be much inclined to float off and write about ‘newspaper taxis’ or ‘Maxwell’s silver hammer,’ “ and who was already “adept at writing about himself,” Harrison was “the first Beatle to write songs about being a Beatle.” Beginning with ‘Don’t Bother Me,’ it’s all there, as plain as plain can be.” According to Glyn Johns, engineer and producer of the Beatles’ famously fraught Get Back sessions, “If I was ever going to write a book about George, I would print out every lyric he ever wrote, and I guarantee you would find out exactly who he was.
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