In the years after The Beatles’ split, George Harrison dealt with a number of lawsuits. Perhaps most significantly, Paul McCartney sued his three former bandmates. He wanted to regain control of their music from manager Allen Klein. The former Beatles spent several tense years battling over this. Harrison also dealt with a lawsuit over plagiarism. He believed he should begin to fight back and start filing suits of his own.
George Harrison wondered if The Beatles should have been more litigious
In the years after The Beatles, a number of projects about them, or using their music, cropped up. Harrison said the band should put a stop to that.
“There’s not much more we [the Beatles] can be sued for, but we can sue a lot of other people,” he told Rolling Stone. “Being split and diversified over the years has made it difficult to consolidate certain Beatles interests. For example, all those naughty Broadway shows and stupid movies that have been made about the Beatles, using Beatles names and ideas, are all illegal.”
He said the band had placed so much focus on their own legal problems that they overlooked the people profiting off of them.
“But because we’ve been arguing among ourselves all these years, people have had a free-for-all,” he said. “Now we’ve gotten to the point where everybody’s agreed and we’ve allocated a company to go out and sue them all. It’s terrible, really. People think we’re giving all these producers and people permission to do it and that we’re making money out of it, but we don’t make a nickel. So it’s time that should be stopped.”
George Harrison said he felt bad for everyone involved in a film about The Beatles
The Bee Gees and their manager, Robert Stigwood, created the jukebox musical, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Harrison said he hadn’t seen it, but he felt it was a blatant cash grab.
“I just feel sorry for Robert Stigwood, the Bee Gees and Pete Frampton for doing it, because they had established themselves in their own right as decent artists and suddenly . . . it’s like the classic thing of greed,” he said. “The more you make the more you want to make, until you become so greedy that ultimately you put a foot wrong. And even though Sgt. Pepper is no doubt a financial success, I think it’s damaged their images, their careers, and they didn’t need to do that. It’s just like the Beatles trying to do the Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones can do it better.”
He dealt with his own legal problems
Harrison himself dealt with a legal battle over plagiarism. The Chiffons accused him of plagiarizing their song “He’s So Fine” in “My Sweet Lord.” A judge declared he had subconsciously plagiarized the song.
“Well, that has been going on for years. It’s like a running joke now,” he said. “The guy who actually wrote ‘He’s So Fine’ had died years before, Ronnie Mack. Bright Tunes Music, his publisher, was suing me. So we went through the court case, and in the end the judge said, yes, it is similar, but you’re not guilty of stealing the tune. We do think there’s been a copyright infringement, though, so get your lawyers together and work out some sort of compensation. But Bright Tunes wouldn’t settle for that; they kept trying to bring the case back into court. They even tried to bring it back into court when I did ‘This Song.’”
He joked that now that most of his legal battles were over, he should prepare himself for more.
“It’s difficult to just start writing again after you’ve been through that,” he said. “Even now when I put the radio on, every tune I hear sounds like something else. But most of the lawsuits are gone. Now we’re gearing up for the next batch.”
