George Harrison claimed The Beatles couldn’t do anything creative without people hassling them. The press and fans were always trying to figure out the group’s creative process. Meanwhile, the record companies and executives were always trying to change things.
George Harrison said it was a ‘big joke’ that people tried to figure out The Beatles and their creative process
With how popular The Beatles were, all eyes were constantly on them. Everyone, the press, fans, and even fellow musicians, wanted to know their secret to success. They didn’t exactly have one, according to George.
During a 1967 interview, Melody Maker (per George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters) asked George if he could explain where The Beatles were at musically.
“We’re not trying to do anything,” George said. “This is the big joke. It’s all Cosmic Joke. Everyone gets our records and says ‘wonder how they thought of that?’ or ‘wonder what they’re planning next?’ or whatever they do say.
“But we don’t plan anything. We don’t do anything. All we do is just keep on being ourselves. It just comes out. It’s the Beatles. All any of us are trying to do now is get as much peace and love as possible. Love will never be played out because you can’t play out the truth. Whatever I say can be taken a million different ways depending on how screwed up the reader is.
“But the Beatles is just a hobby really … it’s just doing it on its own. We don’t even have to think about it. The songs write themselves. It just all works out. Everything that we’re taking into our minds and trying to learn or find out—and I feel personally it’s such a lot, there’s so much to get in—and yet the output coming out the back end is still so much smaller than what you’re putting in.
“Everything is relative to everything else. We know that now. So we’ve got to a point where when people say ‘there’s nothing else you can do,’ we know that’s only from where they are. They look up and think we can’t do anymore, but when you’re up there you see you haven’t started.”
George said The Beatles couldn’t do anything creative without people hassling them
Ultimately, The Beatles had no idea how to explain their creative process. They just absorbed as much music as possible and regurgitated it. Melody Maker asked George if he had any idea what the group would do the next time they entered the recording studio.
“No idea,” he said. “We won’t know until we do it. We’re naturally influenced by everything that’s going on around us. If you weren’t influenced, you wouldn’t be able to do anything. That’s all anything is, an influence from one person to another. We’ll write songs and go into the studios and record them and we’ll try and make them good. We’ll make a better LP than Sergeant Pepper. But I don’t know what it’s going to be.”
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Then, Melody Maker mentioned The Beatles were thinking about making a film. George said they couldn’t do much because people hassled them in their creative process. So, that’s why they wanted to do everything themselves.
“Yes,” George said. “We’ve got to the point now where we’ve found out that if you rely on other people, things never work out. This may sound conceited but it’s not. It’s just what happens. The things that we’ve decided ourselves and that we’ve gone ahead and done ourselves have always worked out right—or at least satisfactorily—whereas the moment you get involved with other people, it goes wrong.
“It’s like a record company. You hand them the whole LP and the sleeve and everything there on a plate. All they’ve got to do is print it. Then all the c*** starts: ‘you can’t have that’ and ‘you don’t do this’ and we get so involved with trivial little things that it all starts deteriorating around us. And it’s the same with a film.
“The more involved we get with film people the less of a Beatles film it’s going to be. Take that Our World television show. We were trying to make it into a recording session and a good time and the BBC were trying to make it into a television show. It’s a constant struggle to get ourselves across through all these other people, all hassling.
“In the end it’ll be best if we write the music, write the visual and the script, film it, edit it, do everything ourselves.”
Doing everything themselves didn’t help either
Initially, The Beatles thought people would stop hassling them if they did everything themselves. However, sometimes that wasn’t the solution.
George continued, “But then it’s such a hell of a job that you have to get involved and that means you couldn’t do other things. But we’ll have to get other people to do things because we can’t give that much time to just a film because it’s only a film and there are more important things in life.”
So, The Beatles couldn’t exactly win in their creative process. Either way, whatever they did, someone hassled them. It could’ve been one of the reasons why the Fab Four had to split up. Later, it got to be too much.
