The brutal song George Harrison wrote about The Beatles’ ugly egos

When The Beatles crossed paths with the psychedelic and mind-expanding drug LSD, the world wasn’t quite ready for the formerly prim and proper Fab Four to open their minds and change their attitudes. The drug had become a fashionable party piece during the mid-sixties and, when John Lennon and George Harrison took their first hit under the tutelage of the ‘Demon Dentist’ John Riley, who apparently ‘dosed’ the two Beatles during a night on the tiles in 1965, things changed forever. It would be turning point both for the most famous band in the world and, naturally, their millions of fans.

Many people will point to the huge effect it had on the band, most easily when revisiting both the albums Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. Undoubtedly, the music was heavily affected by their new outlook provided by the drug. But it is difficult to look at an artist’s art and see every piece of their internal fabric.

While the latter was Paul McCartney’s experience with the drug and the former was more tightly associated with John Lennon, it was George Harrison who took on the affectations of acid most sincerely and soon found further spiritual connection after his experimentation with the hallucinogen had opened his mind to a new world. It was a seismic moment that would shape Harrison forever.

With prior knowledge of the drug and its effects, it is easy for us to look back and recognise that this would become a turning point in Harrison’s cultural outlook. But in the mid-60s, few people were aware of the powerful narcotic’s long-lasting effects. Short-term exposure had a habit of changing the way people viewed their lives. “Having LSD was like someone catapulting me out into space,” the songwriter later said, “The LSD experience was the biggest experience that I’d had up until that time.” Lennon and McCartney turned their attention to the music after their experience while Harrison turned his focus inwards and began trying to change his ways.

After his experience with the drug, he continued to pursue his fascination with Eastern philosophies. He encouraged the rest of the band to join him in a Transcendental Meditation course under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s guidance. During this period, Harrison seemed intent on aligning himself with the new world he could now see more clearly, a world without the trappings of modern life or the weight of the ego. It was a viewpoint that would expand Harrison’s mind and open up his songwriting avenues. One song saw the two intertwine most effectively, the brilliant ‘I, Me, Mine’.

The track has become synonymous with The Beatles iconography, least of all because it was the final song the group ever recorded, but because it did a grand job of letting Harrison eviscerate not only his own band but his bandmates’ fascination with themselves. Written at the end of 1968, Harrison originally brought the song to the Twickenham Studios in January 1969 as the group were filming for the original failed Let It Be project, saying, “‘I, Me, Mine’, it’s called. I don’t care if you don’t want it… It’s a heavy waltz.”

He and Ringo Starr put down something very raw before asking Paul McCartney to join in as the trio performed and Lennon and Yoko Ono danced away. By the time it was finished in 1970, so was the band, and the words felt truer than ever. The song, therefore, remains a key piece of the puzzle as to figuring out the demise of The Beatles; it just so happens that the song is about the bandmates growing egos.

“Suddenly, I looked around and everything I could see was relative to my ego,” Harrison said in his autobiography in 1980. He continued, sharing his distaste for the growing need to please oneself: “Like ‘that’s my piece of paper’ and ‘that’s my flannel’ or ‘give it to me’ or ‘I am’. It drove me crackers, I hated everything about my ego, it was a flash of everything false and impermanent, which I disliked.”

Never one to be dictated to, Harrison added: “But later, I learned from it, to realise that there is somebody else in here apart from old blabbermouth. Who am ‘I’ became the order of the day. Anyway, that’s what came out of it, ‘I, Me, Mine’.” It’s perhaps one of Harrison’s most integral piece of work. A conduit to how garrison was feeling at a brutal time for the band, the tune represents a moment of suspension creatively as he begins his songwriting journey while still held into the group he would need to shake to reach his full potential.

The song also contains some of Harrison’s key advice for living too, “The truth within us has to be realised. When you realise that, everything else that you see and do and touch and smell isn’t real, then you may know what reality is, and can answer the question ‘Who am I?’”

The material was originally considered a mere filler piece but has since become one of the most beloved songs of The Beatles’ back catalogue. As Harrison succinctly describes it in Beatles Anthology, “‘I, Me, Mine’ is the ego problem. There are two ‘I’s: the little ‘i’ when people say ‘I am this’, and the big ‘I’ – i.e. duality and ego. There is nothing that isn’t part of the complete whole. When the little ‘i’ merges into the big ‘I’, then you are really smiling.”

It’s likely that with Harrison’s disposition for knowledge and his dislike of confinement, that Harrison may well have written a similar song without the use of drugs. But there’s no denying that while Lennon and McCartney were both cosmetically affected by the experience, it was George Harrison who used LSD to open his mind.