Why didn’t George Harrison write more Beatles songs?

“Do as I say, not as I do” was largely the code by which George Harrison lived during the early years in The Beatles. Not in the usual sense of the idiom whereby he was in the presence of behaviour not worth following, but rather to play the chords laid out by John and Paul, and not bother trying to replicate their greatness.

After all, why would he rock the boat? It was creatively impervious and commercially prolific, delivering hit after hit, and pound after pound into his bank account. If anything, Harrison had the easiest job of the lot – enjoy the stardom, receive the praise and go on about his career without the burden of delivering the songs it was built upon.

But we all know there’s more to musicianship than that. Unless you’re a commercial robot, you simply can’t be satisfied with a career that doesn’t allow you to exercise your own creativity, and Harrison was no different. Any burgeoning sense of songwriting creativity he did have was in the right environment, for the studio shared with Lennon and McCartney would have been fertile soil for Harrison’s greatness to grow.

“To get it straight, if I hadn’t been with John and Paul, I probably wouldn’t have thought about writing a song, at least not until much later,” he told Guitar World in 1992, remembering the early days of the band. “They were writing all these songs, many of which I thought were great. Some were just average, but obviously, a high percentage were quality material. I thought to myself, if they can do it, I’m going to have a go.”

When he got into his groove, Harrison delivered some of The Beatles’ finest moments. ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes The Sun’ are two songs steeped in the legacy of the band and it was Harrison we had to thank. But that thankyou came with a lot of questions, the most important one being, “why have you been hiding these songs for so long?”

Well, there’s no one reason to attribute the lack of Harrison songs to, really. Ultimately, he worked in the shadow of music’s most prolific songwriting partnership and with the inevitable sense of ego that would have existed in the studio, taking album real estate away from the pair would have been a difficult task.00

But in the earlier years of the band, it can certainly be pinned down to a lack of confidence. Lennon and McCartney had proven from the very first album that they could pen world dominating songs and they had the ability to churn them out with relative ease. The fanbase quickly turned into a pack of wolves, waiting to gobble up musical genius and ready to spit out anything less than worthy. For a young Harrison, the weight of that expectation undoubtedly wore heavy.

He explained this himself, saying, “I used to have a hang-up about telling John and Paul and Ringo I had a song for the albums, because I felt at that time as if I was trying to compete. I don’t want the Beatles to be recording rubbish for my sake just because I wrote it — and on the other hand, I don’t want to record rubbish just because they wrote it. The group comes first.”

But after his life-changing trip to India in 1966 and subsequent mentorship from Ravi Shankar, Harrison’s approach to songwriting became more enlightened and skilled. He returned as an artist brimming with creative potential and ideas, making the tempering of his contribution more difficult for Lennon and McCartney.

Did John Lennon and Paul McCartney hold George Harrison back?
There’s certainly a compelling case to be made for the dynamic duo hampering the greatness of their bandmate. By the late ‘60s, Harrison was like a younger brother who had grown up taller and stronger than his elders and could comfortably take them down in a sibling wrestle. Naturally, as all older siblings do, they changed the rules somewhat, bent the parameters in their favour as though to protect their status as the top dogs.

Harrison himself confessed that he felt as though he would have to write a catalogue of great songs before one was heard, while, because of McCartney and Lennon’s preassigned roles as leaders of the band, they were allowed to explore sillier ideas at free will.

While he’s gone on record to slander the nonsensical nature of songs like ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, Harrison harboured more overarching feelings towards McCartney, comparing it to a sort of creative dictatorship. He said, “My problem was that it would always be very difficult to get in on the act, because Paul was very pushy in that respect,” he commented. “When he succumbed to playing on one of your tunes, he’d always do good. But you’d have to do 59 of Paul’s songs before he’d even listen to one of yours.”