Harisongbook:
"Don't Bother Me"
(by George Harrison,
12. September 1963, EMI Studios, London)
12. September 1963, EMI Studios, London)
The first Harrison song that made it onto a Beatles album, arose in August 1963, when they had to play for a week in Bournemouth - and George was ill during the day in the hotel room. The outspoken text ("So go away / Leave me alone / Don't bother me") clearly refers to Harrison's skepticism of the star hype and to the urgent need for more privacy in the age of Beatlemania:
The moment when the world threw itself at his feet, George already sang from his problem with this success - and with the band that had made this success possible. "It was always difficult to me to say to John, Paul and Ringo, that I also had a song for an album," admitted George Harrison in 1969 in an interview, "I felt like in a competition - in which the bar was pretty high: John and Paul's songs were just very good, and I do not want the Beatles to record rubbish, just because it is from me."!
(Beatles "Don't Bother Me" bei YouTube)
As a Beatle of the people and late matured songwriter, George Harrison was never showered with laurels to the extent as Lennon & McCartney, who once were called the modern Schuberts by Leonard Bernstein, the famous conductor. But he never doubted his legitimate status as the third member.
"Sometimes simply the one gets most of the songs on an album, who puts the most effort - that's a question of character," he said in the same interview: "And if I am to sing songs on a record, they might as well be my own ones. "
George Harrison also talked to Bill Henry of Mersey Beat about the songwriting and said:
"I can't write lyrics. If i could write lyrics as easy as I could write melodies I would be churning them out like Paul and John."
PJ Griffiths, a well known photographer, recalls: "Liverpool was a very vibrant place at the time," said Griffiths, who photographed the Beatles on three separate occasions in the early sixties. "You hung around with the right wrong crowd and got friendly with various musicians, and you were never sure who was going to make it." Griffiths was presented by his best friend Adrian Henri, who was in a band together with Paul McCartney's brother Michael. "McCartney's brother would vouch for me as being okay," Griffiths said, "I hung out like a pal. I did not show up with an assistant at lights. I just wish I'd realized at the time they were going to be as famous as they became. I regret that I did not spend more time around them really." "Had I known what a ashram was," Griffiths said, "I'd have said, this guy's gonna end up on an ashram."