141. Don't Bother Me
George's first solo composition is far better than anyone could have reasonably expected
This is George’s first songwriting credit, and for a first song, it’s quite good. Lennon/McCartney had been writing together (on and off) for half a decade before their first Beatles compositions. George didn’t even really consider writing anything of his own until they were already big stars. And this wasn’t exactly a matter of inspiration, but instead “an exercise to see if I could write a song.” Turns out he could!
However, while this is generally understood to be ‘George’s first song,’ it’s actually a bit more complicated. He was actually a co-writer of two (very) early tunes which thankfully have survived the ages. The first was In Spite Of All The Danger, which was the ‘b-side’ of the very first Quarry Men record back in 1958, and which remains the only McCartney/Harrison composition. It’s mostly a Paul song, but George was given credit because he came up with the guitar solos.1 The second Harrison credit is on Cry for a Shadow (originally called Beatle Bop) and which also has a unique songwriting credit: Harrison/Lennon. An instrumental pastiche based on the sound of The Shadows, they wrote it together in Hamburg mostly as a joke. But when they went into the studio to back Tony Sheridan, they included it in the session, intending for it to potentially be included on their first solo single. In early 1962, it became the first original Beatles recording with a commercial release—albeit on a Tony Sheridan EP.
All of which is just to emphasize that ‘writing songs’ was a bit more fluid than is usually imagined. I think a lot of us (myself included) cultivate a mental image of “Lennon/McCartney” based on the stories of them writing ‘eyeball to eyeball’ and imagine that this was a constant process. The reality is that they wrote together a fair bit back in the Quarry Men days, but then composed virtually nothing for two or three years. It was only after Brian Epstein told them that he’d have more luck selling them if he could emphasize their songwriting abilities—in late 1961—that they started writing again.
So it’s certainly true that John and Paul had a big head start on George in terms of writing original material, but it’s also true that a lot of the heat in the crucible that turned them into songwriting geniuses was actually shared. More than anything, they learned how to be great writers by spending an ungodly amount of time learning new songs, playing them a million times, and then repeating the process. That was really the thing that distinguished the Beatles from everyone else in Liverpool in those early days: their voracious acquisition and interpretation of everything they could get their hands on. George was also a participant in that process—though admittedly not as aggressively as John and Paul—and you can see it in his rapid development as a songwriter once he put his mind to it.
Even here, right at the ‘start,’ he’s already quite accomplished. This isn’t an enormously sophisticated song, but it’s pretty darn good! The guitar-playing is fierce, which includes George’s solo, but also the reverb-heavy rhythm track from John, which gives the song a feeling of constant acceleration. And, notably, it’s much less fluffy than the songs George had been covering up to this point—with a wonderfully moody minor key feel. It’s also darker than the stuff John and Paul themselves were writing, which I think is impressive. George was notoriously independent, and I think may have intentionally tried to write something that couldn’t be mistaken for a Lennon/McCartney tune. The fact he was able to execute that brief is quite impressive.
It was recorded in a home studio solely for their own personal use, the sole copy of which effectively disappeared for several decades until John Lowe, the pianist at the time, revealed that he still had it.