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Mon 29 December 2025 18:37, UK
By the time The Beatles broke up, John Lennon seemed content with paving a way forward on his own.
It was his band, after all, and while it took him a long time to come to terms with the fact that they wouldn’t be together anymore, the fact that he could still carry on and have the final word on Plastic Ono Band were the words that fans needed to hear, even if they didn’t want to hear it at the time. But ever since leaving the Fab Four, Lennon was always candid about what he thought his fellow bandmates were up to.
Then again, not all of them exactly knocked it out of the park every time they made a record. It’s easy to dog on someone like Ringo Starr for having some of the least good solo records of the time, but given how cruel the critics were to Paul McCartney’s early career, it’s not like everyone was rushing to call their records works of art on par with what they did as a group. But for Lennon in particular, what the rest of the world thought didn’t matter to him.
He was content to live out his days playing with Yoko Ono, but for all the squabbling going on between him and McCartney during those first few years, that didn’t seem to matter to George Harrison. After being kept down for so long, ‘The Quiet Beatle’ finally managed to make the record that most people had been waiting for on All Things Must Pass, and once he started up the Concert for Bangladesh, there was no question that he was one of the most successful Beatles of the time.
While Lennon remained absent from the charity concert, he did at least approve of what his old mate was doing. There were moments where things would get a little bit strenuous between them, but Lennon was always proud of Harrison in the same way that a musical older brother would be. So when he saw his former bandmate start waning, he could only point to the people around him half the time.
It’s no big secret that Harrison didn’t want to be in a traditional frontman role, but Lennon felt that working with Ravi Shankar may have been one step too far. The idea of making spiritual music was one thing, but since everyone was coming to see Harrison on his first solo tours, having everyone go through a massive performance of Eastern music was going to be a bit jarring for those who had no idea what they were listening to.
Lennon was always the first one to experiment half the time, but even he had to admit that Harrison may have gone in the wrong direction by having Shankar open up for him, saying, “I mean I’m no one to say what works and what doesn’t work really, but my personal opinion just was that he would have been better without. I think Ravi’s great, but it might have been better to keep Ravi separate. I want to see George do George.”
Then again, it’s not like any Beatles advice was going to slow Harrison down by any stretch. He was following his own bliss whenever he played, and no matter what he was doing behind the scenes, he knew that nothing that he wrote ever mattered unless it was coming from the same spiritual place that he would go whenever he heard Shankar playing away on his sitar whenever he took to the stage.
So while Shankar might not have been everybody’s first choice to listen to over Harrison, it’s not like he was ever going to leave ‘The Quiet One’s side, either. He was one of his musical gurus in a way, and when listening to his impact on Harrison, the rest of the Beatles’ solo career was going to be a natural extension of what he had done on tunes like ‘Within You Without You’.
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