(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Thu 21 August 2025 16:30, UK
The worst thing that anyone can do in the music business is mess with an artist’s creative process.
Everyone has a different approach to how they want their music to sound, but when a label has a different idea for what they want their product to look like, George Harrison felt that The Beatles’ music could have been treated a little bit better.
Then again, everything about Harrison’s treatment in the band could have gone a lot differently in hindsight. He was more than capable of making fantastic songs on his own, but since he had a bit of a late start compared to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, there were always going to be limits on where he could go compared to how his fellow bandmates were doing. If he couldn’t get a word in during the early days, he was going to make sure he crafted everything until it was perfect.
But even in their earliest days, everyone in the band had one big hurdle ahead of them: conquering America. The Fab Four knew that they wouldn’t be able to call themselves stars until they were big in the same land that produced their favourite acts, and when the American market finally latched onto songs like ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, the four lovable goofballs from Liverpool were bound to look like four Elvis Presleys for the price of one.
If they wanted to get a hit in the American market, though, they would have to do things on much different terms. Harrison knew that there were avenues for them to go down as performers that were more business-minded, but mixing and matching the songs on their albums was a little bit too far over the line in some cases.
According to Harrison, having their albums messed with in this way went against everything they set out to do when sequencing their records, saying, “We always had complete artistic control from the outset, and we took great care over running orders, having the right songs in the right places and good sleeves – it was all done with a bit of taste. But straightaway they started screwing that up in the States, holding back tracks from albums so that, for every two albums released in Britain, they could release three over there.”
Even if America figured they would throw together whatever track order they wanted to, some of the albums did function a lot better in their Yankee-approved form. With The Beatles was a fantastic sophomore release for the group, but Meet The Beatles! does give people a decent crash course of the iconic songs of their earliest years without having to go through their multitude of covers.
But it’s not like Harrison was the only one who was annoyed. If you listen to some of the audio from their stadium shows in America, you can hear Lennon getting a little bit confused and dismissive about introducing songs that were released on albums like Beatles ‘66 or whatever other Americanised version was out at the time.
For all of the problems they had getting the albums lost in translation, Sgt Pepper was the first album that the band insisted that everything be listened to in the order they intended. They were now making high art on every record they made, and the last thing they needed was for people to be mixing and matching different tracks and getting in the way of their artistic vision.
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