During the Beatles’ early hit-making years, John Lennon and Paul McCartney took most of the plaudits for their songwriting. George Harrison was slower to find his voice as a writer, and when he wrote his first solo composition for the Beatles, he was sick in bed. Even then, he wasn’t convinced what he had written could even be considered a song.
By the time the Beatles landed in Bournemouth, on England’s south coast, for a six-show residency at the Gaumont in August 1963, their debut album, Please Please Me, was already fueling the first ripples of Beatlemania. Harrison had come away from those sessions without a songwriting credit, despite handling lead vocals on “Chains” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret.”
Harrison had already co-written songs with fellow Beatles, including “In Spite of All the Danger” with Paul McCartney and “Cry for a Shadow” with John Lennon, but “Don’t Bother Me” was different. This was his first Beatles song written entirely by himself.
Harrison wrote it while he was sick in bed in Bournemouth. It would appear on the Beatles’ second album, With the Beatles, released in November 1963. But its creator wasn’t exactly impressed with his first solo effort.
“I don’t think it’s a particularly good song,” he once confessed in his autobiography, I Me Mine. “It mightn’t be a song at all.”
That assessment is striking in hindsight. Harrison would go on to write some of the Beatles’ most enduring songs, including “Here Comes the Sun” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which featured an uncredited lead-guitar contribution from Eric Clapton. But in 1963, he was still trying to establish himself as a songwriter within a group whose creative partnership was already dominated by Lennon and McCartney.
Paul McCartney remembered that Harrison’s growing desire to write for the band had become an issue.
“A lot of the girls were mad on him, so we always wanted to give him at least one track,” he said in the Anthology box set. “Then George started to catch on, [asking] ‘Why should you write my songs?’ And then he started writing his own.
“It was an option to include George in the songwriting team. I remember walking up past Woolton Church with John one morning and going over the question: ‘Without wanting to be too mean to George, would the three of us write, or would it be better to keep it simple?’ We decided we’d just keep the two of us.”
Harrison nevertheless kept writing. And getting a song into the Beatles’ repertoire wasn’t easy for him. In 1969, he admitted that he felt uncomfortable even telling his bandmates that he had written something for an album.
“I used to have a hang-up about telling John, Paul and Ringo I had a song for an album,” he said in 1969. “I felt mentally, at that time, as if I was trying to compete. And in a way, the standard of the songs had to be good, because they were very good. I don’t want the Beatles to be recording some rubbish for my sake just because I wrote it.”
“Don’t Bother Me” did make the cut, despite Harrison’s reservations. And the Beatles took the song seriously enough to experiment with its sound. John Lennon tried to give his rhythm-guitar part — played on his 1958 Rickenbacker 325 electric guitar — a harsher, more aggressive character by using a Maestro Fuzz Tone pedal, one of the earliest commercially available fuzz units. Producer George Martin rejected the effect, however, feeling that the primitive fuzz created too much distortion and noise.
Instead, Lennon used the built-in tremolo on his Vox AC30, switching the effect on and off with a foot-switch. During overdubs, the group added percussion, including an Arabian bongo played by Ringo Starr, giving the song an unusual exotic sound. These are small details, but they show that “Don’t Bother Me” was more than a token Harrison composition: the Beatles regarded it as deserving the same creative support they gave Lennon and McCartney’s.
Harrison himself saw the experience as a starting point rather than a triumph.
“At least it showed me that all I needed to do was keep on writing and maybe eventually I would write something good,” he wrote in I Me Mine.
He was right. “Don’t Bother Me” may not have been a classic, but it was a watershed moment: for the first time, Harrison had put a song of his own alongside the work of Lennon and McCartney. He would soon prove he belonged there.
And Harrison wasn’t the only Beatle to have doubts about the quality of his own material. John Lennon later dismissed “Run for Your Life” as a throwaway macho number and said he loathed the song. The Beatles were never entirely unanimous about their songs or their sound.
For Harrison, though, “Don’t Bother Me” represented something more important than a hit. It was the moment he stopped waiting for Lennon and McCartney to give him a song and began insisting that he had songs of his own.
