Despite their position as bastions of a creative, cultural and social upheaval in the 1960s, during the early days of The Beatles, the band didn’t act like a democracy. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were the chief officers of the Liverpudlian liner. They would steer the ship in whatever creative direction they wished, trusting the songwriting process that was skyrocketing them to international fame.
It was an intense relationship that, although it bore fruit in the form of enormous ticket and record sales, would become a focal point for the Fab Four’s eventual split. The stranglehold that the two principal songwriters held over the group even resulted in the duo writing one song purely out of charity to George Harrison in a desperate bid to give the guitarist “some action” on an album.
As The Beatles’ tenure advanced out of their mop-top-pop days, Harrison’s role became much more significant with every release. By the end of their journey, he was arguably the most pivotal member of the band, producing perhaps the best Beatles material in the form of tracks like ‘Within You Without You’, ‘Something’, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, and ‘Here Comes the Sun’. However, this wasn’t always the case, and it took Harrison a lot longer to find his voice in comparison to his colleagues Lennon and McCartney, who burst onto the music scene with all the confidence of a peacock in a Saville Row suit.
Harrison’s first song to be included on a Beatles record was ‘Don’t Bother Me’, which appeared on the 1963 record With The Beatles. However, it didn’t make him a prolific songwriter and didn’t really scratch the creative itch he had gnawing away, as he later admitted: “The first song was written basically as an exercise to see if I could write a song. I wrote that in a hotel in Bournemouth. We were doing a summer season. I was sick in bed, maybe that’s why it turned out ‘don’t bother me’”.
“It’s not a very good song,” bemoaned Harrison. However, the tune did open the door to songwriting freedom for the guitarist. “But it at least showed me that, you know, all I needed to do was keep on writing, and maybe someday I’d write something good,” he self-deprecatingly added.
After writing ‘Don’t Bother Me’, Harrison still primarily saw himself as a guitarist, which led his bandmates to hand him songs they considered less significant. While Lennon and McCartney might have intended to share the spotlight, it’s likely that something else was at play. If they truly valued the songs they were passing on, they would have kept them for themselves rather than giving them to Harrison. A more plausible explanation is that Brian Epstein, the band’s manager, wanted each member to have a chance at singing a track. This strategy catered to the growing fanbase, which was increasingly divided by their favourite Beatles, giving them more incentive to purchase the records.
One song that neither Lennon nor McCartney were fond of was ‘I’m Happy Just To Dance With You’, which appeared on the soundtrack for A Hard Day’s Night solely because Harrison needed a track in the film. However, its inclusion likely pleased Brian Epstein as well.
“We wrote ‘I’m Happy Just To Dance With You’ for George in the film. It was a bit of a formula song,” McCartney told biographer Barry Miles. “We knew that in E if you went to an A flat minor, you could always make a song with those chords; that change pretty much always excited you. This is one of these. Certainly ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’ was.”
“This one, anyway, was a straight co-written song for George,” McCartney shared, showing just how professional he and Lennon had become since their early days writing for fun. “We wouldn’t have actually wanted to sing it because it was a bit. The ones that pandered to the fans, in truth were our least favourite songs, but they were good. They were good for the time. The nice thing about it was to actually pull a song off on a slim little premise like that. A simple little idea. It was songwriting practice.”
This rather blunt statement from McCartney was supported by John Lennon, who said: “That was written for George to give him a piece of the action.” On another occasion, he brutally commented, “I’d never have sung it myself,” acknowledging how he felt it was a little beneath him.
Truthfully, the song is one of The Beatles’ weaker moments in comparison to their grand oeuvre, but on the other hand, it proves how far Harrison came during his time in the band. At one point, he was an afterthought, but only a few years later on Abbey Road, his input in a songwriting sense arguably stole the show thanks to ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes The Sun’, which showcased his striking development with the pen.