The quiet Beatle finally made the rest of the group sit up and take notice. When George Harrison started to compose his gentle ballad “Something” on a piano in an empty Abbey Road recording studio in 1968, he might have been forgiven for wondering why he was even bothering. He had suffered under the Lennon-McCartney compositional hegemony for long enough. And now they weren’t even friends any more. But he liked the new song’s melody; so much so that he instantly gave up on it, assuming that he had subconsciously lifted it from another source.
He returned with it some months later, finally confident that “Something” was both an original, and strikingly lovely, piece of writing. Trying it out in the studio, he made light of his struggle to find a suitable simile to end his very first line. “Something in the way she moves, attracts me like… a pomegranate,” was his first offering. “Like a cauliflower,” offered John Lennon, less than helpfully.
Once he and his bandmates moved beyond fruit and vegetables for inspiration, Harrison completed the song swiftly. In one of its earliest manifestations, included on the new Abbey Road Anniversary Edition (released on September 27), his yearning vocal is accompanied only by his own guitar, and piano. It already sounds affecting, the composer infusing the song with both passion and self-effacement. “You’re asking me will my love grow,” he posits in a swelling chorus. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” is the candid response, the depth of his emotions transcending cognitive analysis.
“Something” was an instant highlight of Abbey Road, released 50 years ago this week. The most important plaudits of all came from Lennon, Paul McCartney (who supplied a beautifully crafted, perhaps over-fussy, bassline), and producer George Martin. “I was surprised he had it in him,” confessed Martin. The rest of the musical world listened, and got to work. Cover versions appeared instantly. Heavyweight balladeers and seasoned crooners rushed to offer their interpretations.
Truth to tell, few of them managed to capture Harrison’s tone. Shirley Bassey’s version was rich in pyrotechnics, but lacked the original’s fragility. It was hard to believe, once she started belting that chorus, that she “didn’t know”. Frank Sinatra brought typical elegance and effortlessness to the song, but he is a little too knowing. Watch the way he sings, “Something in the way she wooooos me”, with a nod and a wink, in a 1971 performance. He even invents an interlocutor — “You hang around, Jack, it may show” — adding to the super-masculine highballs-with-the-buddies vibe.
Reportedly Harrison’s favourite cover, James Brown’s version on a 1973 B-side is improbably funky, but full of intelligence. He replaces the limpid guitar refrain in the introduction with an incantation of desperation: “I got to believe in something”. Elvis sang it — of course he did — in his Aloha from Hawaii filmed concert from the same year, with the assistance of a ghostly, and ghastly, female voice pointlessly embellishing the melody.
Performances of “Something” achieved a greater level of poignancy in the immediate aftermath of Harrison’s death in 2001. McCartney and Eric Clapton played it at the Royal Albert Hall’s Concert for George, the former Beatle kicking off the song on ukulele, reviving memories of his childhood friendship with Harrison, while guitarist Marc Mann paid Harrison the ultimate honour of copying his tasteful and precise solo note-for-note. Bob Dylan, another close friend, paid his own tribute with a gruff and moving rendition in his 2002 Madison Square Garden concert.
Much has been made of Clapton and Harrison playing “Something” together in the 1990s, the two men seemingly acknowledging their feelings towards the woman whom they both married, and who was the alleged inspiration for the song, Pattie Boyd. But “Something” is somehow grander, more universal, than that. Sinatra famously labelled it “the greatest love song of the past 50 years”, and Harrison himself sensed that it would become a large part of his musical legacy. “When even Liberace covered it,” observed the quiet, and ever laconic, Beatle, “you know that it’s one of them that ends up in an elevator.”
This article has been amended to reflect the fact that the guitar solo at the Concert for George was played by Marc Mann.
What are your memories of ‘Something’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: EMI Catalogue; Parlophone UK; UMC (Universal Music Catalogue); Polydor; RCA/Legacy; Craft Recordings; Rhino/Warner Records
Picture credit: Jan Persson/Redferns