Full Transcript for From Hit Parade: The Harrisong Edition

call them, is in fact their most popular song ever. It was never issued on 45. It doesn't even make any of Rolling Stone's surveys of the 500 greatest songs of all time. But what if, what if, the Beatles' biggest hit is actually Here Comes the Sun? 00:04:40 Speaker 7: Here comes the sun. 00:04:42 Speaker 1: Here comes the sun. 00:04:46 Speaker 5: I say it's all right. 00:04:51 Speaker 2: We'll be right back. Before we jump back in, if you're a regular Hit Parade listener and love what we do here, or if you've just discovered the show and you feel like, hey, this guy seems to be on to something, consider becoming a Slate Plus member. You'll be supporting Hit Parade and helping to power it into the future. And in return, you'll get ad-free versions of Hit Parade and every other Slate podcast. Plus, you'll be able to listen to The Bridge, our Slate Plus bonus episodes. Just visit slate.com slash hitparadeplus to get access wherever you listen. That's slate.com slash hitparadeplus. To talk about the improbability of this George Harrison song being the Beatles' biggest hit, we need to talk about how the charts work and why the choice of singles from albums matters. For much of the 60s, the Beatles didn't actually pull singles from their albums. They would release them separately from albums and compile them later. But by the 70s, standard practice was for an album to spawn multiple hit singles. Hit Parade is normally about chart hits, but for this story, we'll need to explain how certain famous songs do not become hits. For most of the 20th century, single release was how songs were permitted on Billboard song charts. including the Hot 100, which launched in 1958 and quickly became America's flagship pop chart. The magazine had a rule that to be eligible to even appear on the chart, a song had to be issued as a single available at retail separate from an album. That could be 45 RPM vinyl, a cassette single or casingle, or a CD single. What's remarkable about this rule are the songs that are quite famous and were never issued as singles, hence never appeared on the Hot 100. For example, consider Stevie Wonder's 1976 album Songs in the Key of Life. Songs was packed with singles, four of them to be exact. These include I Wish, a number one hit. Sir Duke, also a number one hit. 00:07:34 Speaker 1: Music is a world within itself With a language we all. 00:07:39 Speaker 2: Understand And the top 40 hits Another Star and As. 00:07:44 Speaker 7: I'll be loving you always. 00:07:59 Speaker 2: All four of these singles now have Spotify streams in the tens of millions. If you know Songs in the Key of Life, you may be wondering why I didn't mention the classic Isn't She Lovely. Stevie Wonder never elected to release Isn't She Lovely as a single. He wanted to keep it at its full album length. It was never promoted to radio, never released as a 45, and hence never made the Hot 100. And yet, today, on Spotify, if we look at the streams of songs on Songs in the Key of Life, Isn't She Lovely has 212 million streams, more than I Wish, As, and Another Star. Only Sir Duke surpasses it. In short, Isn't She Lovely is kind of a stealth hit. It walks like a hit and talks like a hit, but it wasn't an actual hit. There are quite a few of these so-called stealth hits in the catalogs of some pretty famous acts. They're more than deep cuts. They might even be the most consumed song on a very famous album, despite never charting. For example, Billy Joel's 1977 album The Stranger. By far, its most popular song is Vienna, a song that was never a single. Vienna is now over one billion streams, even though it was not among the four singles taken off The Stranger. The only song that comes close is She's Always a Woman. And that only reached 630 million streams. Similarly, on Fleetwood Mac's 1975 self-titled album, The One Before Rumors, the most played track by far is... Similarly, on Fleetwood Mac's 1975 self-titled album, The One Before Rumors, the most played track by far is Landslide, a song never released as a 45. 00:10:13 Speaker 6: And I saw my reflection in snow-covered hills Till the landslide brought. 00:10:23 Speaker 2: Me down At 1.1 billion streams, it's nearly double the streams of Rhiannon from that same album. In 1985, John Fogerty released an album whose lead single was Old Man Down the Road, a top ten hit. 00:10:48 Speaker 8: The old man is down the road. 00:10:53 Speaker 2: But these days, the most famous song from the Fogarty album is its title track, Center Field, which was only issued as a B-side and never even made the top 40. Put me in, coach. 00:11:06 Speaker 6: I'm ready to play. Today, look at me. 00:11:13 Speaker 5: Gotta be me. 00:11:16 Speaker 2: So, a stealth hit can change the public's perceptions of a specific superstar album. But what about a group's entire career? The fact is, the Beatles' catalog of hits is mostly defined by the songwriting of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The group scored 20 number one singles, still a record on the Hot 100. And all of these 20 singles feature Lennon-McCartney songs. However, only one of those 20 number one hits, a double A-side single from 1969, even includes a George Harrison song. That would be Something, which was the flip side of the John Lennon song Come Together. We'll talk more about the song Something a bit later. But that's not the focus of this episode. We're here to talk about another George Harrison song from the same Beatles album that was never a single at all and now beats all of the Beatles hits, including all of the Lennon-McCartney songs. And we have the data to prove it. 00:12:24 Speaker 6: Here comes the. 00:12:26 Speaker 2: Here Comes the Sun is arguably the Beatles' most underestimated song and their ultimate stealth hit. But understanding how and why George Harrison wrote it helps explain why it was underestimated. Let's take a walk back into George's history as a Beatles songwriter. You might say John Lennon and Paul McCartney

got a head start in songwriting. They formed their songwriting partnership as teenagers, before the Beatles even took off. Even before they signed a recording contract, Lennon and McCartney agreed that any song written in part or in whole by either of them would be credited to the moniker Lennon-McCartney. So, what that means is that a primarily John Lennon song like A Hard Day's Night. 00:13:24 Speaker 8: It's been a hard day's. 00:13:26 Speaker 2: Night That was credited to Lennon-McCartney. Or an all-Paul McCartney song. Literally none of the other Beatles either wrote or performed on that song, but that too was credited to Lennon-McCartney. Now, let's be clear, these were top-shelf songs. The quality and the dominance of Lennon-McCartney songs defined the Beatles' songbook. But the side effect was it made George Harrison's songs largely superfluous, at least early in the group's career. Harrison didn't even begin writing songs until 1963's Don't Bother Me from the With the Beatles album. 00:14:09 Speaker 8: So go away, leave me alone, don't bother me. I can't believe that she would leave me on my own. 00:14:19 Speaker 2: But Harrison's songwriting kept improving over the Beatles' recording years. Several George Harrison songs could easily have been Beatles singles. On the soundtrack to the movie Help in 1965, his song I Need You receives a showcase slot in the movie. 00:14:38 Speaker 7: You don't realize how much. 00:14:45 Speaker 2: I need you In 1966, Taxman was track one on the Revolver album. 00:14:51 Speaker 1: Let me tell you how. 00:14:55 Speaker 7: It will be. 00:14:59 Speaker 2: And, by the way, it featured a very influential guitar riff that the British band The Jam later ripped off for their number one UK hit, Start. Another monster Harris song, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, from the 1968 self-titled Beatles album, a.k.a. The White Album. 00:15:29 Speaker 8: I look at you all, see the love that's sleeping, while my guitar gently weeps. 00:15:44 Speaker 2: To this day, multiple magazines rank While My Guitar Gently Weeps, which features guitar by Harrison's friend Eric Clapton, as the best or among the best songs on the White Album. But through all of this time, songs written by George Harrison weren't released as singles. They didn't even start to appear on 45s until the Beatles' final years together as a band. The first Harris song to even make the B-side of a single was 1968's Raga influenced The Inner Light. 00:16:18 Speaker 6: Without going out of my door. 00:16:23 Speaker 2: Which was the B-side to the Paul McCartney jam Lady Madonna. 00:16:27 Speaker 5: Lady Madonna, children at your feet, wonder how you managed to make it. 00:16:36 Speaker 2: Harrison didn't finally score a Beatles A-side until 1969, and it was with a ballad that turned out to be his greatest standard, the song Something. 00:16:48 Speaker 7: Something in the way she woos me I don't want to leave her now You know I believe in how. 00:17:05 Speaker 2: As I mentioned earlier, Something was released on a double A-side 45 with John Lennon's Come Together. As we discussed in our B-sides episode of Hit Parade, if it hadn't been for Something, Come Together wouldn't have reached number one. Billboard changed its policy while the single was climbing the charts to allow two-sided hits to chart in the same position. As a result, Come Together slash Something rose to number one in November 1969. Something is indeed George Harrison's standard. It's his most covered recording. In fact, it's the second most covered Beatles song after Paul McCartney's Yesterday. 00:18:01 Speaker 4: Something in the way she. 00:18:04 Speaker 2: Moves Something has been recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra, who called it his favorite Beatles song, to British Chanteuse Shirley Bassey. 00:18:16 Speaker 7: Attracts me like no other. 00:18:18 Speaker 2: Lover To Godfather of Soul James Brown. His version was George Harrison's favorite cover version. 00:18:29 Speaker 6: Oh, now As for the original Something, it has made all versions of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs list. 00:18:36 Speaker 8: As of 2021, the latest version of the list, Something ranked number 110. 00:18:42 Speaker 5: On Spotify. 00:19:00 Speaker 2: Something's lifetime streams total just over half a billion, an impressive number, but that's less than one-third of the streams of Harrison's other great song from Abbey Road. Though Here Comes the Sun now sounds timeless, its creation was very tied to how George Harrison was feeling in 1969. You might say Here Comes the Sun was therapy for George, a song of relief and release. If you caught the recent Peter Jackson documentary Get Back, which chronicled the Beatles' January 1969 recording sessions culminating in their rooftop concert, you may recall that George Harrison was having a hard time. By 1969, Harrison was chafing at the limits placed on his songwriting and input on Beatles albums— John Lennon and Paul McCartney typically allotted George two songs per album. On the double album, The Beatles, aka The White Album, he had four. But this was no longer enough for George Harrison. During the January 69 recording sessions, he performed several songs that would wind up not only on the last two Beatles LPs, but even his 1970 solo debut, All Things Must Pass. In other words, the Beatles were leaving George Harrison's songs on the cutting room floor. You may also recall from the Get Back documentary that George had a snippy argument with Paul McCartney and even briefly left the Beatles. 00:20:56 Speaker 1: Can we play guitar all through? Well, I don't think. 00:20:59 Speaker 6: Yeah, OK, well, I don't mind. 00:21:00 Speaker 7: I'll play, you know, whatever you want me to play. Or I won't play at all if you don't want me to play. 00:21:06 Speaker 1: Whatever it is that will please you, I'll do it. 00:21:09 Speaker 2: But I don't think you really know what that one is. Though George's reasons for leaving the group for a

couple of days in January 69 are murky, reportedly his meager songwriting credits were a factor. Another factor, the formation of AppleCore, the Beatles' troubled foray into the music business. George hated the legalities and meetings that were involved in setting up the company and its record label. The combination of all of these factors led to a creative release. Harrison said, quote, At the time, Apple was getting to be like school, where we had to go and be businessmen, sign this and sign that. Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever, and by the time spring comes, you really deserve it. So one day, I decided I was going to sag off Apple, and I went over to Eric Clapton's house. The relief of not having to go see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric's acoustic guitars and wrote Here Comes the Sun. So that's the origin story of one of George Harrison's greatest songs, breaking out of a string of boring meetings, picking up an acoustic guitar, and strolling around Eric Clapton's garden, soaking in the springtime weather. 00:22:37 Speaker 7: Here comes the sun, here comes the sun, and I say it's all right. 00:22:47 Speaker 2: In other words, if Here Comes the Sun sounds like self-care or therapy, for George Harrison, it was. He completed the lyrics a couple of months later while on holiday in Sardinia in June of 69. The Beatles reconvened to record their Abbey Road album in July of 1969. However, for the first few days, John Lennon was not with them. He and Yoko Ono had been in a car crash just before the session started, and he took just over a week off. As a result, Here Comes the Sun, which was recorded early in the sessions, features no John Lennon. Only Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr play on the song. What's also exceptional about Here Comes the Sun is its creative instrumentation. For one thing, the song features one of the earliest recordings of the Moog synthesizer. This was the analog synthesizer that took up nearly half a room and was made famous on the album Switched on Bach by Wendy Carlos in 1968 and on the early Doors hit, Strange Days. In addition to the Moog synthesizer, Harrison opens the song with acoustic guitar, then adds a harmonium organ. The song features hand claps by Paul, Ringo, and George, giving it an almost Latin rhythm. And after the song was mostly completed, producer George Martin brought in a small orchestra to provide strings and woodwinds. The Beatles thought well enough of Here Comes the Sun to make it track one on side two of the Abbey Road LP. It provided solid evidence alongside the song Something that Harrison's songwriting had reached a new pinnacle, but its greatest fame would come later. We'll be right back. When the Abbey Road album showed up in stores in late September 1969, Here Comes the Sun was well-regarded but largely ignored. Again, it was never issued as a single. George's Something was the more obvious candidate

to be released as the first of his Beatles A-sides. In fact, the only country where Here Comes the Sun was even issued on a 45 was Japan, and then only as the B-side to the Paul McCartney song Oh Darling. darling Critical reviews of Abbey Road either ignored Here Comes the Sun or criticized its Moog synths as, quote, disembodied and artificial. However, the album did sell well. It spent 11 weeks at number one in the U.S. That's the third largest total for any Beatles album, after Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Hard Day's Night soundtrack. And it spent 17 weeks at number one in the U.K., But for four years after the album's release, Here Comes the Sun was only available on Abbey Road. In fact, the only other Beatles album to even include Here Comes the Sun was their 1973 double LP, 1967 to 1970. The so-called Blue Album wasn't really a greatest hits album. It compiled both Beatles hits and beloved deep cuts. Those two albums, Abbey Road and The Blue Album, were the only way to buy Here Comes the Sun for decades. As a non-charting non-hit, a stealth hit, Sun made no other appearances on any Beatles compilation. That includes the 2000 blockbuster CD, One. To order the Beatles One, call the number on your screen or send $ 18. 98 for CD or $ 11. 00:27:12 Speaker 9: 98 for cassette plus $ 4. 00:27:13 Speaker 2: 95 shipping and handling to the address below. Call now. The first people who knew Here Comes the Sun was extraordinary were the many artists who covered it. Those remakes started appearing pretty quickly. 00:27:26 Speaker 8: Little darling It's been a long, long, lonely winter. 00:27:34 Speaker 2: Richie Havens, the percussive acoustic guitarist made famous at the Woodstock Festival, scored his only top 40 pop hit with a cover of Here Comes the Sun in 1971. Here comes the sun, I say. It reached number 16 on the Hot 100. If I may offer a fond childhood memory, my first exposure to Here Comes the Sun as a song was Richie Haven's performance of it on Sesame Street in 1975. The legendary Nina Simone made her cover of Here Comes the Sun the title track to her 1971 rock covers album, Here Comes the Sun. 00:28:22 Speaker 10: It's all right, little darling Here comes the sun Yeah, here comes the sun I. 00:28:36 Speaker 2: Say In 1976, British rock band Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel covered Here Comes the Sun and took it into the UK top ten. 00:28:48 Speaker 8: ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶. 00:29:06 Speaker 2: But for decades, through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, Here Comes the Sun remained an album deep cut, a stealth hit, if you will. And it might have stayed that way, if not for the digital music age of the 21st century. The first evidence we had of Sun's deep popularity came in 2010 when the Beatles' full catalog became available for download on Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store. The arrival of the Beatles on iTunes was a big deal. Apple Computer and the Beatles' own Apple Corps had spent decades haggling over the name Apple. The Beatles sued Steve Jobs' company multiple times over his use of the name. And in one settlement, Apple Computer agreed not to get into the music business. In the 2000s, when the iTunes Music Store opened, they violated that agreement. That required years more of negotiations, thus delaying the arrival of the Beatles on iTunes until 2010. 00:30:10 Speaker 9: My model of business is the Beatles. 00:30:13 Speaker 2: Apple founder Steve Jobs was a huge Beatles fan. 00:30:16 Speaker 9: They were four very talented guys who kept each other's kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the sum was greater, the total was greater than the sum of the parts. 00:30:28 Speaker 2: And that's how I see business. 00:30:29 Speaker 9: You know, great things in business are never done by one person. 00:30:32 Speaker 2: The negotiations to get the Beatles on iTunes was one of the last major deals he made before his death in 2011. Accordingly, the Beatles' arrival on iTunes was trumpeted across the media. But for chart watchers like your Hit Parade host... The interesting byproduct of the Beatles on iTunes was finally answering the question, what would happen when the public had the ability to buy any Beatles song untethered from physical goods? Which Lennon-McCartney songs would prevail at the iTunes store? Predictions ranged across the Fab Four's catalog. Beatle fans expected songs from Yesterday to Hey Jude to Let It Be to wind up as the Beatles' most downloaded track. And yet, in November 2010, when the first week of downloads came back, it turned out the top seller was a song that had not only never hit number one, It had never been a single, and it was a George Harrison song. In that first week, the Beatles sold more than 2 million iTunes song downloads globally, and the bestseller was Here Comes the Sun. In the U.S. alone, it sold 55,000 copies. At the time, I wrote about the surprise success of Here Comes the Sun. and I credited this success to a sort of end-of-scarcity problem. Here Comes the Sun was suddenly available, and people snapped it up. Something similar had happened in 2007, when Led Zeppelin made their debut on the iTunes Music Store, and Stairway to Heaven, previously never a single, was available for the first time. 00:32:21 Speaker 5: There's a lady who's sure All. 00:32:26 Speaker 7: It glitters is gold, and she's buying a stairway to heaven. 00:32:34 Speaker 2: But as it turns out, my theory was wrong. Here Comes the Sun's popularity was deep, abiding, and lasting. We received further evidence when Spotify came to America in 2011, kicking off the streaming era on the charts. Here Comes the Sun quickly established itself as the Beatles' most streamed song. Remember, the difference between downloads and streams is that streams track how much folks play a song, not just buy a song. And it turns out people play Here Comes the Sun a lot. 00:33:09 Speaker 10: Wow. 00:33:10 Speaker 1: God. 00:33:11 Speaker 7: God. 00:33:18 Speaker 4: Maybe it's just

them singing the word sun. I'm not sure. I feel like this song is just making my day so much brighter. It's so beautiful. It's short, sweet, and oh, wow. The Beatles just do it again. 00:33:29 Speaker 2: It's the only Beatles song to surpass a billion streams on Spotify. In fact, the song is closing in on two billion streams. Its current tally is 1.88 billion. By the way, that's three and a half times the streams of something... It's nearly two times the streams of both Come Together and Let It Be. 00:33:56 Speaker 7: When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes. 00:34:01 Speaker 2: To me And it's more than two times the streams of Yesterday. 00:34:06 Speaker 7: Something wrong now I long for yesterday Yesterday. 00:34:15 Speaker 2: All of those Lennon-McCartney classics... have fewer streams than George Harrison's Here Comes the Sun. Speaking as a chart analyst, I don't think it's too speculative to say that the Beatles, who, again, already have 20 number one hits, may have left a 21st chart topper on the table. In the early 2020s, writing in Esquire magazine, critic Alan Light cited the track's continued standing as the Beatles' most-streamed song on Spotify as evidence that George Harrison, quote, has emerged as Gen Z's favorite Beatle, unquote. Around the same time, Uncut critic Tom Pinnock said, quote, The overwhelming popularity of Sun shows that, musically, Harrison seems to make sense in our anxious times, unquote. In my slate column, Why Is This Song Number One, I compared Sun to Brenda Lee's Christmas classic Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, a song that was also revealed by streaming music to be far more popular than people realized. In the case of both George's classic and Brenda's classic... I took away two lessons. Lesson one, metrics matter. We had no idea how beloved George Harrison's Abbey Road Deep Cut was because the charts and the marketplace didn't provide a yardstick. On a truly even playing field, one made possible by digital technology, where all songs are equally consumable, the market forms a consensus. And takeaway number two, songs are both inspiring and functional. For so many listeners, Here Comes the Sun is a Fab Four favorite because it soundtracks their life passages and times of change. George Harrison himself wrote it as therapy, and it serves that function for others, from those with seasonal affective disorder to recovering addicts. These listeners find Sun hopeful, heartening, and hymn-like. 00:36:30 Speaker 8: Sun, sun, sun, here it comes. 00:36:34 Speaker 2: In fact, one of the only sad notes of Here Comes the Sun is that George Harrison never got to see its massive popularity firsthand. Harrison, you may recall, died in 2001. When he passed, the internet existed, but music downloading mostly happened on Napster or LimeWire. This was a couple of years before the advent of legal music downloading. Apple launched its iTunes Music Store in 2003. One can imagine that Harrison would have taken great pride in the success of Here Comes the Sun, given his puckish, sardonic sense of humor and his perception as being the kid brother of Lennon and McCartney in The Beatles. One final detail in this story. After the Beatles, George Harrison didn't tour much. But in 1991, he was persuaded to go on tour with his friend Eric Clapton in Japan. It would turn out to be Harrison's final concert tour. And what did he play live on stage in Japan every night of the tour? The song he had written in Eric Clapton's garden more than two decades earlier. Harrison was not a natural live performer. 00:37:53 Speaker 7: Here comes the. 00:37:54 Speaker 2: Sun But you have to imagine, Here Comes the Sun functioned for him much the way it did in 1969, as a balm, a moment of optimism, a light of hope. It's still providing that hope to millions, maybe billions, of listeners today. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was conceived, researched, and narrated by Chris Malanfe. That's me. My producer for this episode is my supervising producer, Joel Meyer. From all of us at Hit Parade HQ, congratulations to producer Kevin Bendis on his new baby. The executive producer of Slate Podcasts is Mia Lobel. Just a reminder, if you liked this episode, if you learned something new, if you love chart nerdery, or maybe you were just pleasantly surprised about the connection we made between Brenda Lee and George Harrison, consider supporting Hit Parade by becoming a Slate Plus member. go to slate.com slash hitparadeplus. And after you sign up, you'll get access to an ad-free version of the show, plus the trivia-filled bonus episodes we call The Bridge. To join, just go to slate.com slash hitparadeplus. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melanthe. 00:39:28 Speaker 6: Son, son, son, me and God.