Musings, Meanderings, & Loops · Essay
August 24, 2026
I have been watching the Concert for Bangladesh again, and the thing that struck me was not the music. It was Dylan.
Bob Dylan in 1971 had barely played live in years, was famously difficult about being asked for anything, and had spent most of the decade evading people who wanted a piece of him. George Harrison asked, and he came. Seventeen years later George asked him to join a band with a silly name where everyone worked under a pseudonym, and he did that too.
Dylan could be short with almost anyone. He was never short with George. I wanted to know why.
The usual explanation is spirituality, and I think it is right as far as it goes. George's path ran through Vedic philosophy and Dylan's through biblical language and American roots music, but both men treated songwriting as something received rather than constructed, and both spent decades trying to get out from under a fame that had cast them as spokesmen for something.
That is real. But it explains why they liked each other. It does not explain the specific thing I kept circling, which is that Dylan heard George — heard him as a peer, immediately, at a moment when the two men who had known him longest could not.
Thanksgiving 1968. George goes to Woodstock and stays with Dylan. They sit with acoustic guitars and write together. George brings a set of major-seventh chords, Dylan finishes the lyric, and the song they get is "I'd Have You Anytime." George would later put it first on All Things Must Pass — the opening track of his first real solo statement, and he gave that slot to the song he wrote with Bob Dylan.
January 1969. George walks into Twickenham for the Get Back sessions carrying that song and a stack of others: "All Things Must Pass," "Isn't It a Pity," "Hear Me Lord," "Let It Down." Some of the strongest material anyone in that building would write.
The band ran through "All Things Must Pass" repeatedly. You can watch it happen in the Get Back footage. Dozens of passes. The reception was lukewarm, the song never got a proper recording, and George stopped offering it. On January 10 he left the group, and by most accounts said something to the effect of see you round the clubs.
Thirteen months apart. Same songs, same man. In one room he was a co-writer. In the other he was the third guy, waiting for his two slots.
Then he released the songs himself. All Things Must Pass arrived in November 1970 as a triple album — the format itself an argument about how much material had been dammed up — and went to number one in both America and Britain.
Set that against what the other two put out the same year. Paul's McCartney had come in April and topped the American chart for three weeks, held at number two in Britain. John's John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band landed two weeks after George's and peaked at six in America, eight in Britain.
And with "My Sweet Lord" sitting at number one on the American singles chart at the same time, George became the first of them to hold both spots at once — something neither Lennon nor McCartney managed until Wings in 1973.
The junior partner won the first round outright.
Here is what I think was actually going on, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the material.
On February 6, 1958, a fourteen-year-old George Harrison auditioned for the Quarrymen on the top deck of a Liverpool bus by playing "Raunchy" note for note. He got in. Lennon, seventeen, had reservations about the kid's age.
That is where the rank was set. And the rank never got re-evaluated.
Not when George wrote "Taxman." Not when he wrote "Something." Not when he came back from Woodstock having written with Dylan. The assessment was made in 1958 on the top deck of a bus, and eleven years later it was still running, because nobody ever thought to run it again.
And it reached well past the three of them. Frank Sinatra called "Something" the greatest love song of the past fifty years, recorded it, and — by a number of accounts — spent years introducing it from the stage as his favorite Lennon and McCartney number. The best song on Abbey Road was so self-evidently theirs that even its admirers handed it to them.
This is the part I find genuinely instructive rather than just sad. John and Paul were not wrong about George's talent because they had bad ears. They had the best ears of their generation. They were wrong because they had already decided, and the deciding had happened so long ago that it no longer presented itself as a judgment. It presented itself as a fact about the world.
Dylan's prior was different, and the difference is entirely a matter of when it got formed. He met the Beatles on August 28, 1964, at the Delmonico Hotel in New York, introduced by the journalist Al Aronowitz after their show at Forest Hills. George was twenty-one and already a professional in the biggest band on earth.
So Dylan knew him for four years before Woodstock. What he never knew was the schoolboy. He was not in the room in 1958, he did not have to be persuaded to let the kid in, and he had no memory of George as someone whose presence required a decision. Whatever baseline Dylan set, he set it on a competent adult.
Which meant that when the two of them sat down with guitars in 1968, there was no junior slot for George to be filed into. He had never occupied one. It was not that Dylan was more perceptive than Lennon and McCartney — nobody was more perceptive than Lennon and McCartney. It was that Dylan's file on George had been opened late, and everything in it was current.
Which brings me to the detail that made me want to write this down.
November 29, 2002, one year after George died. Eric Clapton is putting together the Concert for George at the Royal Albert Hall, and he wants Paul to sing "All Things Must Pass." Paul would rather do "Something" on the ukulele, which he had been playing on tour.
Clapton pushes. And in rehearsal it turns out that Paul does not know the song.
Not that he was rusty on it. He did not know it — had to sit down and learn the chords and the structure and the melody from the beginning, thirty-three years after standing in a room while it was played dozens of times.
Clapton's account of it is careful and generous:
"Paul had to admit that he didn't know 'All Things Must Pass,' and that was an awful thing to confront. It was huge humble-pie stuff."
— Eric Clapton
He is right that it was awful, and I do not think it reflects badly on McCartney in the way it first appears. It reflects on something much more common than callousness.
Paul was present for that song and did not hear it. He was in the room. He was holding an instrument. He was playing along. And the file marked George's songs had been closed for so long that the sound went in and left no trace.
That is not malice. Malice would require noticing. This is worse in a quieter way, and far more ordinary: you can rehearse something dozens of times and never once listen to it, because listening requires believing there might be something there, and you settled that question years ago.
At the end of the night Paul told the hall what Olivia Harrison had said to him — that with Dhani up on stage it looked like George stayed young and the rest of them got old. It is a beautiful line and it is about mortality. But there was a second clock running in that building, and it had been running since 1958.
I wrote the other day that partnerships survive on structure — that the thing which makes people productive together is a room they have to keep showing up to, whether or not they feel like it.
This is the correction to that, and I want it on the record next to it. The room is necessary and it is not sufficient. George Harrison had the room. He had the most famous room in the history of the form, with a contract and a schedule and no exit, for eleven years. And inside it he was systematically not heard, by two people who were physically present and holding guitars.
So the room gets you proximity. It does not get you attention, and those are not the same thing.
Which suggests a question worth asking about any partnership that has run a long time — and the longer it has run, the more it is worth asking:
When did I last actually evaluate what this person can do, rather than recalling what I concluded about them years ago?
Everybody you have worked with for a decade is carrying a rank you assigned early, usually in the first few months, often on thin evidence. People grow, and they mostly grow invisibly to the ones who knew them first, because those are precisely the people who stopped collecting data. The person best positioned to miss what you have become is the person who has known you longest.
Dylan's gift to George was not friendship or spiritual kinship, though there was plenty of both. It was that he had never once seen George as the youngest person in the room — because by the time the two of them met, he wasn't.
That is available to anyone, and it costs nothing. It is just very hard to do on purpose with someone you already know.