On March 15, 1967, a lone Beatle entered the recording studio to create a song that would forever define the Fab Four’s shift from teeny-bopper sweethearts to counterculture royalty.
George Harrison’s “Within You Without You” was the last track completed for ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. ‘ It opened the B side and served as a declaration of Harrison’s musical and ideological independence from the cultural behemoth that had become the Liverpool rockers.
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Performed by Harrison, Neil Aspinall, and an ensemble of Indian instrumentalists, the song’s creation reflected the Beatles’ troubled dynamic at the time: distant, disjointed, and dissolving.
A Reluctant Beatle’s Defining Work
Shortly after ‘Sgt. Pepper’s release in 1967, George Harrison admitted to biographer Hunter Davies, “I don’t personally enjoy being a Beatle anymore. All that sort of Beatle thing is trivial and unimportant. I’m fed up with all this ‘me, us, I’ stuff and all the meaningless things we do. I’m trying to work out solutions to the more important things in life.”
Thus, “Within You Without You” was born. The track is a droning, hypnotic exploration of the soul’s transcendence from the body into something more significant than the individual, the collective, and, yes, even the Beatles themselves.
Try to realize it’s all within yourself
No one else can make you change
And to see you’re really only very small
And life flows on within you and without you
Struggling under the weight of the Beatles’ external fame and internal contention, Harrison’s B-side used Hinduistic ideology to call out the frivolity of obsessing over this existential realm alone. When you’ve seen beyond yourself, then you may find peace of mind is waiting there, he sings. And the time will come when you see we’re all one.
Dinner Party Amongst Friends
Similarly to the recording process, the writing process for “Within You Without You” was conducted with no other Beatles present. After a dinner party at fellow musician and long-time friend Klaus Voorman’s London home, George Harrison was fiddling with a pedal harmonium—one of many Indian instruments the musician brought back from his transformative time in the South Asian country. The song’s opening lines directly reference conversations held between Harrison, Voorman, and other attendees, like future Apple exec Tony King.
We were talking
About the space between us all
And the people
Who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth, then it’s far too late
When they pass away
“We were all on about the wall of illusion and the love that flowed between us, but none of us knew what we were talking about,” King later recalled in Steve Turner’s book “A Hard Day’s Write.” “We all developed these groovy voices. It was a bit ridiculous, really. It was as if we were sages all of a sudden. We felt we had glimpsed the meaning of the universe.”
George Harrison’s Realization of Multiple Inspirations
Ridiculous or not, the discussions held that fateful night in London clearly resonated with George Harrison, who was already well into the creative, spiritual, and financial disillusionment of his internationally renowned band. Harrison said the distinctive melody on the harmonium came first. Then, the first lyric, and the rest of the piece came to Harrison later at home.
We were talking
About the love that’s gone so cold and the people
Who gain the world and lose their soul
They don’t know
They can’t see, are you one of them?
The track’s primarily Eastern instrumentation of sitar, tamboura, tabla, and swarmandal was a direct homage to Harrison’s time in India the previous year. Harrison spent six weeks absorbing Indian culture, spirituality, and musicality, studying under sitar master Ravi Shankar. The then-24-year-old credited a piece written by Shankar for All-India Radio as the main inspiration behind “Within You Without You.”
“Within You Without You” is a standalone salve in the otherwise galloping, upbeat record—a singularity that was hardly unintentional given Harrison’s growing disdain for the mega-business the Beatles had become.
(Photo by Edward Wing/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
