Some of the best songs are the ones that fall out in a matter of minutes, which is certainly the case for a scathing song George Harrison wrote mere hours after a tense fight with the rest of the Beatles. Harrison wrote the song in the late 1960s, around the same time that the Fab Four was beginning to fracture.
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Unsurprisingly, Harrison included the track in his solo debut, All Things Must Pass. Despite a few hiccups in the production process with Phil Spector, Harrison grew to love the song that marked his emotional departure from the Beatles and served as one of the most confrontational, in-your-face tracks from the musician formerly known as the “Quiet Beatle.”
George Harrison Wrote This Song Hours After A Fight
Creative and personal conflict permeated the final years of the Fab Four, signaling each musician’s desire to break free from the four-piece that had lifted them to the highest peaks of stardom and into the promising realms of their solo careers. As the primary songwriters of the group, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were perhaps the likeliest of the four to continue writing, recording, and touring as solo artists. But George Harrison had been paying his dues, too, and he had a growing pile of songs that his bandmates rejected. By the time the late 1960s rolled around, Harrison was ready to call it quits. And during the Let It Be sessions, that’s exactly what he did.
“Wah-Wah,” Harrison explained in I Me Mine, “was written during the Let It Be fiasco. We had been away from each other after having had a very difficult time recording the White album. That double album was so long. It went on forever. There were all kinds of other bulls*** things happening in the band; pressures and problems. After that, we came back from a holiday and went straight back into the old routine.”
Harrison recalled “trying” to argue with McCartney while the camera crew present in the studio kept filming. “I couldn’t stand it,” Harrison wrote. “I decided this is it. It’s not fun anymore. It’s very unhappy being in this band. It’s a lot of crap. Thank you, I’m leaving. “Wah-Wah” was a ‘headache’ as well as a foot pedal. It was written during the time in the film where John and Yoko were freaking out, screaming. I’d left the band, gone home, and wrote this tune.”
He Wasn’t The Only One Suffering From Wah-Wahs
George Harrison might have been the one to write “Wah-Wah,” but he wasn’t the only band member experiencing this mental and emotional ailment. Even before Harrison walked out of the Let It Be sessions, drummer Ringo Starr did the very same thing. The rest of the band had to send out an apologetic telegram before Starr would return, but not even this resolution would be strong enough to keep the band afloat. Indeed, everyone was fast approaching their breaking point. Hours after Harrison left the studio, he wrote “Wah-Wah” to encapsulate those feelings.
“It was a very, very difficult, stressful time,” Harrison recalled in Anthology. “Being filmed having a row as well was terrible. It became stifling, so that although this new album was supposed to break away from that type of recording, it was still very much that kind of situation where [Paul McCartney] already had in his mind what he wanted. Paul wanted nobody to play on his songs until he decided how it should go. For me, it was like, ‘What am I doing here? This is painful!’”
Harrison said that although their late 1960s fights never got physical, he couldn’t help but think, “What’s the point of this?” He explained in Anthology, “I’m quite capable of being relatively happy on my own, and I’m not able to be happy in this situation. I’m getting out of here.”
Photo by Pierluigi Praturlon/Shutterstock
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