When George Harrison Stopped Feeling Like an ‘Embarrassment’ to John Lennon

George Harrison and John Lennon grew particularly close over the years they spent together in The Beatles. However, their friendship didn’t start on the best footing. Lennon initially hesitated to let Harrison join the band, thinking he looked too young and might ruin the group’s image. Harrison shared that it took a shared experience with Lennon to dissolve those initial tensions and no longer feel like he embarrassed him.

In the mid-1960s, The Beatles began experimenting with LSD. Lennon and Harrison were the first to try the drug, with Lennon once claiming he used it around 1,000 times.

“I don’t think John had a thousand trips; that’s a slight exaggeration,” Harrison said in The Beatles Anthology. “But there was a period when we took acid a lot — the year we stopped touring, the year of the Monterey Pop Festival, we stayed home all the time, or went to each other’s houses.”

Harrison noted that their shared LSD experiences profoundly changed their dynamic. It made him feel closer to Lennon than to any of the other Beatles.

“After taking acid together, John and I had a very interesting relationship,” he explained. “That I was younger or smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment to John. Paul still says, ‘I suppose we looked down on George because he was younger.’ That is an illusion people are under. It’s nothing to do with how many years old you are, or how big your body is. It’s down to what your greater consciousness is and if you can live in harmony with what’s going on in creation. John and I spent a lot of time together from then on and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death.”

When Harrison first met Lennon, he could tell he embarrassed the older musician. Paul McCartney invited Harrison to join the band, but Lennon wasn’t keen initially.

“I think [John] did feel a bit embarrassed about that because I was so tiny,” Harrison said in the book George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door by Graeme Thomson. “I only looked about ten years old.”

Lennon admitted he tried to avoid Harrison, who did whatever he could to be close to him.

“He came round once and asked me to go to the pictures with him but I pretended I was busy,” Lennon revealed. “I didn’t dig him on first sight.”

After Lennon and Harrison experimented with LSD, they found it challenging to relate to McCartney and Ringo Starr, who hadn’t taken acid.

“John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid because we couldn’t relate to them anymore,” Harrison said, per Rolling Stone. “Not just on the one level — we couldn’t relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much. It was such a mammoth experience that it was unexplainable. It was something that had to be experienced because you could spend the rest of your life trying to explain what it made you feel and think.”

Starr eventually tried LSD, and after some hesitation, McCartney did too.

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Source: Rolling Stone, The Beatles Anthology, Graeme Thomson