How The Beatles’ ‘Within You Without You’ Was Supposed to Make George Harrison Look ‘Clever’
George Harrison was the most spiritually-minded of The Beatles, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t indulge himself by showing off. He once said he wrote the solo from The Beatles’ “Within You Without You” to draw attention to himself. George revealed what he thought of “Within You Without You” in hindsight and contrasted it with the other songs from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
George Harrison explained the time signature of The Beatles’ ‘Within You Without You’
The book George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters features an interview from 1993. During it, George discussed the difference between Western and Indian musical composition. “In Western music, basically the tempo goes 4/4 or 3/4, and that’s it,” he said. “In Indian music, they have a hundred-and-eight rhythm cycles, and they can even play in things like 7½.
“It’s quite complex, but I did learn this little piece, one of my exercises that I used to practice, that was in a 5/4 timing,” he added. “So I did the solo in ‘Within You Without You’ into a 5/4, just to show how clever I was.” “Within You Without You” helped bring Indian classical music into the Western mainstream, inspiring an Indian-influenced rock genre called raga rock.
The quiet Beatle compared the song to The Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood’
George contrasted “Within You Without You” with two other Beatles songs featuring the sitar: “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and “Love You To.” “‘Within You Without You’ was the big one,” he said. “More than just sitars and tabla, it had all the sarangis.
“And that was quite a complicated one at the time because it was done in three sections, and then I edited the three sections together,” George added. “It had a solo instrumental in a 5/4 kind of tempo, which was very unusual. I suppose Dave Brubeck was the only person who ever played out of 4/4 or 3/4.” Brubeck was a jazz pianist known for playing in unorthodox time signatures.
George Harrison compared ‘Within You Without You’ to the rest of ‘Sgt. Pepper’
“Within You Without You” is the only song George wrote for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. During a 1987 interview with Entertainment Weekly, George dismissed the idea that Sgt. Pepper was the greatest album of all time. He implied that he preferred Rubber Soul and Revolver to Sgt.Pepper. Regardless, he still liked that other people valued Sgt. Pepper so highly.
George felt the first side of Sgt. Pepper was stronger than the second half. He looked back on some songs from the album fondly, including “A Day in the Life” and “Within You Without You.” He called the latter “really strange and unique.” However, George dismissed other Sgt. Pepper songs, such as “Fixing a Hole” and “When I’m Sixty-Four,” as merely mediocre. He also said there were other songs on the record he couldn’t stand, but he didn’t name them.
While George wasn’t the biggest fan of Sgt. Pepper, he repeatedly had nice things to say about his clever song “Within You Without You.”
