HH. BEGINNING OF DESTRUCTION: The Angry Song George Harrison Wrote About The Beatles’ Split
BEGINNING OF DESTRUCTION: The Angry Song George Harrison Wrote About The Beatles’ Split
It didn’t start with George Harrison — it began with Paul McCartney, decades later, sitting alone behind a piano under the dim stage lights.
His voice, fragile with time, carried the weight of a friendship fractured and healed only through music.
As he softly sang the words George had once written in anger, the audience felt something sacred — not just nostalgia, but reconciliation. It wasn’t a tribute. It was an apology sung in melody, a bridge across years of silence.
Long before that night, George Harrison had been living in the shadow of Lennon and McCartney — the “Quiet Beatle” whose talent often went unheard. His songs were sidelined, his ideas brushed aside, and his patience quietly thinned. Beneath his calm presence was a storm that had been brewing since the mid-1960s, a battle between artistic expression and creative confinement.
That inner tension finally erupted in the form of “Taxman.” On the surface, it was a biting critique of Britain’s heavy tax system. But between the lines, it was so much more — a declaration of independence, a shot fired against the machinery that constrained him, both financially and musically. George’s sharp wit and searing guitar riff revealed the rebellion of a man no longer willing to remain in the background.
“I was fighting for air,” George later admitted — a haunting confession that echoed the suffocation he felt within the world’s most famous band.
“Taxman” marked the beginning of George’s transformation from quiet observer to fierce creator. The anger and frustration that once fueled his writing became the very fire that set him free. Through that anger, he carved out his identity, proving that his voice — once overshadowed — was powerful enough to stand on its own.
Years later, when Paul played George’s song again, the meaning had shifted. The fury had softened; the rebellion had become remembrance. What began as a cry for freedom had evolved into something more profound — a moment of healing between two men who had once been brothers in sound, then strangers in silence.
In that tender performance, Paul wasn’t just singing George’s words — he was finishing his prayer. The bitterness that had once divided The Beatles dissolved into a shared grace. The song that once symbolized the beginning of their destruction had, at last, become a hymn of forgiveness — whispered into eternity by one Beatle for another.
