Throughout the recording sessions, The Beatles are seen to be fraying at the seams, with bickering a common feature throughout and George Harrison storming out in the middle of a session. After the famous Rooftop Concert, relations between the four continued to worsen over the following few months until the ultimate break-up of the band in April 1970. (Faroutmagazine)
With the final frosty break-up just a few months after the documentary cuts off, it’s apparent that the squabbling we saw was just the tip of a sizable iceberg.
Harrison’s wife at the time later revealed some of his thoughts and feelings at this testing juncture for The Beatles. She explained that Harrison saw McCartney “as difficult”. She elaborated, “They would tolerate each other, but I think George basically didn’t like Paul’s personality. I just think they really didn’t love each other.”
“The Beatles made him unhappy,” Boyd recalled. “With the constant arguments.
They were vicious to each other. That was really upsetting.” She added that it was “even more so” upsetting because of Harrison’s new spiritual awakening with the Hare Krishna movement. The movement was a branch of the Hindu faith and taught Harrison to search for inner peace and harmony. This was hardly something he could achieve with The Beatles in their state at the time.
Boyd finally explained that the youngest Beatle felt he was being sidelined by the rest of the band. “Like a little brother, he was pushed into the background,” she said. “He would come home from recording and be full of anger. It was a very bad state that he was in.”
Just a few months after The Beatles released their final album in 1970, Harriso
n released his first solo single, ‘My Sweet Lord’. It dropped on November 23rd, 1970, and shot straight to number one. With that, Harrison became the first former Beatle to achieve a number one hit as a solo artist.
Lennon found “For The Benefit of Mr. Kite” on an antique circus poster; Paul Simon found “Mother & Child Reunion” on a menu in a Chinese restaurant, McCartney discovered “Eleanor Rigby” in a graveyard. And George Harrison discovered “Savoy Truffle” in a box of chocolates. (excerpt from Americansongwriter)
George wrote “Savoy Truffle,” the first and only Beatles song about candy and the need to stop over-indulging in it so as to save one’s teeth. In his 1980 autobiography, I Me Mine, George related the origins of “Savoy Truffle,” explaining that it was inspired by Eric Clapton’s candy habits.
‘Savoy Truffle’ is a funny one written whist hanging out with Eric Clapton in the ’60s. At that time he had a lot of cavities in his teeth and needed dental work. He always had a toothache but he ate a lot of chocolates – he couldn’t resist them, and once he saw a box he had to eat them all. He was over at my house, and I had a box of Good News chocolates on the table and wrote the song from the names inside the lid. I got stuck with the two bridges for a while and Derek Taylor wrote some of the words in the middle – ‘You know that what you eat you are.
“[Eric Clapton] got this real sweet tooth and he had just had his mouth worked on. His dentist said he was through with candy. So, as a tribute, I wrote ‘You’ll have to have them all pulled out, after the Savoy Truffle.’ The truffle was some kind of sweet, just like all the rest, ‘crème tangerine,’ ‘ginger sling,’ just candy, to tease Eric.“
A horn section was added which was arranged by Chris Thomas.
“The session men were playing really well – there’s nothing like a good brass section letting rip – and it sounded fantastic. But having got this really nice sound, George (Harrison) turned to (engineer) Ken Scott and said, ‘Right, I want to distort it.’ So I had to plug-up two high-gain amplifiers which overloaded and deliberately introduced a lot of distortion, completely tearing the sound to pieces and making it dirty.
“The musicians came up to the control room to listen to a playback and George said to them, ‘Before you listen, I’ve got to apologize for what I’ve done to your beautiful sound. Please forgive me, but it’s the way I want it!’
