Worst Songs Ever: George Harrison’s ‘All Those Years Ago’

Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.

George Harrison’s “All Those Years Ago”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #2 in June 1981

We music critics aren’t omniscient; we miss stuff all the time. Around SOB X RBE, Tracey Thorn, and Yo La Tengo, I’ve been listening to a couple of oldies, most prominently George Harrison’s Living in the Material World. In the early 2010s The Dissolve, whose collapse I lament, ran a regular feature called Forgotbusters devoted to massive box office hits that no one remembers today. Did you know Alan Alda’s writer-director debut The Four Seasons was one of the top grossing films of 1981? Or Tom Hanks and Dan Ackroyd’s movie version of Dragnet in 1987? Or the Will Smith vehicle Hancock?

I would love to contribute to or approve a musical equivalent. 1973’s Living in the Material World would qualify. The anticipated studio followup to All Things Must Pass was coming off the Album of the Year and massive sales of The Concert for Bangladesh. In the summer of 1973, it sailed to #1, where it remained for, wow, five weeks. Its anchor single “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” replaced Paul McCartney and Wings’ “My Love” at #1 at the same time — I’d love to imagine the reaction at McCartney headquarters. Yet it peaked quickly, and for reasons I don’t know it coughed up no sequels, not even “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long,” which Beatlephile consensus indicates would’ve been worthy. Despite the thinness of Harrison’s vocals — a continuing problem — here was one album where the arrangements compensated. Never again would the range of his guitar work get such a fulsome display: producing himself for the first time, he put bottleneck and slide solos, twelve-string acoustic rhythm beds, and liquid leads against Nicky Hopkins’ piano, Ringo and Jim Keltner’s drums, and Jim Horn’s brass arrangements — and nothing gets in the way. In fact, Material World sounds nothing like 1973, showing how much the so-called Quiet Beatle had learned from George Martin, the producer who had unwittingly condescended to him for almost a decade (the next year’s Dark Horse, with its funk rhythms and Billy Preston everywhere, is “dated” in the way that friends who criticize gated drums will never admit).

No one ever lobbed that comment about “All Those Years Ago.” By 1981 a disconsolate Harrison, tired of the industry, had lost the impetus to record sometime in the mid seventies as drugs, the Clapton-Pattie affair, and kicking against his Beatle pricks shriveled inspiration. Like the other three songwriting Beatles he’d chipped in a song for the latest Ringo project, itself a disconsolate affair recorded because Ringo had contractual obligations; if you want to see what depressing alcoholism looks like, watch this 1988 clip before Ringo and wife Barbara Bach hit AA. But John Lennon, shot dead in December 1980, required a eulogy from his mates. Harrison took back the Ringo donation but asked him to drum; Paul and Linda contributed harmonies; Harrison rewrote the lyrics.

Sean Ross has described the summer of 1981 as the dreariest since 1963, the summer before, yes, the Beatles touched down on American soil:

It’s easy to remember 1981 now as the year that “yacht rock”—the last wave of Doobie Brothers disciples—wouldn’t leave. It was a year when R&B couldn’t crossover unless it was “Slow Hand” by the Pointer Sisters or “Endless Love” by Diana Ross & Lionel Richie.

In the summer of 1981, the Top 40 format itself was going missing in many markets. In D.C., WPGC was in the process of softening to AC. Q107 was segueing to AOR as “Q Phase II”—a reaction to the relaunch of rival WAVA as a Doubleday AOR along the lines of the phenomenal WLLZ Detroit. New York didn’t have a real top 40 that summer either. (WABC and WNBC were really Hot ACs.)

“All Those Years Ago,” despite its sincerity, contributed to its narcolepsy (Ross doesn’t mind it, readers will notice). Chained to a creepily cheerful synthesizer line that could be out of period PBS programming, “All Those Years Ago” is muddle-headed about the sorrow it’s trying to express, which I suppose endeared it to programmers and listeners who made it Harrison’s best showing in eight years: after a spectacular debut at #33, it rocketed into the top ten in four weeks, then parked itself three weeks at #2 behind Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes,” a top forty phenomenon that fools people into thinking 1981 is awesome because El Lay New Wave, sung by a Kenny Rogers fellow traveler, had conquered the chart. Without the Carnes anomaly, “All Those Years Ago” would have become Harrison’s third American chart topper, I’m sure.

But return to that synth bounce. The melody has a wistfulness, aided by Harrison’s as usual impeccable slide guitar interjections and those McCartney harmonies; George does sound besotted by remembrances of years past. But the perennial weaknesses of Harrison as singer cuts into the pathos. The verses require his vocals to ascend before the next line; he sounds quite literally out of breath singing clumsy lines like, “We’re living in a bad dream/They’ve forgotten all about mankind.” What do “they” have to do with Lennon’s assassination? Who are they? “All Those Years Ago” has one moment of pathos when Harrison’s feeble vocal works for the message: “Living in good and bad/I always looked up to you” — a reminder that Lennon and Harrison were not, according to Lennon in the fall of 1980, on good terms because, according to Lennon, Harrison hadn’t given him the proper obeisance in his lavish, privately published collected lyrics collection I Me Mine. (“In his book, which is purportedly this clarity of vision of his influence on each song he wrote, he remembers every two-bit sax player or guitarist he met in subsequent years”).

Having tipped his hat to charts he had long since abandoned conquering, Harrison watched the hit’s parent album Somewhere in England, rejected twice by the record company for not having hits, briefly outchart 1979’s superior eponymous effort (its single “Blow Away” is a beguiling little gem that’s the equal of any McCartney) before disappearing. He recorded an insouciant followup in 1982 and disappeared, letting McCartney take the blows for the rest of the decade. He had the last laugh: Cloud Nine and the Traveling Wilburys records would raise his profile and recast him in the public’s mind — anyone who didn’t know his Handmaiden Films produced Monty Python films  and the early Neil Jordan effort Mona Lisa, that is  —  as the Funny Beatle. The Quiet Beatle was always a stupid moniker. By the nineties George Harrison had learned how to use silence as assuredly as a plectrum.