I Me Mine

• 1. Introduction

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  "I Me Mine" is a song George Harrison wrote on the night of the 7th of January 1969, after one of the most dispiriting days of his career. That day at Twickenham Film Studios, the Beatles had spent hours grinding through Paul McCartney's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" with little to show for it. Lennon and McCartney argued. Harrison confronted his bandmates about their indifference to his songs. He went home and wrote a waltz about selfishness.

  What came from that evening became the last new track the Beatles ever recorded. The recording session took place without John Lennon, who had quietly left the band months earlier. A few weeks after the song was finished, McCartney made the break-up public. So a sardonic little waltz about ego ended up as the full stop on one of the most celebrated careers in popular music.

  The questions worth sitting with are these: what did Harrison actually mean by the song's odd three-word title, why did Lennon mock it while dancing with Yoko Ono, and how did a track lasting just one minute and thirty-four seconds come to be cited by a Tibetan Buddhist scholar at a TED Conference decades later?

• 2. A Miserable Monday

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  On the 7th of January 1969, the Beatles were two weeks into rehearsals at Twickenham Film Studios in west London, filming what would eventually become the Let It Be documentary. Harrison had returned from two months in the United States feeling, in his own words, "quite optimistic" about the new project. The optimism faded fast.

  The plan was to film a return to live performance, the first the Beatles would attempt since 1966. But the dynamic inside the studio felt unchanged to Harrison. He later said the situation was "just the same as it had been when we were last in the studio," full of "trivia and games." The particular tension he felt came from the power struggle between Lennon and McCartney and from the constant presence of Lennon's girlfriend, avant-garde artist Yoko Ono. Harrison had recently been collaborating with Bob Dylan and the Band in upstate New York, where he had experienced a kind of creative freedom that made the Twickenham atmosphere feel suffocating by comparison.

  On that the 7th of January, Harrison finally said something. He told his bandmates directly that he resented being made to wait while Lennon and McCartney treated their own songs as the priority. He later put it plainly: "I'd have to wait through ten of their songs before they'd even listen to one of mine." He went home that night and wrote "I Me Mine." The melody was drawn from incidental music Harrison had heard on the BBC that evening, either from a programme called Europa - The Titled and the Untitled, performed by an Austrian brass band, or from music composed by Tristram Cary for an episode of Out of the Unknown that aired just before it on BBC2.

• 3. Ego, the Bhagavad Gita, and LSD

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  The pronouns that form the song's title are a conventional shorthand for the ego in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, and Harrison was drawing on that tradition deliberately. He said the song addressed what he called the "eternal problem" of egoism. His thinking on the subject had been shaped by two very different forces: his past experiences with LSD and his ongoing study of Swami Vivekananda's teachings.

  Vivekananda taught that an individual's goal was to transcend what Harrison called "the little 'i'" and recognise themselves as part of "the big 'I'; i.e. OM, the complete whole, universal consciousness that is devoid of duality and ego." The song's lyrics reference the Bhagavad Gita, specifically verses 2:71 and 2:72, part of which advocates a life "devoid of any sense of mineness or egotism."

  Spiritual biographer Gary Tillery notes that the song targets McCartney and Lennon for being fixated on their own interests, but also reaches further to lament the egocentricity of all people. From Harrison's Hindu perspective, as Tillery explains it, egocentricity is comparable to a single drop of water obsessing over its own course at the expense of the ocean surrounding it. Musicologist Walter Everett reads the song as Harrison's "mocking complaint" about the stifling egos of his bandmates, a follow-up to the 1968 song "Not Guilty," which Everett calls Harrison's "defense against the tyranny of his songwriting comrades." Author Jonathan Gould offers a blunter summary: a "commentary on the selfishness" of Lennon and McCartney.

• 4. The Waltz and the Walkout

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  On the morning of the 8th of January 1969, Harrison played "I Me Mine" to Ringo Starr while the two waited for Lennon and McCartney to arrive. He introduced it to Starr as a "heavy waltz" and joked, with a nod to McCartney's concert plans, "I don't care if you don't want it in your show."

  The Beatles rehearsed the song forty-one times that day. McCartney and Starr were enthusiastic, according to author John Winn, while Lennon mostly stayed out of it. Lennon ridiculed the song. According to Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt's study of the session tapes, Lennon joked that a collection of freaks could dance along with what he called George's waltz, and he told Harrison the Beatles only played rock and roll. McCartney also mocked it, singing in a Spanish accent. Beatles biographer Kenneth Womack describes Lennon's ridicule as a form of "baiting," driven partly by resentment of Harrison's outspokenness about Ono's presence and partly by annoyance at the number of songs Harrison had ready. Musicologist Walter Everett suggests the derision revealed that Lennon was jealous of Harrison's widening vocal range and growing confidence as a composer.

  That same day, Lennon made similar dismissive remarks about McCartney's "Let It Be" and "The Long and Winding Road." Two days later, on the 10th of January, Harrison walked out of the sessions entirely. He had grown weary of what he saw as McCartney's overbearing manner and Lennon's disengagement. Meanwhile, the footage of Lennon dancing with Ono while Harrison performed the song was captured by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and would eventually appear in the Let It Be documentary.

• 5. Recording Without John

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  By the time the Beatles sat down to formally record "I Me Mine," the group had already fractured beyond repair. On the 3rd of January 1970, Harrison, McCartney, and Starr gathered at EMI Studios in London with producer George Martin. Lennon was not there. He had privately left the group the previous September and was on holiday in Denmark with Ono at the time.

  The session, according to Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, was an efficient one. The three musicians recorded sixteen takes of the basic track, with Harrison on acoustic guitar and singing a guide vocal, McCartney on bass, and Starr on drums. Between takes, the group jammed and played what Lewisohn describes as a "delightful" cover of Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue Got Married," sung by Harrison before beginning take twelve. At the start of take fifteen, Harrison delivered a mock press statement that acknowledged Lennon's absence with a joke, recasting the four Beatles as members of the British pop group Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.

  The overdubs added to take sixteen included two distorted electric lead guitars by Harrison, lead acoustic parts by Harrison and McCartney, and McCartney's Hammond organ and electric piano. The finished recording lasted one minute and thirty-four seconds. Engineer Glyn Johns, when compiling an early proposed version of the album, kept the studio chatter before take sixteen: Harrison saying "All right. Are you ready, Ringo?" and Starr replying "Ready, George!"

• 6. Phil Spector's Intervention

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  Glyn Johns submitted two proposed versions of the album and the Beatles rejected both. Lennon and Harrison then brought in American producer Phil Spector to rework the record. Spector decided that "I Me Mine" was too short and extended it by repeating the rock-style chorus in the middle and adding a second verse. The extension was carried out on the 23rd of March 1970, with Harrison present for much of the session.

  Spector's method was mechanical: he copied the tape from the one-minute-and-twenty-second mark, after the line "flowing more freely than wine," and added fifty-one seconds to the running time. Then, on the 1st of April, he overdubbed a twenty-seven-piece string section, six brass players, and additional drums by Starr. The female choir hired for that session is listed among the song's Wall of Sound characteristics by music critic Richie Unterberger, though Lewisohn states the choir did not actually sing on the track. To the frustration of the EMI engineers, Spector also insisted on hearing the tracks with full tape, plate, and chamber echo applied during the session itself rather than at final mixing, which made the process considerably harder.

  As the last of the three songs Spector amended on that date, the additions to "I Me Mine" constituted the final overdubs on any Beatles recording before the group's break-up. A version without the orchestral overdubs but keeping the repeated section was issued on the Let It Be... Naked album in 2003. The 1:34 original recording, complete with Harrison's pre-take-fifteen announcement, appeared on the 1996 outtakes compilation Anthology 3.

• 7. Reception and Legacy

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  When Let It Be was released on the 8th of May 1970, it appeared one month after McCartney had publicly announced his departure from the Beatles. "I Me Mine" was placed fourth on the album, between "Across the Universe" and "Dig It." Contemporary reviews were divided. Alan Smith of the NME called Let It Be "a cheapskate epitaph" but singled out "I Me Mine" as "a strong ballad with a frantic centre." In Melody Maker, Richard Williams praised the "great organ/guitar intro" and noted that Harrison "put a lot of strength into this." Rolling Stone's John Mendelsohn took a dimmer view of Spector's orchestration, writing that the waltz sections recalled something from The Al Jolson Story.

  Years later the assessments grew warmer. In 2002, David Fricke of Rolling Stone included it in his list of the "25 Essential Harrison Performances," describing Harrison's guitar as "the honest sound of exhaustion and hard-won freedom." Ian MacDonald, in his book Revolution in the Head, called it a "poetic stroke of fate" that this song about ego was the last new track the Beatles recorded. Author Mark Hertsgaard credits Harrison's guitar playing and the shifts in time signature with giving what could have been a bleak subject "real bite."

  Harrison titled his 1980 autobiography I, Me, Mine after the song. It was the first memoir by a former Beatle and was originally published by Genesis Publications as a luxury leather-bound edition in the style of the same company's Log of HMS Bounty. Harrison wrote in his foreword that the title acknowledged the book "could also be seen as 'a little ego detour'" of his own. Religious scholars have since taken up the song: in June 2007, Tibetan Buddhist Robert Thurman quoted it during a TED Conference, calling it "a perfect song" and "a perfect teaching" on the nature of ego. Jeffery D. Long, a scholar of religious pluralism, credited the song as one of the influences that led him to study the Bhagavad Gita and embrace Hindu Dharma. Dave Lewis of Classic Rock ranked "I Me Mine" at number 6 in a 2016 list of the ten songs that best represent Harrison's contribution to the Beatles.