If I Needed Someone

Yeah.

So this is If I Needed Someone then.

George's kind of encounter with The Byrds, um, and th- this is what resulted.

Yeah.

Ah.

Ah.

If I had some more time to spend, then I guess I'd be with you, my friend, if I needed someone.

Had you come some other day then, it might not have been like this.

Wow.

Right in the middle of If I Needed Someone, and they don't stop.

One night on a show in the south somewhere, somebody let off a firecracker while we were on stage, and there'd been threats to shoot us.

The Klan were burning...

Written by George and recorded by me.

And the song was on Rubber Soul LP.

And the song is called If I Needed Someone.

paul having fun and then after she's a woman finishes he goes we'd like to carry on with the song not surprisingly yeah and he introduces his song as being from the rubber soul lp and it is if i needed someone

He was improving.

Now, there might be some people who might disagree with me here, but I think Taxman is such a huge step lyrically compared to George's two songs that he had written on Rubber Soul, Think for Yourself and If I Needed Someone.

And those are two great songs, but Taxman, I feel like he was onto something here.

He took something from real life and made it autobiographical about his situation.

None was penned by guitarist George Harrison.

On a mid-period Beatles album like Rubber Soul, George was likeliest to write deep cuts like If I Needed Someone.

In fact, Beatles songs written by George Harrison weren't even issued as singles until the Beatles' final years together.

And only one of George's songs was a hit.

I think John and Paul worked extra hard on their harmonies on George songs because they didn't have the confidence in him.

You hear this in If I Needed Someone as well, which is in the British Rubber Soul, but I feel like the harmonies are so John and Paul laden because they didn't quite have the confidence in him.

Is that weird?

I think that's about right.

And also, this is a song structure that's a little bit different than other songs.

Like, George is pushing the structure with those elongated vocals, the verses.

He does it kind of in If I Needed Someone Too, and I think that's what I liked when I was a kid when I heard this song, was like, oh, this isn't just like you fit four words into a four thing.

This is like, oh, he's pushing it.

Let's see what he says here.

I guess his most famous lick that probably one of the most famous, you know, guitar licks of all time is in Day Tripper, you know, and it's part of the, you know, the two measure guitar lick kind of riff thing that the Beatles did a lot, like in Ticket to Ride, Paper Bag Rider, and I guess If I Needed Someone has that too.

But, you know, of course, you know the lick, fantastic lick, right?

All right, so I'll stop there.