George Harrison’s writing contribution to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, Within You Without You uses Indian instruments and musical form to present a thoughtful song described (by Chris Ingham) as a “meditation on life and love beyond self”. The album came at an interesting point in the Beatles’ evolution, at a time when they had begun to move in different musical directions, but were still close enough together artistically to make a coherent piece of work together. If anything, Harrison was the most independent at this stage having spent time studying with Ravi Shankar, he was immersed in the music and culture of India, and had evidently learned a lot. The melody is based around a particular mode – similar to a scale – the Khamaj thaat. This can be heard in the context of a Raga recorded by Shankar in 1967:

Western music is typically more structured, precomposed and repetitive than Indian classical and devotional music. Even though Within You Without You defies many pop-rock conventions with instrumentation and arrangement based on elements of a raga, its fixed verses and chorus would not be typical of Indian music. It is really a hybrid of the two approaches, and it might have been very challenging to coordinate this in the studio with the Indian musicians, but apparently Harrison ran the session very effectively. The overall result clearly owes a great deal to the instrumentalists who were recruited to play on the record:

• Dilruba, the single-stringed bowed instrument that carries the melody in unison with the vocal, played by Anna Joshi and Amrit Gajjar
• Tamboura, the drone like instrument which provides a meditative ambience, played by Buddhadev Kansara.
• Tabla, the warbling, resonant hand drums, played by Amiya Dasgupta.
• Swarmandal, a harp like instrument heard in the introduction and at transitions between sections, was played by an unknown musician (Possibly Harrison himself? Certainly he had previously played the same instrument on Strawberry Fields Forever)

Harrison played sitar, while Beatles’ road manager and assistant Neil Aspinall also another tamboura. The song also includes a very sympathetic and subtle string section, scored by George Martin. Martin writes:

When he first played it to me on his acoustic guitar, George made rather a mournful sound: but I was intrigued… George loved working with [the Indian musicians[ and it was fascinating to see how his ideas grew and how easily he communicated the complex music to them. Indian rhythms can be extraordinarily difficult, and I have a fond memory of George speaking in a strange tongue emphasizing the accents with a wag of his head – “Ta-ta ticky ta, ticky tick ta ta” and so on. The Indian musicians cottoned on instantly. It was most impressive.

My job was to add Western strings to the song… I had eight violinists, and three cellists… They were all first-class players in their own right, and they had to be – they found it very difficult indeed to follow and keep up with the elastic swoops and wiry furrows of the dilruba… we did a lot of takes before George was pleased with the result. George’s meticulousness was worth it, in the end. Gruenberg’s gentlemen-players did the business: we added another dimension to the song.

Within You Without You has a strong lyric, one of Harrison’s best in my view, coherent and meaningful even though it deals with very abstract subject matter. It does have a touch of Harrison’s characteristic chiding tone, where, at least superficially, he tends to identify faults in others: “they don’t know, they can’t see, are you one of them?” That said, the song is inherently reflective and explicitly deals with ego, so “you” is most likely referring to George, the listener or anyone else interchangeably: “we’re all one” as it says in the concluding lines. The title is a clever play on words. “Life flows on within you and without you” has a couple of intertwined interpretations that need not be picked apart: both “within you and beyond you” and “within you and even in your absence”.

John Lennon said:

One of George’s best songs. One of my favourites of his, too. He’s clear on that song. His mind and his music are clear. There is his innate talent; he brought that sound together.

Some have compared it to a sermon, and this might be an uncomfortable fit for a band and singer known for rock and pop. Certainly it was part of a trend in which those genres were moving away from the frivolity of adult escapism or teenage entertainment that dominated their earlier years. People like Nina Simone and Bob Dylan had begun to build on the political and social activism of artists such as Billie Holliday and Pete Seeger, bringing increasingly serious and grown-up themes into popular music, but outside explicitly religious music (e.g. gospel), spiritual and philosophical ideas were not common. People were used to having their wisdom dispensed by old men from pulpits and lecterns, not pop stars, and at the time not everyone approved of the direction the Beatles were taking. But to a modern listener, having heard, say, Radiohead or Kendrick Lamar, Harrison’s subject matter does not seem as challenging, and the Indian classical sound is timeless, so the song has aged very well.

In dealing with loosely spiritual or philosophical topics Within You Without You can be compared with The Word, Tomorrow Never Knows, The Inner Light, I Me Mine, Across The Universe. All You Need Is Love. Notably all these songs are written either by Lennon or Harrison. McCartney tended to avoid this territory or at least to be more cryptic when touching on these themes, but perhaps comes closest with Blackbird and Let It Be.

The creative work of the Beatles thrived on some fundamental tensions between the three writers/lead singers. The tension between “soft”, happy and romantic music hall (McCartney) and harder, darker rock’n’roll (Lennon and to a lesser extent Harrison), was one such dimension (see e.g., yesterday’s post on A Taste Of Honey for an early example). But a less well-documented dimension is between the desire to be innovative, thoughtful and challenging and the need to be seen as unpretentious and grounded. This balance is likely to have preoccupied all three writers. It’s my impression that the Liverpool culture they grew up in prides itself on its wit and intellectual independence but also frowns on any form of pretension. The Beatles ability to walk this tightrope was a big part of their appeal, and in my view Within You Without You is a great example, leaning a little more to the innovative and challenging end of the spectrum but never toppling over, and swiftly counterbalanced by the deeply unpretentious When I’m Sixty Four.

While Within You Without You was not the Beatles first or last foray into weightier topics, or into even philosophy and consciousness, but to my mind it’s one that stood the test of time. It must have been hard to sequence with the other tracks on Sgt Pepper, but it provides a welcome change of direction. Somehow the very different ingredients of the album blend together perfectly.