93. Nowhere to Go

George Harrison’s debut solo album, All Things Must Pass, could well have been a triple album of full-fledged originals (technically it’s a triple album as it stands, but does anybody listen much to Apple Jam?). There are at least nine more songs that could have been worked up and added to the album, each of them as good as those that did make the cut. It’s unfortunate that, of these nine, most were abandoned at demo stage rather than being held over and developed for a later album.

That said, George Harrison solo guitar demos are among the greatest pleasures that pop music (using the term “pop” widely, in the old sense) has to offer, and in an interview this year George’s son Dhani has suggested that a mega-deluxe edition of All Things Must Pass may be on the horizon, and that it could include better-sounding versions of the demos which circulate on bootlegs.

Among these demos is Nowhere to Go, a Dylan/Harrison composition which George sings with his usual mix of intimate vocal stylings and open-hearted passion, to the accompaniment of a low and gritty electric rhythm guitar. It’s a great performance and a great song.

I expect it was written in the same way as I’d Have You Anytime, George working on the chords and Bob spurred by the melodies to come up with a few apposite words. Thus, as in I’d Have You Anytime, I suspect that only the refrain is Dylan’s, and the verses Harrison’s. And as in I’d Have You Anytime, the words Bob contributes are pointed and poignant and, as we know in these post-Chronicles days, straightforwardly autobiographical. Hounded by overeager fans and worshippers from house to house and city to city, and eventually all the way down to Mexico, Dylan had good reason to lament, as he does in this collaboration with Harrison, “Nowhere to go / There’s no place to hide myself / Nowhere I know that they don’t know / And I know it.”

Harrison, being a Beatle, would have understood the sentiment, so it figures that the verses take up Dylan’s theme. Commenting on both the notoriety he gained just by being a Beatle and his annoyance at playing second fiddle (second guitar, I should say) to Paul McCartney and John Lennon, George deadpans, “I get tired of being Beatle Jeff” and, in the following verse, “of being Beatle Ted.” It’s not likely that a whole lot of people interested enough in the Beatles to recognize one on sight would be getting a Beatle’s first name wrong, but the point is well taken: “He’s not John, he’s not Paul, he’s that other guy—Jeff, Ted, whatever—who cares?” Singing, George hesitates a breath before delivering the wrong names, emphasizing the mistakes. The humor is welcome in a song otherwise so morose.

Dylan’s refrain, born from the mundane torment of his turn-of-the-decade life, takes on, in the song, the hues of a deeper, more all-embracing sadness. This is in large part due to the way George’s chords and vocal melody lift the refrain into a space of air and prettiness out of the murky (though catchy) wandering oddness of the verses. George sings high on “nowhere to hide myself,” expressing with his voice the longing to hide, to flee, to fly away.

All three prolifically songwriting Beatles had a knack for taking ordinary thoughts and observations about love and life and making them seem huge and profound, and at the same time intimate, as if yours and the Beatles’ alone. The refrain of Nowhere to Go is one such example, transfigured first by Dylan’s own lyrics, which don’t specifically reference his plight as such (if we didn’t have Chronicles, we couldn’t guess), and second and more fully by George’s gift of musical metamorphosis.