Don't Bother Me - Remastered 2009

"Don't Bother Me" was the first song George Harrison wrote, and his first song to be recorded. His older bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney had been writing all the group's material, so it took him a while to pluck up the courage to write one himself. When he did, it was up to form and released as track 4 on With The Beatles, their second UK album (in America, it was the first song on side 2 of Meet The Beatles, their first album released in there). Harrison never regarded this song very highly, possibly because he was holding it to the standards of Lennon-McCartney material, but it's well regarded by fans and shows that Harrison had the goods as a songwriter. He explained: "I don't think it's a particularly good song... It mightn't even be a song at all, but at least it showed me that all I needed to do was keep on writing, and then maybe eventually I would write something good." A Harrison-penned song would not appear again until the 1965 album Help!. That would be "You Know What To Do."

Harrison wrote this song in August 1963 when he was down with the flu, resting in a hotel room in Bournemouth, in the south of England. The Beatles were playing a week of shows at the Gaumont Cinema, so when Harrison fell ill, he stayed in bed all day to save his energy for the shows at night. A doctor gave him medicine with morphine in it, which was common at the time. "I was taking that stuff and in bed, all feeling weak and tired but trying to reserve my energy so I could get out of bed each night to do the concert," he told Timothy White in 1992. "So it was the first thing I thought of, really as a lyric. And I never really thought it was a great song. I was quite happy that I had written it, because that was the thing. I just thought, 'I'm going to see if I can write a song because they're writing them.'"

This song has a darker, more pessimistic mood that was uncommon of The Beatles main sound, but would come to be Harrison's trademark stamp. This is actually part of what made the Beatles' formula work: McCartney was the chirpy, positive one, and Harrison was the melancholic counterpart.