Here Comes the Sun

You’re locked on The Zoo, the station that still treats an album side like it means something, and the record on the turntable is Abbey Road. The cut that opens the second side is George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun,” and if you only know it as the cheerful one they play at weddings, stick around. There is a whole other story under that capo.

By the summer of 1969 the four Liverpool lads who had rewritten the rulebook were barely a band in the room at the same time. Apple Corps, the company they had built so they could run their own shop, had turned into a money pit of boutique dreams, unpaid bills, and endless meetings. Harrison, the youngest of the four and the one who had spent years waiting his turn behind John Lennon and Paul McCartney, was sick of the boardroom. He has said he wrote this song in Eric Clapton’s garden at Hurtwood Edge in Surrey, sitting with an acoustic guitar while he ducked another Apple appointment. The image stuck because it fit the man: the Quiet One, slipping out the side door with a melody instead of an argument.

Harrison was born in Liverpool on February 25, 1943, the son of a bus conductor, and he came up through the same skiffle and Hamburg grind as the others. He joined John and Paul as a teenager, held down the lead-guitar chair through the Cavern, the Star-Club, and the Parlophone years with George Martin, and for a long time was handed one song a record, maybe two. “Don’t Bother Me” on With the Beatles was the first real claim. “Taxman” on Revolver was the snarl. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” cut with Clapton sitting in, was the proof that the third voice in the room could carry a side. By Abbey Road he had two of the strongest songs on the album, “Something” and this one, and Frank Sinatra would later call “Something” the great Lennon-McCartney ballad, which tells you how completely the credit had been misfiled.

The recording started on July 7, 1969, in Studio Two at EMI on Abbey Road. That date was also Ringo Starr’s 29th birthday. Harrison, McCartney, and Starr cut the basic track: Harrison on a Gibson J-200 acoustic with a guide vocal, McCartney on his Rickenbacker bass, Starr on the kit. Lennon was in the control room. He had been in a car crash in Scotland and was not playing on the song. They ran thirteen takes. Out of superstition the keeper was announced as take twelve and a half. Harrison piled on another acoustic pass before they wrapped. The bridge you wait for, that bright little climb on “sun, sun, sun, here it comes,” was not finished yet.

The guitar architecture came later. On August 6 Harrison went back into Studio Three and stacked three more guitar parts. One of them was a solo that never made the record. It sat on the multi-track until Martin Scorsese’s Harrison documentary, Living in the Material World, when Dhani Harrison, George Martin, and Giles Martin rolled the tapes and the unused solo finally surfaced. A note on the tape box from the finishing session told the mixers not to use the guitars from those tracks for the solo. The song the world got is the cleaner one.

The last color arrived from a Moog synthesizer. Harrison had bought one of the early large Moogs and had it hauled into Abbey Road. On August 19 he played the sliding, bell-like line that answers the acoustic guitar, the part that makes the record feel like a window has been opened. The stereo mix was run slightly fast, the tape machine nudged up from the usual speed, which tightens the performance by a few seconds and adds a little extra shimmer. No orchestra on this one. The lift is guitars, bass, drums, handclaps, harmony, and that Moog. Martin produced. Phil McDonald and the Abbey Road staff engineered. The album reached the shops in Britain on September 26, 1969, with the four of them on the zebra crossing out front, and “Here Comes the Sun” sitting at the top of side two, right before “Because” and the long medley that closes the record.

Abbey Road was the last album they recorded together. Let It Be came out in 1970, but those sessions had been earlier and uglier. By the time this song was mixed, the break was already in the walls. Harrison walked out of the Let It Be filming at Twickenham in January 1969, came back, and then used the Abbey Road dates to put two fully realized songs on a Beatles record without asking permission from the old hierarchy. After the split he opened the floodgates with All Things Must Pass, a triple album of material the band had not had room for, organized the Concert for Bangladesh, wandered into the Traveling Wilburys with Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne, and kept a solo catalog that ran from “My Sweet Lord” to “Give Me Love” to the quiet later records. He died on November 29, 2001. The song outlived the argument that produced it.

On the guitar it is a capo trick as much as a composition. Harrison sets the capo high, up around the seventh fret, and frets a D shape, so the voicing rings in a key that flatters the acoustic and lets the Moog sit above it without crowding. The lyric is plain on purpose. A long cold lonely winter, the ice melting, the smile returning. He was not writing a sermon. He was writing the feeling of getting out of a meeting and into a garden. That is why the record still works on a rock station that would rather play deep cuts than jingles. It is not soft because it is simple. It is simple because the man who wrote it had already said the complicated things on “Taxman” and “Gently Weeps,” and here he wanted light without pretending the winter had not happened.

Covers piled up for decades, from rich harmony versions to solo acoustic passes, and the song became one of the most played Harrison titles in the catalog, sitting alongside “Something” as the proof that the lead guitarist had been a writer all along. On Abbey Road it also does structural work. After the hard blues of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” shuts side one, side two opens in the clear. The band was fracturing, the business was a mess, and the third songwriter handed them the most durable melody on the album.

That is the cut. George Harrison, Abbey Road, second side, first song. If you want the rest of the story, the garden, the Moog, the unused solo, and the band that could still play like this while coming apart, you are in the right place. The Zoo keeps the deep cuts and the backstories spinning, commercial-free, the way album rock was supposed to work. Come by the station at thezoorocks.com, then dig further with the official pages and the fan archives that still treat the session notes like scripture: thebeatles.com, Facebook, Instagram, X, The Beatles Bible, and About The Beatles.