THE BEATLES SONG GEORGE HARRISON WROTE JUST TO “PASS THE TIME”

George Harrison had contributed a few songs to the Fab Four but one track which appeared on the Magical Mystery Tour EP and album was made when George was just sitting back and waiting for the time to pass by.

‘Blue Jay Way’ is a rare early song from George to be feature don the band’s album and was written primarily as George waited for publicist Derek Taylor to arrive at the house, a house situated on, yep, you guessed it, Blue Jay Way. “Derek Taylor got held up,” Harrison remembered, speaking with Hunter Davies in 1968. “He rang to say he’d be late. I told him on the phone that the house was in Blue Jay Way. And he said he could find it okay… he could always ask a cop.

“So I waited and waited. I felt really knackered with the flight, but I didn’t want to go to sleep until he came. There was a fog and it got later and later. To keep myself awake, just as a joke to pass the time while I waited, I wrote a song about waiting for him in Blue Jay Way. There was a little Hammond organ in the corner of this house which I hadn’t noticed until then… so I messed around on it and the song came.”

The track was one of several songs that George composed on the keyboard between 1966-1968 and saw the guitarist begin to finally find his feet within songwriting, having played third fiddle for so long. It also saw George begin to imbue his work with the delicacy of Indian classical music.