Good, Better, Best: “Isn’t It a Pity” (George Harrison)

Some covers are more equal than others. Good, Better, Best looks at three covers and decides who takes home the gold, the silver, and the bronze.

Isn’t it a shame that George Harrison had to live so long in the shadow of Lennon/McCartney? But then, all songwriters live in that shadow–including John Lennon and Paul McCartney, whose solo careers never reached the creative heights of their partnership years. George was only unique in that some of his best songs were repeatedly denied a serious hearing by his own band. For example, “Isn’t It a Pity.”

Harrison pitched the song as early as Revolver in 1966. In Lennon’s judgement, it didn’t make the grade, neither for that album nor for any subsequent Beatle album. In Peter Jackson’s Get Back, there’s footage of George complaining about this to Lennon. The scene was a revelation to those who assumed (like I did) that “Isn’t It a Pity” (released in November 1970) was a hot take on the acrimonious Beatles breakup announced in April 1970.

So the question becomes, what reasons did George have in 1966 to feel so bleak? At age 23, he was already rich and famous beyond measure, the most influential guitarist of his guitar-obsessed generation. He was newly married to the actress/model Patti Boyd. He didn’t even have to tour anymore. Apart from the taxman, what did he have to moan about?

The early creation of “Isn’t It a Pity” affirms that there was substance to the trope of George as the “Spiritual Beatle.” His love of Indian music and his budding friendship with Ravi Shankar led to a deep engagement with Eastern spiritual concepts. Mature enough to see through material success, he pondered the nature of suffering, the traps of ego, greed, and ignorance. As much as the other Beatles got swept up in these newfound fascinations–transcendental meditation, especially–Lennon and McCartney (and manager Brian Epstein) may have felt George’s world-weariness needed to be held in check. After all, the band still felt compelled to project positivity in this post-touring period, with songs like “Good Day Sunshine,” “Getting Better,” and “All You Need is Love.”

For all his cynicism, George could also write cheerfully about love and sunshine with the best of them. His Abbey Road contributions “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” make that obvious. More to the point, consider the first single from his first post-Beatles solo album, All Things Must Pass, “My Sweet Lord” / “Isn’t It a Pity.” On this double A-side, George expresses something like spiritual rapture and joy on one side, and then on the flip side the opposite. Both sides are the real George Harrison.

It seems clear in retrospect that “My Sweet Lord” was really the A-est of the single’s two sides. “Isn’t It a Pity” seems not to have maintained the excitement it generated at the start. Several other tracks from All Things Must Pass have proven more popular in time, including the title track, the album’s third single, “What is Life,” and of course “My Sweet Lord,” with an order of magnitude more streams than any other song on the triple album.

So with “Here Comes the Sun” being the most successful Beatles song (in the streaming era at least), and “My Sweet Lord” being by far George’s best-selling solo track, let’s look again at the brooding flip side of George Harrison. And how other artists have responded to it.

The Cowboy Junkies cover is good.

The Nils Landgren cover is better.

And the Nina Simone cover is best.

Cowboy Junkies – Isn’t It a Pity (George Harrison cover)

On their war-minded album 21st Century Blues (2005) the Junkies covered some dark songs and then spun them in even darker directions against the background of the “Global War on Terror” then raging. Harrison’s “Isn’t It a Pity,” the band claimed, was a key inspiration for the whole project.

The lower register of Margot Timmons’ voice colors all things somber and shadowed. But what’s most successful about this version is how the band layers in instruments to build up complexity and richness as the song progresses. Starting with reverberant electric guitar and then adding soft wire brushes on the snare, to this hypnotic groove they add droning organ, and a couple of kinds of highly-processed guitars come in as Margot falls silent for a time. Finally a melodica or accordion comes to the fore as the long outro concludes. The phrase “fog of war” comes to mind, but here it’s a sonic fog or miasma with bittersweet melodies and Margot’s elegantly mournful voice as consolation.

Nils Landgren – Isn’t It a Pity (George Harrison cover)

The versatile Swedish trumpeter and vocalist Nils Landgren plays in a wide variety of contexts, both as bandleader and as guest. As with that other trumpeter famous for his singing, Chet Baker, a soft, feminine quality characterizes Landgren’s voice, and contemplative material like “Isn’t It a Pity” suits that voice perfectly.

There’s surprising unexpected depth to Landgren’s arrangement, instrumentally speaking. Beginning with a spare acoustic guitar, followed by voice, piano lightly joins in soon enough, then quiet drums, until by the second verse a muscular double-bass steps in. The mounting effect is subtle, unhurried and unfussy. It’s not that the band builds a wall of sound à la Phil Spector in the original, but a swath of sympathetic sound forms protectively around Landgren’s gentle and unadorned vocal. The trumpet break, when it comes, is all understated feeling rather than flash playing, and the break is all too brief. It’s a beautifully focused take on the song; Landgren extracts its essential elements and lets them breathe. If you felt that Harrison and Spector went a little over the top with the original’s long outro (itself a nod to “Hey Jude”), you may appreciate the spareness and restraint shown here.

Nina Simone – Isn’t It a Pity (George Harrison cover)

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By the late 1960s and early 1970s, younger jazz artists (and open-minded older ones) were absorbing Lennon/McCartney numbers into their repertoire, including pianist-composer-vocalist Nina Simone. In ‘71, Simone’s attention then turned to George Harrison’s work; she recorded three of his most recent compositions in a single year.

First up was “Here Comes the Sun” (Simone took the song title for her 1971 album title). And then came extended reworkings of both “My Sweet Lord” and “Isn’t It a Pity” on 1972’s Emergency Ward (where the covers make up half the album). The dire album title reflects how stormy a period this was for Simone; she faced personal demons, career setbacks, and a situation of her own with the taxman. (She fled the US in 1970 to live the rest of her life in exile.) As a Black American, she reeled from the assassinations of black spiritual and political leaders, and from the deepening anguish of the Vietnam quagmire. As a civil rights activist and leader, she experienced the exasperation of unrelenting injustice and inequality.

All of this you can hear in Simone’s vulnerable take on “Isn’t It a Pity.” She seems in a kind of crisis here, but so is the USA, she insists. (The album cover consists of newspaper articles about the war in Vietnam.) She gives voice to a sense of powerlessness bordering on defeat–an unsettling mood for an activist long focused on protest and political reform, and for a songwriter accustomed to expressions of anger and outrage meant as rallying cries. This is another side of the woman who wrote “Mississippi Goddamn!”

Despite the album’s subtitle (“In Concert”), only half of the album tracks were live. ”Isn’t It a Pity” isn’t one of them, unless you want to say it’s live in the studio. Surely it all feels improvised and spontaneous–there’s a few flubs and missteps, not that they matter much. It feels like a dress rehearsal when she begins by singing “Isn’t it a pity,” and then immediately ad-libs “you don’t know what I’m talking about yet but I’m gonna tell you soon.” Is she imagining an audience and addressing them? Is she singing to God? She invokes God directly throughout the song. Her ad-lib signals her intention to take her time, that she wants to get her mind and heart around this weighty theme, on a track that goes on for more than eleven minutes. She doesn’t wish to perform the song, but to answer it or to rise to its occasion. She wants to get swept up into its emotions, and at times it certainly seems like the music plays the musician.

Simone steps through the lyrics with her own modest embellishments, but increasingly she adds her own thoughts into the mix, and her own melodies too. In brief moments she improvises in spoken-word fashion. Her piano all the while moves between churchy and gospel-flavored moods in one moment, and Western classical modes the next with sections that sound inspired by Chopin or Liszt. Her playing swells and recedes, vamps and shifts, and at one point falls absolutely silent. In her ruminations she turns accusatory; she blames plastic, she blames the frantic pace of society; she asserts we are programmed to be indifferent and hateful without addressing who or what is doing the programming. But Simone never stays out too long on these limbs, the singer always returns to the root, that fully felt “God: isn’t it a pity?”

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