Frank Sinatra spent years needling The Beatles about their hair. Then he went and recorded George Harrison's "Something" not once but twice, and called it the greatest love song written in the previous fifty years. That's the contradiction sitting at the centre of this whole story, and it's a good one.

Go back to 1965. Sinatra's album A Man and His Music dropped with a press release taking a direct shot at the British invasion: "If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons... It should be refreshing." Ol' Blue Eyes wasn't shy about propping up his own sound over theirs.

But a few years on, something shifted. Sinatra sang "Yesterday." And then came "Something," the Harrison-penned track off Abbey Road, which Sinatra loved enough to cut two separate versions of and praise as the finest love song of the era. Billy Joel has talked about what that meant at the time. "Even Sinatra covered it. He wasn't a big fan of a lot of pop music. The fact he did that was very important to some people who didn't take The Beatles seriously," Joel said, adding that fans reacted with something like, "Wait a minute, this must be a pretty damn great song if Frank is doing it."

So a man who mocked their haircuts ended up legitimising them for an entire generation of listeners who wouldn't have given the Fab Four a second look otherwise.

Elvis had the same problem

Sinatra wasn't alone in this particular flavour of hypocrisy. Elvis Presley's dislike for The Beatles ran deeper and got political. He told President Nixon in 1970 that the band had been "a real force for anti-American spirit," that they'd made their money in the States and gone home to push what he saw as an anti-American line. A year later, touring FBI offices, he told director J. Edgar Hoover the group's "filthy, unkempt appearances and suggestive music" had laid the groundwork for youth trouble in America, according to a report cited by Far Out Magazine.

And yet, per his step-brother David Stanley, speaking to the Daily Express in March 2025, Elvis had a genuine soft spot for George Harrison's writing. "He loved George Harrison. He thought George was the most prolific writer," Stanley said. The King's favourite Beatles tracks, per Stanley, were mostly Harrison compositions, "Something," "Here Comes the Sun," and "If I Needed Someone" among them. He apparently gave grudging credit to "Norwegian Wood" too, a Lennon-McCartney number, despite everything he'd said to Nixon and Hoover.

Two of American music's biggest names, both publicly dismissive of The Beatles at various points, both quietly obsessed with Harrison in particular. Whether that says more about Harrison's songwriting or about how hard it was to actually hate the Fab Four once you sat with the records, is the argument music historians will keep having.