“George plays lead guitar. He’s the one with the blank face between John and Paul. He’s also probably the best musician, having taken a few hours of music lessons, making him the only member of the group with a music education. George is more introverted than the others and someone who interviews him mostly gets ‘yes’ and ‘no’ as an answer, nothing more. George is the quietest and youngest of the group. […] What is immediately striking about his appearance is his narrow face, light hazel eyes shadowed by his shaggy Beatles-cut hair. His favorite food is lamb chops, but food isn’t particularly important to him. His collar size is 14, chest 38, hips 30 inches. He is one of four children and did better than average in school.”
These are the words used by the American record company to describe George Harrison on the lyrics to the LP “Songs, Pictures and Stories of the Fabulous Beatles” released in 1964. In the interest of sales, the authors of such texts were often not so precise with the truth. But who was George Harrison? The fact is that Harrison was born on February 25, 1943 in Liverpool. As a child, he met Paul McCartney on the bus to school, which quickly developed into a friendship. The driving force was a shared love of music, particularly the burgeoning rock ‘n’ roll. What developed from this has often been told – Quarrymen, Hamburg, Brian Epstein and George Martin, America and the world, new paths and the end of the tours, finally the separation.
Life after the Beatles
If you want to fathom the quiet nature of George Harrison, it is worth looking at what happened to him after the Beatles. George Harrison would be the first Beatles member to release a solo album, Wonderwall Music, and by the time the White Album was being recorded he was so emotionally and creatively frustrated that he left the group in anger, albeit for some return weeks later. Not the last attempted escape, as a laconic diary entry from January 19, 1969, when the Beatles were filming “Let It Be” at Twickenham Studios, reveals: “Got up went to Twickenham rehearsed until lunch time – left the Beatles – went home and in the evening did King of Fu (controversial single by Apple artist Brute Force) at Trident Studio – had chips later at Klaus (Voormann) and Christine’s went home.”
When Paul McCartney finally pulled the plug and the Beatles were history in 1970, Harrison soon released All Things Must Pass – a triple album that he was able to fill with all the material he had originally written for the band. It was to become his masterpiece and is still considered by many contemporaries to be the most successful of all Beatles solo attempts. Produced by Phil Spector, the album also yielded the biggest hit of his solo career, “My Sweet Lord.” The commercial success of the song, a hybrid of honeyed melody and mantra, was overshadowed, however, when the publishers of the Chiffon hit “He’s So Fine” sued for plagiarism and were able to assert themselves legally with this view.
Love and departure from the stage
After meeting Pattie Boyd on the set of A Hard Day’s Night (in which the 19-year-old model played a schoolgirl), Harrison walked her down the aisle in 1966 — old friend Paul serving as best man. They split in 1974 when Boyd moved in with Eric Clapton, one of his closest friends. Four years later, he married Olivia Arias, who worked at Harrison’s Dark Horse label in Los Angeles. In 1978 their son Dhani was born.
After “All Things Must Past” his commercial career was more of a rollercoaster ride. But even if the enthusiastic reviews and exorbitant record sales didn’t materialize: There were still wonderful moments hidden on all the albums. His creative low point probably came in 1982 with “Gone Troppo”, his last album for five years, until he returned in 1987 with “Cloud Nine”, polished by Beatles fan and ELO boss Jeff Lynne. The following year he reunited with Lynne, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty to form the Traveling Wilburys, but two albums later saw Harrison step down from the limelight.
The knife attack and the disease
In 1998 he announced that he had been diagnosed with throat cancer. The cigarettes were a faithful companion in his life. A year later, he made headlines again when he was physically attacked and seriously injured by a deranged burglar at his home in Friar Park. His wife Olivia managed to render the man harmless and handed him over to the police. While Harrison was recovering from the stab wounds, Tom Petty faxed him, saying, “Aren’t you glad you married a Mexican girl?”
In May 2001, Harrison underwent surgery to remove cancerous tissue from his lungs. A little later, a brain tumor was treated in Switzerland, where Ringo Starr visited him. In November of the same year, George Harrison flew to New York for cancer therapy. The illness had spread through his brain and made it clear that he would not have much time left. On November 12, the surviving members of The Beatles reunited at his bedside before Harrison traveled to Paul McCartney’s Beverly Hills mansion for his final days.
What George Harrison left behind
When he finally died at the age of 58, his family released a statement that summed up his legacy perfectly: “He left the world as he lived it – trusting in God, not afraid of death, at peace with himself and surrounded by his family and friends. He often said, ‘Everything can wait except one thing: finding God – and loving one another.’”
Harrison did have interests in the “material world” – as a film producer, for example, or as a committed observer of Formula 1 – but meditation remained the focus of his daily life. In her he found the place where he could retreat to himself, far away from fame and the rock ‘n’ roll circus, from which he had long since said goodbye. His adequate retreat was Friar Park, the crumbling neo-Gothic building in Henley-On-Thames that he bought in 1970. He spent the rest of his life renovating the historic structure and cultivating the park’s 14 hectares; among other things, he built a miniature alpine village there, complete with a sandstone Matterhorn.
George Harrison’s destiny
“What we are today is the result of our past behavior, what we will be tomorrow is the result of our behavior today”Harrison once said. “There are things that are predetermined. I was destined to play with the Beatles, even though I didn’t know it at the time. In retrospect, it was a trap. But at the same time, I do have some influence on my destiny… I could try to be a pop star ’til the end of my life, be on TV all the time, and be a celebrity. Or I can be a gardener.” In the end, that was exactly what “Beatle George” chose. The man who helped usher in the pop era found his greatest satisfaction in repotting the plants in his garden.
An obituary
ROLLING STONE editor Arne Wilander penned his personal obituary shortly after Harrison’s death:
My first record was George Harrison’s Somewhere In England in 1981. Before that I knew Sgt. Pepper, which was on my parents’ shelves, and The Simon & Garfunkel Collection, because of Mrs. Robinson, I Am A Rock, and The Boxer. Lennon’s death remained incomprehensible to me, only guessed at the reaction of my parents and the death of my grandmother. A horror, an amazement. After that I bought everything I could read about Lennon (and these buttons for the denim jacket), finally wished for the Beatles records as well, as if I could catch up on what my parents told me under the heading “1966”. photos showed.
In the fall of 1981, “Somewhere In England” was released with the song “All Those Years Ago”, on which Paul and Ringo had collaborated. It was the tribute to John (“You were the one who made it all so clear”) and the sign of reconciliation that the community had been waiting for. We now know that this song was not exactly written out of Harrison’s spontaneous pain, nor is it a particularly eloquent or apt tribute. But it’s a good song and more than the three men later managed. “Somewhere In England” is an odd, yet overloaded (four drummers, including Starr and Keltner, and too many musicians anyway) and musty record. In songs like “Unconsciousness Rules” it is not an enlightened person who speaks, but a skeptic. The contemporary scenario “Save The World” ends ironically in the Big Bang.
Beatles on the moon?
For me, George was the guy who brought her to India and to the Maharishi. And although I found the guru disgusting, the India phase retained something self-evident beyond anything religious. Where else should the most famous men in the world (besides Jesus) have gone? To the monastery, to inner exile, to the moon? One has only to think of Ringo and his canned beans imported from England to appreciate the desperation.
In the “Anthology” one can see George, the gardener, sitting in the open air and not without bitterness recounting the ruin of his “nervous system”. He used that term often. In the end, perhaps George Harrison was the one who knew best of all the price to pay.
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