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SATURDAY DECEMBER 01 2001
Unlike their eternally youthful music, we find the Beatles also become old
BY DAVID SINCLAIR, ROCK CRITIC, AGED 45
WHEN I met George Harrison in 1990 he was friendly but guarded. There was a bitter residue to his memories of life in the Beatles where he felt that his songwriting talent had been deliberately stifled by Lennon and McCartney.
“The usual thing was that we’d do 14 of their tunes and then they’d condescend to listen to one of mine,” he said ruefully.
I was struck by how careful he was about his personal security. He hung around for ages in the doorway of his record company offices — peering intently out of the shadows — before he judged it was the moment to walk across the pavement to the safety of his chauffeur-driven car.
It was an especially cruel blow that the attack to which he eventually fell victim in 1999 came not while he was on tour or in a busy public place, but in the assumed safety of his own home.
He was a man torn between the attractions of vastly different worlds. He owed his enormous wealth and pre-eminence as a musician to the Beatles. But he disliked the razzmatazz and cocktail-party values of the celebrity circuit, preferring to spend his time pottering about in the gardens of his estate in Henley-on-Thames or hanging out in private with a few close friends.
Despite his astonishing legacy, both with the Beatles and as a solo artist, Harrison believed that in certain respects he did not fulfil his potential as a musician. The sheer scale of the Beatles’ success meant that they became isolated from the wider community of musicians, and he felt that he missed out on opportunities to play music for its own sake.
Although he found solace and inspiration with his superstar companions Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and the late Roy Orbison in the Traveling Wilburys, Harrison became an increasingly reluctant participant in the rock ’n’ roll circus.
“My ideal situation would be to play in a proper, driving big band, like the old Cab Calloway Band,” he told me. “I’d love to play somewhere that people can go along, maybe dance a bit or whatever, but where the emphasis is on enjoying the music rather than being in awe of some superstar mob on stage. I’d like to play the Holiday Inn in some out-of-the-way place. Somewhere where your myth and your past is not attached to what you’re doing now. Like we did before we were famous. I’d tour again if it wasn’t such a big deal.”
It was typical of Harrison’s quixotic nature that when he was eventually persuaded to make a rare concert appearance at the Albert Hall, London, in 1992 he did so on behalf of the Natural Law party, an organisation that contested that year’s general election with a manifesto promising, among other things, a tax rate of 10 per cent and “complete knowledge of the experience of Yogic Flying”.
Perhaps Harrison is flying somewhere now. I certainly hope so. For me and doubtless many others who belong to the ageing generation of baby boomers for whom the Beatles were little short of deities, his death is like a slap in the face.
We already knew from the awful fate that befell John Lennon that the Beatles were mortal. But now we discover that, unlike the eternally youthful sound of their music and the boyish images that remain in our hearts, they can also become old and frail and terminally ill. Now two out of the four have gone, and you can take all your Limp Bizkits and Oasises and Eminems and all the others and pile the records they have sold up in mountains that reach the sky, and still the pop world remains a sadly diminished place today.
Although it was always Lennon and McCartney who walked off with the bouquets, Harrison was the special Beatle. He was known as the Quiet One, to which one might add that he was also the sensitive one, the thoughtful one, the shy one, the spiritual one, the dignified one and ultimately the most interesting one.
To begin with, he was simply the cool one. Usually standing slightly apart, with his large-bodied Gretsch or Rickenbacker guitar held exactly parallel with the ground, he carved out his distinct mystique away from Lennon and McCartney.
Clearly the most gifted guitarist in the group, he played economically, elegantly and always distinctively. But he was too self-effacing ever to become a player in the guitar-hero mould. Indeed, having written the sublimely taut riff of Taxman, he turned over the solo in that song to McCartney. Similarly, having agonised for hours over the solo to another of his compositions, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, he eventually invited Eric Clapton to play it on the recording.
Although he instinctively performed best as a team player, that did not prevent Harrison from blossoming into a songwriter who was virtually on a par with Lennon and McCartney by the time the Beatles split.
Harrison’s open attitude to new ideas was a mixed blessing. His fascination with the culture of India led to the Beatles adopting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as their “spiritual adviser”, one of their more ridiculous escapades in retrospect.
By the same token his patronage of Indian music had an incalculable influence on later generations of Western music fans. The live album that he masterminded, The Concert For Bangladesh, which topped the British chart and reached No 2 in America in 1972, began with 17 minutes of sitar music, an exercise in bridge-building that undoubtedly led the way to the huge interest in “world music” that has developed since the 1980s.
His dry, Liverpudlian humour never deserted him. As he was being carried into the Royal Berkshire Hospital two years ago suffering from multiple stab wounds, somebody asked him whether he had recognised his assailant. “The man certainly wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys,” Harrison replied, without missing a beat.
