George Harrison

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George Harrison

George Harrison

George Harrison will forever be the patron saint of rock ‘n’ roll underdogs.

The “quiet Beatle” took his inner conflict between fame and privacy, secular and sacred, and turned it into a huge body of work. George Harrison’s rich inner life yielded a prolific oeuvre that introduced the Western world to Eastern musical and spiritual influences. In a not-so-distant, black-and-white age the world clapped and screamed as four dark-haired lads from Liverpool ascended the dizzying ladder of gain and glory we now expect all our rock stars to climb. They got the hits and the headlines; got the money and the movie roles; got the cars, gorgeous girlfriends and wives. Then one of them - the youngest Beatle - reached one rung higher and got religion. Or a deep spirituality, to be accurate. Today, when the name of one deity or another is so easily dropped in award speeches and CD liner notes, public acknowledgment of the divine can seem a rote exercise. When George Harrison began exploring spiritual matters, however, this seemingly trend-setting act derived from his eyes-wide, questioning nature. And it was that nature that ultimately lashed Harrison’s musical career to a spiritual pursuit.

Of all the singular sounds made by the Beatles, George Harrison’s lead guitar might be the most elusive. With Lennon/McCartney standing on the garden hose of George Harrison’s songwriting career throughout most of Beatlemania, the guitarist celebrated his former band’s demise with a triple-LP deluge. While nothing on All Things Must Pass touches the garment-hem of “Something” or “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” clearly there was a great deal of quality inventory to unload—the “unintentional plagiarism” of “My Sweet Lord” a hymnal disguised as a pop song, “My Sweet Lord” uses simple, repetitive lyrics and mantras (“Hallelujah,” “Hare Krishna”) to subtly indoctrinate its audience into a universal faith.  All Things Must Pass was one of rock ‘n’ roll’s first triple albums. George was self-critical enough to know that his thin voice couldn’t carry a set this ambitious, and so recruited sonic drywall installer Phil Spector to liberally drip syrup all over the album’s dark-tinged Krishna folk-rock. Nevertheless, even recent remasterings make Spector’s echo-drenched symphonics sound endearingly bleached-out, a technical shortcoming that no doubt influenced the many lo-fi orchestras that have riddled the indiescape.

Harrison’s playing, both in the Beatles and in his solo work, has always sounded this way, like whatever resounding truth remained after all else was exhausted; it is an inner music. Like a chess master who stares motionless at the board while the pieces move in his mind, Harrison’s hardest work always happened before he began playing, as he painstakingly arranged and rearranged chord shapes: In her foreword to his memoir I, Me, Mine, Olivia Harrison fondly remembers her husband writing at home, one ear cocked to the side, endlessly working and reworking chord formations. It is this liquid quality that is hardest to pinpoint. The tone evokes a zither, a clarinet—something more delicate, nuanced, and lyrical than an electric guitar. His style was so careful it was nearly self-annihilating—appropriate for someone so concerned with Eastern concepts of self. He was, after all, the Beatle who famously sat with Ravi Shankar and attempted to master the sitar, and although he failed to become a professional (or even passable) player—"I should have started at least [15] years earlier,” he lamented in I, Me, Mine—the study led him to new possibilities on the guitar neck.. “As far as writing strange melodies and also rhythmically it was the best assistance I could have had,” he wrote. Ultimately, it is a kind of restraint, a way of seeing, that distinguishes Harrison’s playing. His ear was drawn to the smallest possible units of motion, his “quiet Beatle” stillness allowing for a heightened form of listening. “I’m really quite simple,” Harrison told Derek Taylor in I, Me, Mine. “I plant flowers and watch them grow...I stay at home and watch the river flow.” This centeredness & attention radiates from every aspect of his music.

For new fans- I would point you to Let It Roll: Songs by George Harrison and for the more devoted I would recommend Early Takes: Volume 1 which includes one of my favorites, “Awaiting On You All.”

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George Harrison