George Harrison’s view of the world from 1973 resonates still
It wasn’t until he was seven that the son of the Beatle realised his father was much more than a weekend strummer.
After the last official Beatles concert, at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966, the band ran from the field towards a Loomis armoured van that drove to the city’s airport where the boys joined a flight to London. George Harrison sat back and sighed: “That’s it, then. I’m not a Beatle anymore.”
It had been a familiar yet odd performance. The band’s Revolver album — one of the most acclaimed in music history — had been issued three weeks earlier. They played not a song from it. They started (Rock And Roll Music) and ended (Long Tall Sally) the concert with Hamburg-era covers, but they’d not recorded one in years.
As ever, the overwhelming tempest of screaming meant the band did not hear themselves and, as if to underscore how unimportant the music was anyway, Ringo Starr at one point pushed his microphone away and it swung 180 degrees; he sang into its counterweight for the rest of the show.
Harrison was not resigning as a Beatle but retiring from the concept of one. He was the first to speak out about it, but the rest felt just as trapped by the confining curse of Beatlemania.
Nonetheless, it was Harrison who was first to look beyond the horizons of the next Beatles album, notwithstanding that he was still to write such classics for the band as While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Something and Here Comes the Sun — the Beatles’ most streamed song.
Harrison was first to release a solo record: Wonderwall Music, the Indian-influenced soundtrack to a 1968 psychedelic film about a peeping Tom. He was the first to have a No.1 hit single with My Sweet Lord and a No. 1 album with All Things Must Pass. Tellingly, that album featured three songs first heard in Beatles recording sessions but crushed between Paul McCartney’s ego and John Lennon’s heroin-haze indifference: the title track, Wah Wah and the glorious Isn’t It a Pity, which became a reflection on a band of old mates being shuffled apart by warring lawyers.
Harrison would resonate with often unexpected people who were near his wavelength: Formula 1 racing hero Jackie Stewart, comic genius and former Goon Peter Sellers, train boilerman and skiffle guitarist Joe Brown, Monty Python actor Eric Idle, low-key American keyboardist Gary Wright and Little Richard organist Billy Preston.
In late 1969, after house hunting for two years, Harrison settled on an odd 100-room, turreted mansion in Henley-on-Thames called Friar Park which came with 12ha of garden. The house and its gardens had been established by eccentric London lawyer Sir Frank Crisp whose fascination with botany and microscopy advanced Victorian scientific understanding. His off-centre personality found expression in Friar Park’s grounds. They feature an alpine garden with a scale replica of the pyramidal Matterhorn, grottoes, water features, absurd gargoyles and various inscriptions, some of which would turn up in Harrison songs.
Harrison had not found Friar Park, it had found him. And it was the perfect retreat from a world from which he was becoming increasingly disconnected. By the time of the famous London Daily Mirror headline Paul Quits the Beatles, Harrison had been at Friar Park for three months. It was hardly news; John Lennon had already left the band but management tried to keep it secret until the revived Let It Be project was ready to go the following month.
By then Harrison was working on what would become the landmark All Things Must Pass triple album that would include those glorious songs his former band had rejected, along with his hits My Sweet Lord, What is Life and the title song, its lyrics adopted the opening lines from Timothy Leary’s 1966 poem All Things Pass which itself was inspired by words written by Lao Tzu, the Chinese founder of Taoism 2500 years ago. Leary’s interpretation read:
A sunrise does not last all morning
All things pass
A cloudburst does not last all day
All things pass
That album, recorded around London, featured a cover photograph of playful Harrison surrounded in his Friar Park garden by four garden gnomes, almost universally interpreted as Harrison freeing himself of his Beatles’ burden. The album was a global chart-topper and headed the Australian albums list for seven weeks in 1971.
Distracted by his monumental effort to pull off charity concerts for war-ravaged Bangladesh and the live recordings and film of them, and then the complex work of copyrights and, importantly, the distribution of the money raised, Harrison did not start recording the follow-up to All Things Must Pass until late in 1972, sessions that would straddle that winter and mostly take place at his new home.
Using a stripped-down band from the army of musicians he had invited to help out on its predecessor, Living in The Material World settled Harrison on his path to enlightenment and on which we were all unequivocally invited.
The anniversary edition of that album has recently been issued and it is an emphatic reminder of Harrison’s search for peace on this Earth and in another place he was confident he would find. The opening track, Give Me Love — which would top single charts across the world — was a confident statement of where Harrison saw his place in the world, even if it was from the perspective of life behind the high walls of Henley-on-Thames.
Give me love
Give me peace on earth
Give me light, give me life
Keep me free from birth
Give me hope, help me cope
With this heavy load
Trying to touch and reach you with
Heart and soul
Harrison was prepared to be disapproving about those people — most of us — who saw less clearly this road to enlightenment. “They live all their lives, without looking to see the light that has lighted the world” he sings in the song of that name.
The track that was scheduled to follow the hit Give Me Love was a straight out pop song — Don’t Make Me Wait Too Long — that could have been an Everly Brothers hit had it been written 15 years earlier. While it can be read as an undemanding love song, in the context of the music around it, it is equally possibly a clever addendum to the chart-busting My Sweet Lord. On that Harrison sang “I really want to see you . . . but it takes so long, my Lord”. Here he demands of his maker “Now don’t let me wait too long”.
It is doubtful any mainstream rock figure has so forcefully stated his beliefs and encouraged others to follow. Certainly not Bob Dylan, Harrison’s old mate, whose conversion to Christianity was celebrated with his controversial Slow Train Coming album in 1979, described by the legendary Greil Marcus as Dylan’s “received truths” never threatening unbelievers — “They only chill the soul”. Harrison’s album went to the top; Dylan’s did not.
A reason for that is the strength of the songs on Material World and the muscular title track that included two drummers (Ringo Starr and Jim Keltner) and the Harrison gang that would work with him for years: Gary Wright, Jim Horn, Billy Preston, Nicky Hopkins and Klaus Voormann, a friend from Hamburg days.
From early years, Dhani Harrison, the only child of Harrison and wife Olivia, believed his dad was a gardener. That’s what he did mostly, sometimes well into the night. Often friends of his father would drop by and play music, but then plenty of families he knew did that. Presumably any gold records or photographs of his dad’s old band had long since lived in storage. Dhani believes he was about seven when it dawned on him his father was more than a weekend strummer. When he found out, he asked his father why he hadn’t mentioned having been a Beatle and recalled him saying: “Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.”
Dhani and Olivia have painstakingly revisited Living in The Material World, overseeing the remixing and remastering of an album some believe to be Harrison’s creative peak. That is no simple task. One of the rarities offered on the 50th anniversary edition is Take 93 of the relatively straightforward Who Can See It — and the pair had listened to all of them. But it was one to get right: in it Harrison talks of the frantic, seemingly endless days of a Beatle and how happy he is to be done with them. It almost sounds mournful, but it really is a determined and reborn Harrison saying “that’s in the past — and thank Christ”.
I speak to Dhani about working on a project that was in turn one of his father’s most cherished. I ask him why the glorious Don’t Make Me Wait Too Long was never a single. He says Material World was an album of spiritual love songs and he would guess Give Me Love was the one everyone gravitated to in the end “and it won out”. A sound choice: I point out to him that Give Me Love topped the Billboard singles chart, knocking off Paul McCartney’s My Love and that Harrison’s hit was in turn overtaken by his mate Billy Preston’s Will It Go Round in Circles (Harrison had written his 1971 hit What If Life with a view to Preston recording it).
“Wow, that’s a great three in a row. My dad and Billy were just so close. My dad loved Billy and I loved Billy,” Dhani says. By coincidence, Dhani was on stage playing guitar in what would be Preston’s last gig, a promotional event to mark the re-release of the Bangladesh concert recordings. “It was me, Klaus Voormann, Ringo and Jim Keltner and Billy and we had Tom Scott and Jim Horn, and I kind of filled the sort of Eric Clapton spot.” Preston fell ill days later and died soon after.
Dhani believes the Beatles were headed for the rocks in early 1969 as the band struggled to record what would become the Let It Be album, but which the world knows through Peter Jackson’s films as the Get Back sessions. The film studio was hardly conducive to musical inspiration, and there was bickering until Harrison brought Preston in: “Because everyone behaves really nicely around Billy, because he’s such a lovely guy, you know, and he’s just got such great energy that . . . everywhere he went, he was just a big smile, and he brought out the best in people.”
Dhani then talks about Gary Wright, another of his father’s dedicated band of sidemen who was on almost every solo album. He was a wonderful musician who died from dementia aged 80 two years ago. Harrison and he clearly shared a philosophical perspective. “Gary was family for me growing up. He was one of the kindest, sweetest, very gentle human beings that you’ll ever meet.”
He says Wright was a “fun Californian meditator and philosopher”.
“He was very calm inside . . . he radiated lovely energy. You know, it was just really spiritual and not to mention (he wrote) Dreamweaver, one of the greatest songs ever.”
It had been planned that producer Phil Spector would oversee Living in The Material World as he had All Things Must Pass, but he was in no fit state to do so and in the end produced just one track. Dhani insists that Spector was a genius, but troubled at the time “and didn’t make the cut”.
Spector was “obviously not a good guy . . . he was a proper mental”. Dhani believes Spector made good records after Material World, but at that point he was unmanageable: “I think the trajectory that my dad was on was sort of healing, trying to better himself in a healing way. And Phil had a very dark sort of energy.”
And there is no doubting that Material World benefits from its simpler production values. Many fans were surprised when Harrison issued a 30th anniversary reworking of All Things Must Pass with Spector’s often overwrought, multilayered productions left untouched. Interestingly, perhaps Dhani’s favourite moment on Material World is its simplest: “There’s a demo of Be Here Now that is one of the most beautiful. Again, it’s that kind of small band setup . . . It’s like Nicky Hopkins, my dad, Keltner, and just a very stripped back version. I really love that.”
The song with the most musicians playing on it also charms Dhani. Sunshine Life for Me (Sail Away Raymond) is a song his father gave to Ringo Starr for the landmark Ringo album of 1973 that involved all four Beatles, but never together. It is a bonus track on the anniversary edition of Material World. The stellar cast includes Starr on drums, Harrison on lead guitar, four members of The Band — Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson and Rick Danko — along with Voormann on upright bass and David Bromberg on banjo and fiddle.
“It’s such a happy song,” says Dhani. “I’m glad that we’ve got that version and the Ringo version. You know, they’re both totally different. But, you know, they’re like pirate songs.”
Rolling Stone magazine these days refers to the album as a “sleeper masterpiece”, and in 1973 described it as “a profoundly seductive record” adding that Harrison had “inherited the most precious Beatle legacy — the spiritual aura that the group accumulated”.
The deluxe two-CD edition of Living in The Material World is out now.
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