Originally published in Uncut Take 135 [August 2008 issue], we go behind the locked doors of his Friar Park mansion to discover the truth about George’s solo years...
December 9, 1980. The police and the media have gathered in a tense vigil outside Friar Park. The terrible news from New York broke several hours ago, and now this neo-Gothic mansion in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, has become a magnet for reporters. It’s the home of George Harrison: the Beatle who abhorred the Mania. When, and how will he react to John Lennon’s murder?
A car approaches and is ushered through the gates. Inside is Dave Mattacks, ex-Fairport Convention drummer, who’s been booked for a George Harrison recording session. Most Harrison biographies state that he cancels this session, to grieve for Lennon in private. But that is not true. George wants musicians around him today; the session goes ahead.
Mattacks, uncertain what to expect, is struck by the fatalistic atmosphere inside the house and studio. George is pensive, saddened, like a man who’s had his worst suspicions confirmed. “It wasn’t doom and despondency, it was more like… very sad resignation,” Mattacks reflects now. “We got to the end of the day, and we were talking about John, and I’ll never forget George’s phrase: ‘All I ever wanted to do was play guitar in a band. And this is the result…’”
As Lennon is mourned around the table, it’s not a time for ironies—but with hindsight, there’ll be two. The first is cruel. George was working on a song about Lennon only last night, while he was alive. The two friends recently fell out, so the song is not complimentary. Now that Lennon is dead, the lyrics are scrapped without a word. The second irony is what happens to the song next. With rewritten lyrics, “All Those Years Ago” is released as a single in May 1981. A poignant reunion of the Fabs in body and spirit (it’s a tribute from George to John, with Ringo on drums and Paul on backing vocals), the record becomes a worldwide news event and gives Harrison his biggest hit in eight years.
A Billboard No2 chart placing, however, cannot repair his badly damaged relationship with his record company. In October 1980, astonishingly, Warner Bros had rejected George Harrison’s new album, Somewhere in England, for having insufficient commercial potential. The composer of “Something”, “My Sweet Lord” and “Here Comes The Sun” had been sent back to his studio to try again.
They were introduced by Dick Cavett, the American talk show host, as “Gary Wright and Wonder Wheel… and friend”. For the next four minutes, Wright, the former Spooky Tooth singer, led his group through a country-rock tune called “Two Faced Man”. But the cameramen seemed much more interested in the friend. The mysterious guitarist sat on a stool at the back, with dark curtains of hair and a long beard, his body half-turned away from the viewers. It was November 1971, and this shaggy Billy Connolly lookalike was probably the most significant rock star on the planet. His triple album, All Things Must Pass, had been a runaway bestseller, and he’d won international acclaim for his all-star charity concert in aid of cyclone-ravaged Bangladesh. And here at last was George Harrison in person—an anonymous back-up musician.
“There was a part of George that was extremely humble,” remarks Gary Wright today. “He liked to work in the background, and not take all the glory for himself. He didn’t do music to glorify himself. At the same time, when he was interviewed on that show afterwards, he got right in Dick Cavett’s face on a lot of issues. He could be very fiery.”
“I remember being on a Chris Evans thing, Thank God It’s Friday or something,” Paul McCartney tells me on the phone as he drives through London on a warm May afternoon. “Chris said during the interview, ‘So what about George? He’s a bit of an old hippy, isn’t he? All this Hare Krishna…’ And it was like, ‘You thick head. No, actually; George is very cool. All that stuff, just because you don’t believe it, doesn’t mean it isn’t cool.’ And I’m sure Chris Evans has totally revised his opinion of George, as have a lot of people, because he was effin’ brilliant.”
A metaphysician and evangelist, with passions as diverse as horticulture, ukuleles and Formula 1 motor-racing. A world-renowned solo artist who shunned publicity and rarely toured. An unabashed didactic whose melancholy minor keys and Serious Views On Life could just as easily give way to silly in-jokes about mates, or a pastoral ode to a sunset. All Things Must Pass, if you want to get theoretical, might be termed rock’n’roll’s nearest equivalent to the Articles of Faith; by contrast, his self-titled 1979 album is a summery charmer that’s happy to lie on the lawn and count the clouds.
“George’s stuff didn’t always grab you the way the other two’s did,” notes Neil Innes of the Bonzos. “But if you listen to something like ‘Beware Of Darkness’ – the chords in that – I mean, he’s up there with Brian Wilson, he’s up there with Debussy. More people should cover his songs.”
“He’s up there with Brian Wilson, with Debussy. More people should cover his songs”
Neil Innes
A Krishna-chanting Yogi with Python-esque tendencies. An anti-materialistic humanitarian with the riches of Croesus (and periodic cocaine problems). “George was a complex man,” says Michael Palin. “That’s what was so good about him. He had a mind, a brain, a conscience. He was sensitive. A lot of things worried him.”
“A wonderfully complicated creature,” agrees actor John Hurt. “He had a deeply spiritual side, but was also the enfant terrible. He was seriously avant garde in his tastes, in his perception, in the way he lived his life. As a person, he’s wildly underrated.”
As a musician also. As a maker of solo albums, he’s almost written out of history. And yet, examining his post-Beatles career between 1970 and 1980, when he attained grace only to fall from it, and saw his music increasingly criticised and derided, you have to wonder if the people who wildly underrated George Harrison took their cue from George Harrison himself.
Delaney & Bonnie’s tour bus rolled up outside the house in Esher on the morning of December 2, 1969. George Harrison climbed aboard with his guitar and amplifier, and found himself back on the road, making his first tour of Britain since The Beatles played the Odeons and Apollos in December ’65. In Delaney & Bonnie’s sprawling lineup, George was merely an unannounced guitarist in the shadows (precisely how he liked it), but the experience would elate him, helping to take his mind off the slow death of the Fabs.
Always a fan of American music (Motown, The Band, his hero, Dylan), George had become the third notable Englishman, after Traffic’s Dave Mason and Eric Clapton, to become a champion of Delaney & Bonnie’s Southern gospel-rock revue. “It was a band of gypsies, sort of thing,” relates Mason, who played guitar alongside Harrison and Clapton onstage, “and it was just a great fuckin’ band.” There was no forethought or calculation when George spoke to Delaney Bramlett in London about joining his group; Delaney remembers him simply asking, “You hired Eric, would you hire me?” All the same, no fewer than seven of D&B’s band-members and affiliates would play on All Things Must Pass, the album George began recording at Abbey Road in May 1970.
The disintegration of The Beatles was far from pleasant for George. A few sources have suggested he was relieved (or even “delighted”) by the breakup, since it got the pedantic McCartney out of his hair and enabled George to begin recording the huge stockpile of songs he’d been accumulating since Help!; but Pattie Boyd, George’s first wife, disputes this. “He was terribly upset during the break-up period,” she says. “He was angry and confused. They were all being so hateful towards each other. It was like a bad marriage, at each other’s throats.”
All Things Must Pass would react to this ongoing turmoil in a number of ways, including sorrow (“Isn’t It A Pity”), exasperation (“Wah-Wah”) and serene acceptance (“All Things Must Pass”). But other tracks on the album looked far beyond the rancour at Apple. “My Sweet Lord” was an open-hearted address to God, and a new type of Harrison song. “Beware Of Darkness” advised the uninitiated to ward off psychic peril by avoiding negativity in thought and deed. “The Art Of Dying”, most far-sightedly, saw the 27-year-old Harrison prepare for death in an ecstasy of resolved, purified karma.
All Things Must Pass was produced by Phil Spector, whose famed symphonic echo Harrison wished to emulate. “George liked the Wall of Sound, and he was enamoured with the legend of Spector,” says Gary Wright, who played keyboards on several tracks. “When it came to dealing with Spector the personality, though, it became a bit difficult.”
The sessions would stretch into the autumn, to EMI’s alarm, and the cast of musicians grew enormously. Klaus Voormann, one of the bassists, recalls “four keyboard players at the same time, all playing the same thing”. Other songs were arranged more modestly – at first, anyway. But when Spector, drinking heavily and losing focus, decided to leave the project in George’s hands midway through the summer, the latter proceeded to out-Spector Spector by overdubbing extravagantly and ramping up the echo. “It’s still a fantastic album,” says Voormann, “but he cluttered it. Phil’s first takes were perfect. George admitted later that he put much too much stuff on top.”
All Things Must Pass is full of everything. From rustic Dylan folk settings to metropolitan blues-rock jams, it even had a song (“Ballad Of Sir Frankie Crisp”) about the eccentric Victorian who’d previously owned Friar Park, the 120-room mansion George had bought in January 1970. The album was a triple, with the third disc devoted to jams. It was released in November 1970 and topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. “My Sweet Lord” became a global phenomenon. But George’s triumph was about to be tarnished by accusations of plagiarism. First, Paul McCartney claimed George had borrowed a melody from “Oh-La-Di, Oh-La-Da” for a throwaway number called “It’s Johnny’s Birthday”. But then, in the spring of ’71, there began to be talk of another plagiarism claim, this one relating to “My Sweet Lord”…
“A wonderfully complicated creature… deeply spiritual but also the enfant terrible“
John Hurt
The Bhola cyclone that laid waste to the eastern wing of Pakistan in November 1970 was compounded by political upheaval in the region, a famine, a civil war, a cholera epidemic, an establishment of a new state (Bangladesh), a refugee crisis and an unfolding human catastrophe.
Within weeks of being asked to help by Ravi Shankar, his sitar tutor and mentor, George organised the headline-making Concert For Bangladesh (actually two concerts, one in the afternoon, one in the evening) at Madison Square Garden on August 1, 1971. Finding himself in uncharted waters, the neophyte fundraiser succeeded in assembling a peerless cast. Klaus Voormann, bassist in the concert’s ‘house band’, remembers George being “on the phone all the time for weeks”, just as Bob Geldof would be in 1985 when planning Live Aid. To add some last-minute panic to George’s workload, the performers included the painfully stage-shy Bob Dylan and the heroin-addicted Eric Clapton.
“To have a concert for Bangladesh – who was interested in Bangladesh?” asks Michael Palin rhetorically. “Yes, it was a terrible tragedy, a terrible mess, but pop stars didn’t get involved in things like that. George was a real pioneer. Not only did he have the strength of purpose to say, ‘I’m going to do what I can for this country in trouble,’ but look at the people he got together. Dylan, Clapton. These brilliant musicians.”
Some commentators regard the Concert For Bangladesh as the finest thing George Harrison ever did. (“He must be given credit for that,” says Paul McCartney. “It was the first big disaster that rock’n’roll had responded to. Typical of George, he did it right.”) The role of onstage emcee at Madison Square Garden was not one that George relished (“You can hear it, he’s really nervous,” laughs Voormann), but he knew it was necessary and didn’t complain. If anything, his obvious discomfort made the music all the more touching. Later on, when legal and tax disputes over the subsequent album and film revenues threatened to scupper the Bangladesh Disaster Fund (in his inexperience, he hadn’t registered the concert as a charity), George wrote his own seven-figure cheque.
Speaking to Uncut last year, Ravi Shankar made the following point: “A lot of people in the pop world had a superficial interest in Indian music and Indian culture during the hippy period. But George wanted to go deep into it. I gave him some books about Indian philosophy and religion, and he read them all… He had a deep appreciation of Indian culture and philosophy.” In other interviews, Shankar has described George as “more Indian than a lot of Indians”.
To his fellow musicians, who liked playing on his records but didn’t necessarily share his beliefs, George could appear a curious mixture of religious influences: West and East, Christianity and Hinduism, New Testament and Bhagavad-Gita. “He changed religions a whole bunch of times,” claims Delaney Bramlett. “He was trying to find God. He told me he wanted to talk to God.” But which one? “My Sweet Lord” was ambiguous. “Awaiting On You All” (on All Things Must Pass), counselled: “By chanting the names of the Lord… you’ll be free.” Note George’s use of the plural.
George was monotheistic, believing in only one God, but was multi-doctrinal and did not recognise ‘conventional’ barriers. Religious conflict (eg in the Middle East) appalled him. Above all, he stressed the value of meditation as a doorway to spiritual enlightenment. “He would quote you phrases from Paramahansa Yogananda,” recalls Bob Purvis of the north-east duo Splinter, whom Harrison produced in 1974. “He could come on very heavy at times. He didn’t force anything on us. But it was all mantras and oms.” Jim Keltner, the American drummer who played on almost all Harrison’s solo albums, remembers frequently being offered phone numbers to call if he wanted to embark on a meditative path. (He didn’t.)
Gary Wright became George’s spiritual disciple in the ’70s. “Initially,” he says, “George was into the Krishna movement. He knew all the Hare Krishna people and he gave them money to build their temples in the UK. But in the end, he gravitated more towards Paramahansa Yogananda. They were all basically the same; they were just packaged slightly differently. George was a Yogi. He knew the scientific techniques of meditation, and was into the whole philosophy of reincarnation and karma.”
Harrison’s friend and producer, Ray Cooper, observes: “Remember, the ’60s were over. By this point, George stood out very much on his own. People were almost embarrassed by the religious aspect of life, but George was very passionate about it, and wanted to share it.”
But here came the tricky bit. Living In The Material World, the album he released in 1973 as the follow-up to All Things Must Pass, positively beamed with the radiance and divinity that George had searched for in his post-Beatles years.
“He was very clean then,” says Jim Keltner. “As far as I remember, he wasn’t even smoking. He was ‘doing the beads’, as they say, he always had the beads in his hands. He was healthy, he was filled out, his hair was long and thick. He was probably at his peak physically.”
But 1973 was a year of fuel crises and wage freezes in Britain, and George’s exhortations to swap a material life for a spiritual one, coupled with some unfortunate phraseology in the economic climate (“Now, the Lord helps those that help themselves”), hit a resounding bum note. The album was rubbished by critics. George had been immensely proud of it.
“He wasn’t really aware of how other people lived,” Pattie Boyd comments today. “If you think about it, [The Beatles] had become famous very young, and been looked after – nannied, if you want – from a young age. They’d lost a certain touch of reality.” Was George puzzled, then, by accusations of preaching dogma from his ivory tower? “It was irritating to him, I think, that these people didn’t understand what he was saying.” The backlash had begun.
In Copenhagen in ’69, Delaney Bramlett was convinced that he and George were writing the song together. “Hallelujah,” it went, “Hare Krishna… my sweet Lord.” As the Mississippi-raised Delaney is quick to tell me, “If you’re not sincere, He’ll know about it. And ‘My Sweet Lord’ is a true gospel song.”
“My Sweet Lord” was first recorded for a Billy Preston album in early 1970, then by George himself a few months later. George was credited as its sole writer; Delaney never made a legal challenge. The song became a global phenomenon, but many people at the time remarked on its similarity to The Chiffons’ 1963 hit “He’s So Fine”. One ex-Beatle certainly did, anyway. Paul McCartney: “But the thing was, because it was Hare Krishna and ‘my sweet lord’, it seemed valid. It wasn’t like he was keeping it as a boy-girl song. Somehow, the spiritual nature of the lyrics seemed to excuse the fact that it was a ‘nick.’”
“‘My Sweet Lord’? Somehow, the spiritual lyrics seemed to excuse the fact it was a ‘nick’”
Paul McCartney
Bright Tunes, the publishers of “He’s So Fine”, felt differently and filed suit in February 1971 for infringement of copyright. Harrison’s then-manager, the notorious Allen Klein, approached Bright Tunes with a view to George purchasing their entire catalogue, but the offer was rejected. The matter was going to court. Two decades of litigation, and the most absurd legal black comedy in the annals of rock, had just been green-lighted.
While George waited for the case to be heard (and in the meantime, parted acrimoniously from Klein), his marriage to Pattie Boyd collapsed and she left him for Eric Clapton in 1974. Clapton’s infatuation with his friend’s wife had been an open secret for years (as “Layla” showed): George, for his part, had been having a reckless affair with Mrs Ringo Starr. Pattie left Friar Park just as four years of restoration work on the house and gardens came to an end.
“The place was a complete mess when George took it over,” says his friend “Legs” Larry Smith. “It had been built by Sir Frank Crisp, a wonderful old eccentric, and then a load of nuns got hold of it. There were little penises on all the cherubs, and the nuns broke them all off. They filled the lake up with rubble, thinking it encouraged swimming and sinful behaviour. The topiary was overgrown, everything was overgrown, and George lovingly restored the whole damn thing. Literally just climbed up a ladder and painted the walls himself.”
George’s love of Friar Park (and gardening) is put forward by many people as the reason he toured only once as a solo artist in the 1970s. “George was very domestic,” says Gary Wright. “He had a beautiful home and he loved spending time in his garden, planting things. That was his real love.” The duo Splinter, who were signed to George’s record label Dark Horse, had spent considerable time at Friar Park in 1974. Bob Purvis: “Fascinating place. It had a miniature Matterhorn in the grounds, and underground tunnels where you could row your boat, with purple lights that showed your dandruff.” Splinter were amazed by George’s energy in the studio, but noticed him looking increasingly gaunt. Klaus Voormann had heard he was taking a lot of cocaine.
“It was a bad time for him,” Voormann says. “He became unreliable. It started when he was cutting the film for …Bangladesh. I called and said I was coming up, and I heard him say, ‘Klaus is coming. Hide the dope.’ I appreciated George for his weaknesses as well as his strengths, and I could tell he was embarrassed. I didn’t have much contact with him during that period. George, to me, was on a different planet.”
George’s 1974 North American tour was an ambitious attempt to fuse East and West by placing Ravi Shankar & Friends centre-stage (whether audiences liked it or not) and, in the words of a contemporary Harrison song, ring out the old, ring in the new. The tour was promoted by the famously meticulous Bill Graham. During rehearsals in LA, Harrison’s saxophonist and musical director, Tom Scott, got a call from Graham, who had a few concerns. The tour was sold-out, but George, wishing to promote his new album (Dark Horse), had only incorporated the bare minimum number of Beatles-era songs in the setlist. Graham feared this would prove unpopular with audiences and critics. Tom Scott: “The Beatles’ footprint loomed large over the whole thing. George said to me, ‘Here’s the deal. I am free, finally, of those shackles. I’m not here to give people The Beatles.’ The tour poster was a picture of him in Indian garb, standing in a white sari – those robes that go over the head and around. With, needless to say, no Beatles references whatsoever!”
The cocaine-and-partying lifestyle put severe pressure on George’s singing voice, which cracked under the strain. Despite proliferating “dark hoarse” puns in the press, the tour continued rather than disappoint ticket-holders. Jim Keltner joined the band as second drummer, but was chiefly there for moral support. “If George had toured all the time, he would’ve had it down, man,” Keltner insists. “He would’ve known how to pace himself, and could’ve gone out in stronger shape. He had a great band, he assembled some great musicians, he broke all the rules in a beautiful way – like having Ravi – and he did really well, except that those were crazy days. Let’s be honest. Drugs were a problem.”
“Those were crazy days. Let’s be honest, drugs were a problem“
Jim Keltner
Reviews were savage. As Tom Scott remembers: “Ben Fong-Torres in Rolling Stone hit hard. He slammed the tour. He was the epitome of what Bill Graham had been concerned about.” George responded as he always did – by writing a song – and “This Guitar (Can’t Keep From Crying)” was one of the best things about Extra Texture (1975). But the prevailing viewpoint now, to his great sadness, was that George had become a complacent bore, whose five-year-old masterpiece, All Things Must Pass, like some kind of Citizen Kane or Catch-22, was something he would never again be able to measure up to.
In 1975 the partnership of The Beatles was dissolved at a private court hearing in London. Ring out the old. Litigation between The Beatles, Apple and Allen Klein remained outstanding, however. In 1976 the record company A&M sued George for non-delivery of his new album, Thirty Three & 1/3 (he’d caught hepatitis and fallen behind schedule), which led to the formal demise of his A&M-distributed label Dark Horse. Things had looked so promising. Ex-Wings guitarist Henry McCullough, who was on Dark Horse’s roster, remembers “walking up Sunset Strip in a pair of shorts” during the early optimistic days. “But it was right at the time when ‘My Sweet Lord’ was in the courts, and that turned Dark Horse upside down for everybody,” he adds. “The money went out the window.”
Bright Tunes, the publishers of The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine”, had gone into receivership after filing their plagiarism suit against “My Sweet Lord”, which delayed the court case until February 1976. Harrison did offer to settle in January (for $148,000), but was rebuffed. Entirely oblivious to George, Allen Klein, his former manager, was now negotiating behind the scenes to buy Bright Tunes, and the rights to “He’s So Fine”, and take his former Beatle client to the cleaners.
At the New York trial, after hearing evidence from musicologists, the judge found that “My Sweet Lord” – albeit subconsciously – infringed Bright Tunes’ copyright. A second trial, to decide the issue of damages (potentially as much as $2 million), was to follow. But then Klein made his move, buying the copyright and lawsuit from Bright Tunes, and pursuing Harrison through the legal process for the next five years. In 1981, a district judge ruled that Klein had acted improperly and was not entitled to profit. The ruling permitted Harrison to buy the rights to “He’s So Fine” from Klein for $587,000 (the amount that Klein had paid for them). But it didn’t end there, as both parties contested the finer details of the decision. Further hearings took place in 1991 and 1993 to establish whether Harrison or Klein should own the rights to “He’s So Fine” in certain territories. Poor George. He’d wanted to “talk to God” in a song, and it had caused 22 years of litigation. No wonder Gary Wright tells us: “He hated lawsuits. You would see reams of paper piled up on his desk. He hated anything to do with the business side of the music industry.”
“He changed religions a whole bunch of times. He was trying to find God“
Delaney Bramlett
To Harrison’s credit, his ’79 LP, simply entitled George Harrison, emerged in the midst of this legal paper-mountain and focused almost exclusively on the positive things in life. He had married for a second time, to Olivia Arias, and they’d had a son, Dhani. The LP had a dreamy, contented outlook. Away from music, George and his business partner Denis O’Brien launched HandMade Films in 1979, bailing out the production of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian after the original financiers, EMI, pulled out upon reading the screenplay. George, a close friend of Eric Idle, was an aficionado of Python, Ripping Yarns and Rutland Weekend Television, and even made a cameo appearance (interviewing Michael Palin) in The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash. Neil Innes (alias Ron Nasty) points out: “When Allen Klein is suing you in all territories of the world, you have to laugh. Or go mad.”
But then came 1980, and another judgement, and another ruling, and this one decreed that George’s new album, Somewhere In England, did not contain any likely hit singles, and that Warner Bros would not release it in its present form. Asked to remove four songs and write new ones, George reluctantly complied. “George lacked a bit of confidence, strangely enough,” notes ‘Legs’ Larry Smith. “He was someone who enjoyed a cuddle now and again. I remember on Extra Texture he printed up some flyers, and on them was written: ‘Oh no, not him again.’ I mean, if that doesn’t indicate a lack of confidence, what does?”
Released in its new form in 1981, Somewhere In England began with two of the most scathing songs that Harrison had written since “Taxman”. The first, “Blood From A Clone”, railed against a music industry he no longer understood—one obsessed with image, marketing and duplicating last week’s hit. The second, “Unconsciousness Rules”, poured scorn on young clubbers for dancing away their troubles to the machine beat. George, never a fan of disco (or punk, or glam, or heavy metal), was merely showing his age.
He was soon to vanish from view for several years, panic-stricken by the murder of Lennon.
Friar Park, which had once left its gates open to visitors (Pattie Boyd recalls arriving home one day and finding a member of the public in her kitchen) was now fortified by alarm systems and ‘Keep Out’ signs, and surrounded by razor wire. And with good reason. When the attack came, in December 1999, from schizophrenic intruder Michael Abram, the knife wounds nearly ended George’s life. In the opinion of some sources I spoke to, the terrifying assault left him powerless to fight the cancer which ultimately did kill him.
Ray Cooper, his longtime friend, believes that George had been considering a comeback in the 1990s as a solo artist, and perhaps even a tour. He’d enjoyed his exploits in The Traveling Wilburys and had written a batch of new songs. Klaus Voormann visited him at Friar Park, where George admitted he was probably not healthy enough to make another album. In November 2001, at the age of 58, he ran out of time.
“He was a wonderfully sane man, considering what had happened in his life,” says Neil Innes. “He didn’t shrink from life. He confronted it in the best way possible.” At Friar Park one afternoon, Innes recalls George running in from the garden, very excited. He asked someone to find him a picture of a moray eel. Puzzled, they looked on the internet, found one, and printed it on a piece of A4. George wrote underneath: “That’s a moray.” Then, leaving them to work out the pun, he went back to his garden.
This article originally appeared in the August 2008 issue of Uncut
