In 1985, I was at a party here in NYC held at a Soho loft by The Smiths' then-manager. I was introduced to Smiths guitarist supremo Johnny Marr and his lovely wife, and I told him how fabulous I thought he was at the Beacon Theatre uptown with his band recently (in my book, The Last Great Rock Concert). I mentioned I had played in the final edition of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. His eyes lit up, and he said: "You're a real Dark Horse on guitar!" ZING went the strings…
I obviously was gratified by his recognition of my playing. But it was only later that I worked out what he was driving at. This was a compliment/comparison to George Harrison and his singular slide guitar playing. My cup runneth over. George Harrison reinvented the whole notion of what a guitar and a glass or metal bottleneck slide could do. Work fucking wonders, basically—as the action of sliding a finger oscillated bottleneck up and down a taut string and fretting/articulating the desired note precisely can produce a multitude of voices almost human in their expressive power. Weeping and wailing and whooping in joyous ecstasy. That's what George did on his guitar lines and carefully constructed solos. Eschewing standard issue bottleneck blues guitar cliches to create very precise melodic filigree in support of the song, dammit—instead of showboating gee-whiz slide pyrotechnics (ever-present nowadays in various beer and automobile commercials). Creating a living, breathing guitar-speak not unakin to human speech (his anthem "Something," recorded by everyone from Sinatra to James Brown, being the gold standard—and especially George's guitar solo within).
Now George might not have been the greatest slide player who ever lived (and certainly not me—that honor belongs, methinks, to Debashish Bhattacharya)—but he comes damn close in my book and also in Seth Rogovoy's superb new book about George's world-shaking and significant contributions to rock and pop and world music as we know it, entitled Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison (Oxford University Press).
It is a cool book by an excellent writer, not surprisingly a direct descendant of the great R&B songwriter Jerry "Rags" Ragovoy ("Time Is On My Side," "Stay With Me," "Piece of My Heart," "Cry Baby," etc.).
In this book, George's mighty canon of music is examined up-close and sympathetically and pretty thoroughly, one stand-out song at a time. And there are A LOT OF THEM.
Let me count the ways, with and without The Beatles—"Don’t Bother Me," "Here Comes the Sun," "I Need You," "Isn't It a Pity," "What is Life," "Taxman," "Love You Too," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," "Think For Yourself," "All Things Must Pass," "I Want to Tell You," "Blue Jay Way," "Long Long Long," my favorite "It's All Too Much" ("to your mother!"), and so on.
As Rogovoy points out in the first couple of pages, this book is not a Bio, nor a Hagiography, nor a breathless tell-all kind of gossipy book about George and Patty and Eric, no siree—instead, Rogovoy has given us an extremely well-written, adult, intelligent guide through the mighty corpus of George's own Harrisongs (George's publishing company), and Northern Songs (the Beatles publishing company headed up by Dick James of Dick James Music, wherein George was unfairly schmeckled/offered a mere pittance of a royalty for his solo song contributions as opposed to Paul and John's way more favorable and lucrative royalty splits).
With some cool, insightful speculation offered up along the way ("Did George really unconsciously plagiarize The Chiffons's "He's So Fine" for "My Sweet Lord"? I do know that when the "My Sweet Lord" single was released in November 1970, that notion, both pro and con, was almost instantly propagated over late-night pizza and cokes by some of my more musically astute buddies at Yale, who recognized the song's—to them—unmistakeable provenance. I could hear it also. George may have lost the lawsuit over this—initiated by Allen Klein, his then-manager, of all people!—but George is universally in the clear now both in the court of public opinion and in Seth's book, where it counts the most-est).
Within You Without You will send you back for some thrilling close listening to old Harrison favorites and songs possibly hitherto unknown to you (unless you are a stone George Harrison fanatic—of which there are numerous).
Either way, you can't lose because George was indisputably his own man—and arguably one of the most creative forces ever to blaze a trail in popular metaphysics/music. (Seth's account of George's Indian music sojourn via Ravi Shankar is particularly fascinating to this lover of all things Eastern and esoteric. A journey into sound that spawned all sorts of fantastic music in its wake—witness the birth of raga-rock, prime examples of which include The Byrds' "Eight Miles High" and "Why" and the Stones's "Paint It Black," although if you want to get shirty about it, The Kinks "See My Friends" and The Yardbirds "Heart Full of Soul" may well have been precursors to George's use of sitar on "Norwegian Wood." Hey, all that perfumed incense fragrance was in the air! For a thorough discussion of this particular subset/genre of music as it was then unfolding its paisley-ed way, check out Sandy Pearlman's "Patterns and Sounds: The Uses of Raga in Rock" in Crawdaddy Magazine #7 Dec. '66).
All in All (a good title for a George song), Within In You Without You is an essential document regarding the many-splendored musical world of George Harrison. Rogovoy comes at the work from many different angles and leaves you breathless at times with his insights and explorations of George's creative efflorescence—reverberations of which are felt to this day and will continue to echo "to the last syllable of recorded time."
George was that heavy a cat.