The Beatles

What Is Life Without George Harrison

Gary Lucas — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 16:17:03 +0000

What Is Life Without George Harrison Gary Lucas October 30, 2024 - 12:17

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Photo by Franco Vogt

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.

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Song of the Week: "Now and Then"

Dusty Wright — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Song of the Week: "Now and Then" Dusty Wright November 3, 2023 - 10:00

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George Martin R.I.P. (1926-2016): More Than Just the Fifth Beatle

Steve Holtje — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 05:16:49 +0000

George Martin R.I.P. (1926-2016): More Than Just the Fifth Beatle Steve Holtje March 10, 2016 - 00:16

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The Beatles

On the evening of March 8, famed producer George Martin passed away at home, in his sleep, at age 90. (The announcement was first made on Ringo Starr's Twitter account.) He is, of course, primarily famous as the Beatles' producer, but I was heartened to see many friends in my Facebook feed chose to mark his passing by posting non-Beatles tracks he produced. Martin was a well-established, and well-rounded, producer before he started working with the Beatles. In his career the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee worked in quite a variety of contexts with any number of famous people, from comedy records with Peter Sellers to jazz records with Stan Getz, and practically everything in between.

The Beatles would undoubtedly have become famous without him -- and perhaps he without them -- but they wouldn't have sounded as good. Who else at that time would have made a Beatles record on which not one Beatle played an instrument? Of course, I have just described "Eleanor Rigby," on which Paul McCartney sang over Martin's lovely string quartet arrangement.

In 1998, struggling with hearing loss, he decided to bow out of the business with the album In My Life, released under his own name but full of guest stars ranging from Sean Connery, Goldie Hawn, Robin Williams, and Jim Carrey to Bobby McFerrin, Jeff Beck, Celine Dion, classical guitarist John Williams, and Phil Collins, all heard interpreting Beatles songs. Martin justly included two of his own compositions on the album too, the instrumentals "The Pepperland Suite" and "Friends and Lovers." As one of the true gentlemen of rock rode off into the sunset, this valedictory album and his induction into the Hall put the period to a long and fascinating tale (though he and his son did work on one final Beatles project a few years later, a Beatles remix for Cirque du Soleil).

I was lucky enough to interview him when In My Life was released. His hearing was so bad that instead of sitting across from me at the conference-room table at his label's office, he had to come around the table and sit right next to me to be able to hear my questions. He was a sweetly polite gentleman, friendly and humble.

Were you classically trained?

Well, I kind of was and I wasn't. The early days were rather like John and Paul, because I was never taught music as a child. And I gravitated to it naturally, and like John and Paul I was running a band when I was 15. But I had never been taught. And it was the tale end of the war; when I was 17 I was in the Royal Navel Air Service, I was 21 when I came out. I had no real training for anything, except I had this gift for music and my musical professor urged me to take that seriously. So I then spent three years of study at the Guild Hall School of Music and emerged from that a professional musician of sorts. By this time I'd studied composition and conducting, so I went right out and I went into record producing, purely by chance. So yes, I was classically trained and my first jobs in record producing were making classical records.

I didn't know anything about record producing. I liked writing [music] and I imagined I could carve some kind of career out of doing that. And that's why I took up the oboe, because I thought it would take a long time to make my writing career, so I thought I would be a professional musician playing the oboe, while I did that.

Among the people you produced were Stan Getz and Jeff Beck, who have reputations for being difficult to work with.

Jeff, Jeff wasn't. Jeff was very, very comfortable. I mean yes, he has had reputations. I've worked with lots of people with reputations for being difficult. But I never found them to be difficult. I found them pussycats. Jeff is a very fine musician and a marvelous guitar player. He can handle a guitar like nobody I know. I mean he can actually make that damn thing sing! I said this to him once, particularly after this one concert, "You really make it sing." He said to me, "The guitar is my voice. I'd like to sing but I can't." And when I did Blow by Blow and then I did Wired, it was exciting, because it was music that I enjoyed very much. It was very rhythmic and funky almost. And I segued it all together, almost like a disc jockey show. I did the whole bit.

And whose idea was the Beatles cover on Blow by Blow?

Oh, "She's a Woman." It was Jeff's idea. He liked it. And in fact when he, when we talked about doing a track for this album, he said he'd love to do one. He said, "But can I pick it?" I said sure. I figured he do something like "Yer Blues" or "Away."

I was looking over the list of what you have produced and I'm sure it was far from complete. But I noticed that for all of your tendency to mix rock and classical music, that you have not done much producing with progressive rock musicians.

What do you call that?

Well, for instance Genesis or Emerson, Lake, & Palmer.

I don't see much progressive about those [laughs]. I just produced what came along. I mean, if Genesis had asked me to make an album, I might have done something with them. I've always liked to do lots of different things. And one of my favorite albums was that one with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, with John McLaughlin. And that's what I call progressive rock.

You've frequently mentioned Jimmy Webb.

Jimmy Webb's a great pal. He's a great writer. And I made an album with him. He's a musician. And he said he didn't want to do any scoring. He wanted me to do the orchestration, because he thought I was a better orchestrator than he was, which I thought was very flattering, 'cause he's a very fine writer. His songs were delightful and they've been used many times since. He was writing absolutely beautiful at that time, and it was lovely working with him.

He also is mad on airplanes, and in particular had the most wonderful sailing plane, which I used to fly up, go out with him. And we were mixing the album, and you know mixing takes quite a long time. You have to hang around, while the engineer's trying all his different things. And we'd kill the time. Instead of doing the Times crossword, we filled the time making paper airplanes. And we had a kind of competition. We were given a sheet of paper and a few paper clips and a bit of tape, and we had to make the best plane. And the one who got it furthest down in the studio was the winner. And we made better and better ones. And eventually, I thought about it, I came in one morning, and made, if I do say so myself, quite a rather nice little plane. And I showed it to him, I said, "Try this one Jimmy," and launched and he went, "Ahhh." It floated probably about 40 feet, down in the studio. And he looked at me, and I was amazed too, and he got hold of his plane and he tore it up and said, "That's it." [laughs] But the kicker to this story is, many years later I was with him, when he was living in New York, and we spent the day together. And I noticed in the corner of his study, a paper airplane, and I looked, and it was the one that I had made. And he said, "That's one of my favorite mementos." And there it was in his apartment. It was lovely.

We get a bit of your composing on the next to last track [of In My Life], "Friends and Lovers," which to me sounds quintessentially English.

Is it? [laughs] Okay, I don't know how to describe it -- it's my writing. Yeah, this is a tune I'd written quite a while before -- in fact, not long after John [Lennon] died -- and it was something I just wrote, naturally orchestrated as it was. I was in Montreux, which is just a beautiful place, and it gave me the inspiration to write this piece and I put it aside. I didn't need it, 'cause you know, you can't really do much with it, unless you happen to have a film to write. If somebody had given me something to score, I might have slipped the theme in somewhere there.

This seemed to be a good opportunity to use it as a preamble to soften people up for what was coming with "In My Life." 'Cause having been through all the mixed bag of tracks that we had on the album, including things like "I Am the Walrus" and "Come Together" and Goldie Hawn singing "Hard Day's Night," that's all lighthearted stuff. So at the end we get a little bit serious, so I thought it needed something to ease the entry into the spoken word of Sean Connery. So I did that as a segue piece. And "In My Life" too is part of my writing anyway, as you know, in the middle.

At first I thought, a recitation? I thought of various examples of that that hadn't worked. And yet by the end Sean Connery's reading is quite moving, especially when he gets to the last line, "In my life I loved you more."

That's right. He does it well. The whole point…it's the one bit of the album that's a little bit serious. Most of it's pop. Most of it's lighthearted. I got a little serious at the end because it is the last thing I'm gonna do, and those lyrics kind of sum up what my life's been like. I've been so privileged to work with so many great people. And I've made a lot of friends along the way. And some are dead, and some are living, and I love them all. And it's been a great time. Without those people I wouldn't be what I am. It's a lot of good memories. So, just a little bit of seriousness at the end. - Steve Holtje

Yes, it was a tad perverse of me to not ask Sir George any questions about the Beatles. Certainly I was reproached for it, with a great deal of incredulity mixed in, by my superiors at CDNOW.com, where this interview was originally published.