Here Comes the Sun

Shortly after his visit with Prabhupada, George learned from Pattie that she had been having an affair with his friend Eric Clapton and was leaving Friar Park to move in with him. George was no stranger to disasters; ever since becoming a Beatle, they had plagued him. They lurked around every corner, ready to ruin his success and challenge his sanity. Before yoga and meditation, his response to disaster had been to strike back. Even as recently as two years ago, when George discovered Pattie and Eric walking hand-in-hand after a concert, he had yelled at Eric that he was never to see his wife again and then shoved Pattie into their car as though she were a misbehaving teenager.

He’d changed in the past two years, and a levelheaded dispassion guided his thinking. Disasters were the product of maya, illusion, and the wise knew better than to react with fear or anger. The secret to happiness was to find sustenance in the middle ground between elation and despair, to withdraw the senses from their objects, to remember God, and see all beings as eternal souls. George didn’t consider himself a very advanced devotee, but at least he could practice that kind of enlightened behavior.

Objectively, he had to acknowledge that despite the fullness of their life together he and Pattie had grown apart and were ready to move on. Her discomfort was obvious, and George acknowledged that she had as much right to determine a path for herself as he did. His own marital behavior over the years had not been without fault, after all. If she wanted to be with someone else, who was he to say no?

And who better than Eric? The two men had been friends since 1964, when Clapton’s first band, the Yardbirds, opened a Christmas show for the Beatles. Over the years they had collaborated on each other’s songs and become so close that looking at Eric, George said, was “like looking at myself.” Eric wasn’t “a leader sort of person,” he said. “It’s the same with me. I need someone to encourage me to do things.”

At George’s invitation, Eric had been the first non-Beatle to play on a Beatles song, George’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” It was also to Eric’s home in spring 1969 that George had retreated to get away from a day of bickering with Paul and John. A few bright hours walking around the Surrey estate were restorative. The day was warm, and surrounded by nature and the promise of spring, George felt inspired. He sat in Eric’s garden, plucked away at one of Eric’s guitars, and wrote a song that would become one of his most popular, “Here Comes the Sun.” The winter has been long and cold, he sang, but the ice is finally melting and smiles are returning to people’s faces.

Pattie had met Eric just after she and George were married in 1966. By 1970, Eric had grown infatuated with her and was insisting she leave George to be with him. The virtuoso guitarist struggled with drug addiction, and despite her attraction to him Pattie initially declined his advances. By 1974, with the help of electro-acupuncture treatments, he had kicked his habit, and intimations of a brighter future together prompted Pattie to change her mind.

Eric was amazed. “He managed to laugh it all off when I thought it was getting pretty hairy,” he commented later. “I thought the whole situation was tense—he thought it was funny. He helped us all through the split-up.”

Tony Calder, a friend who had done public relations for the Beatles in the sixties, added that George “wasn’t angry [about the divorce]. He had moved on spiritually [and] there was no animosity. It was beautiful. That’s all you can say about it.”

Eric and Pattie eventually married, in March 1979. At a belated reception in May, George introduced himself to guests as the husband-in-law. “There comes a time when splitting is for the best,” he said. “We were getting on each other’s nerves, and what with the pace of my work, splitting was the easiest thing to do. In this life, there is no time to lose in an uncomfortable situation.”

Over the years, popular media portrayed George and Eric as inimical; nothing could have been farther from the truth. From the rearranging of partnerships, they emerged brotherly friends who remained so throughout George’s life. Friendship also marked George and Pattie’s meetings with the lawyer who finalized their divorce.

“It was a clean, straightforward, sensibly arranged matter,” said Paddy Grafton-Green, partner in the law firm Theodore Goddard, which had been retained by Pattie. “They were sensitive to one another.” Grafton-Green, who had worked with the Rolling Stones, noted that this kind of objectivity was particularly rare in the rock world, where “few artists know how to handle their own success. Without some sense of spirituality, they just don’t survive,” he said. “One has to be extraordinarily strong to come through the drugs and hedonism of that culture. There are no rules, and it is not a caring environment. Harrison was a rare exception, and he had an influence. People saw that he stood for something different. There was no overreacting, no greed or playing with each other’s emotions—I wish all divorces were so well handled.”

On a trip to New York, alone in his Park Lane Hotel suite, George wrote “So Sad.” The song spoke of cold winds, lost love, and dreams abandoned. But he had come far in understanding how deeply entangled perfect souls became in an imperfect world. “If we were all perfected beings,” he told a New York reporter that week, “we wouldn’t be here in the physical world. . . . We can allow for each others’ inadequacies or failings with a little compassion, you know.”

To the lineup on his 1974 album Dark Horse, George added an old favorite by the Everly Brothers called “Bye-Bye Love,” the lyrics amended to refer to Pattie. On the final mix, Clapton played guitar and Pattie sang in the chorus.

In February 1974, shortly after Pattie broke the news about leaving him for Eric, George packed his bags and flew to India to meet Ravi Shankar and revisit the spiritual world. They met in Bombay and set out on a tour of holy places, including Vrindavan, eighty miles south of Delhi, the village where Krishna had appeared five thousand years before. “In Vrindavan,” Ravi said, “Krishna is everywhere, in the art, the dance, the music, the stories—you have a feeling that Krishna is a person who is still there.”

For many years, prior to each trip back to America, Ravi would rejuvenate himself by spending a few days at a Vrindavan ashram on the banks of the Yamuna River. The ashram, Sri Chaitanya Prema Samasthana, dated from the seventeenth century. For many years, descendants of the Vaishnava saint Gopal Bhatta Goswami had organized the ashram’s courses of devotional study.

George and Ravi arrived at the ashram and spent the next few days meditating, writing music, and discussing the art of devotion. “There is an interesting dictum,” commented Shrivatsa Goswami, a descendant of Gopal Bhatta and current head of the ashram, “that says if you read the Vedas a million times, that is equal to one recitation of japa. And if you do a million japas, that is equal to once making an offering of food with love to the Lord. And a million such offerings are equal to one musical offering. Then what is superior to a musical offering? Only another musical offering. Nothing is higher. That was one of the themes of discussion when George and Ravi came to visit. We would discuss how Chaitanya took that musical offering as supreme, how it is essential to loving devotion.”

In the evenings, they took walks and sat by the Yamuna River, where Krishna sported with friends as a boy. “George was writing music for his future album Ravi Shankar and Family and also his album Dark Horse,” Shrivatsa recalled. “He found musical inspiration here. It has been many years, but I remember that the mood was always calm and loving.”

Every stone and bush in Vrindavan, it seemed, had a story attached to it. While touring the holy village, George’s guide pointed to a grove of ashoka trees. That was where Krishna braided Radha’s hair and decorated her with red kunkuma powder. Over there was the place where Brahma bathed Krishna, one of 108 bathing spots around Govardhan Hill—the hill that child Krishna lifted like an umbrella to protect his friends from torrential rains. And there, on the banks of the river, a beautiful rocket-shaped temple was built over the “mouth” of Govardhan Hill. Pilgrims poured offerings of milk and sweets into the mouth and then went for dips in the river to end their pilgrimage with a splash.

The forests and lakes of Vrindavan were havens for exotic species of water birds: long-necked egrets, red-faced saras cranes, and pheasant-tailed jacanas. As they walked, George heard cooing and cawing in the branches overhead. In blossoming parijata trees, he saw red-beaked moorhens and white-breasted kingfishers nesting, while herds of goats, buffalo, and sheep wandered freely by.

George’s friend Gurudas had been stationed in Vrindavan for the past five years, working under Prabhupada’s direction to build a temple in the village of Krishna’s birth. The friends met and embraced. George saw Gurudas’s wife, Yamuna. Grinning, George ran over and gave her a hug and a smack on the lips. Yamuna nearly fell over backward. “Hey, leave my woman alone,” Gurudas joked.

Still energized by the success of his Concert for Bangladesh and refreshed by his time in India, George returned to England in March 1974 and announced that he would soon be releasing a new album called Dark Horse, followed by a U.S. concert tour. He would be the first ex-Beatle to tour America. “He was definitely inspired after Bangladesh,” said Billy Preston. “He wanted to [perform live] again, right away.”

Within days, George pulled together a team of musicians and began recording at Friar Park. Life was short and speed counted, as Dark Horse bass player Willie Weeks discovered on a break from recording at Friar Park.

“We’d take a break to go for fish and chips,” Weeks said, “and there were two ways you could go. One was through this very winding road through the woods from Friar Park to the little fish place. And that’s the way we went. The first time, he took me in a Ferrari. Well, he really liked racing. I’m telling you, man, when we came back from fish and chips, he drove through those winding roads as if he was on a racetrack. I mean really, really going for it. It was serious, and I’m holding on, thinking, ‘Wow, man, I sure hope we stay on the road because if we miss, we’re history.’ Well, we made it home in the Ferrari.

The next time we went for fish and chips, he took a Porsche and he took the same route. The Porsche seemed to handle the road better, so he started speeding up. I just thought, ‘He’s such a fan of racing, I guess there’s this little racecar driver inside him.’ But then he really started going, and when we got into Friar Park we were flying so fast that the car got away from him. There were these high hedges that lined the driveway to the garage, and we’re running through the hedges—and I just sat there acting as normal as I could, but I was praying, O Lord, please don’t let them read about us in the newspaper. Just get us back to the house. After he came out of the hedges, he shrugged and gave me a little laugh as though it never happened. I’m looking at George, and he just looks away like, Don’t say nothing. Well, we went into the house and neither of us ever said a word.”

Speed counted in the studio, too, with only a few weeks in which to complete an entire album of new songs. George worked nonstop, straining his voice and jeopardizing his ability to sing at all. It started as a soreness and grew worse.

Dark Horse was released in October. Reporters at a Los Angeles conference to launch the album received a press kit including “George Harrison Then & Now,” comparing his answers to a questionnaire in a 1963 edition of New Musical Express to answers in 1974. Under “most thrilling experience,” in 1963 he had listed “First disc a hit within 48 hours of release.” In 1974 his answer read, “Seeking Krishna in Brandaban [sic], India.”

One reporter queried George about his career with the Beatles. “I realize that the Beatles did fill a space in the sixties,” he said. “All the people that the Beatles meant something to have grown up and want to hold on to something. People are afraid of change,” he said, “but you can’t live in the past.”

A reporter asked if it was possible to be spiritual in the material world. “Our consciousness has been so polluted with material energy,” George said, “that it is hard to see our way towards anything spiritual. But everyone has within him the same qualities as God, just as a drop of the ocean has the same qualities as the ocean. Everybody’s looking for something outside—but it’s all right there within ourselves.” That conviction was about to be severely tested.

The Dark Horse album earned George the worst reviews of his career. Writers complained that the tracks seemed unrehearsed, the vocals were out of tune, the melodies unremarkable, and the lyrics weak. “Dismal,” one reviewer groused, “an album which should never have happened.” Another reviewer declared George a failure as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Two singles spun off from the album failed to reach the U.K. top thirty, the first solo Beatle records to perform so poorly. Compared with his previous grand successes, reviewers deemed George’s third solo album a complete disaster.

The seven-week Dark Horse tour began on November 2, and things went from bad to worse. George opened each show with Ravi and a troupe of Indian musicians playing a lengthy program of Indian classical music that had fans yawning and restless. When he came on to perform the second half, George’s constant exhortations to “Chant Krishna! Christ! Krishna! Christ! Allah! Buddha!” added to their unease. He came across as overzealous, alienating much of his audience. Someone in the audience yelled out a request for his hit single “Bangladesh.”

People had come expecting at least a few Beatles memories, but George refused to be pulled back into that persona, providing concertgoers instead, with what one reporter called “a surfeit of the unfamiliar and a short-changing of the golden greats.” Ravi appealed to him. “Give the people a couple of old songs,” he said. “It’s okay.”

It was not waving a picture of Krishna over his head that fans minded. They could even go along with his insisting that God was where it was at and his yelling, “Someone’s got to tell you!” After all, those were his beliefs, and so long as the music rocked, they felt they were getting their money’s worth. His worst offense was when, finally relenting to sing a few Beatles tunes, he changed the lyrics to reflect his beliefs. Now his guitar “gently smiled,” and in his life he “loved God more.” No one in the audience shouted what they were feeling, but the sense of betrayal was obvious beneath their indifferent applause.

Beatles songs had made them feel good. They remembered where they were the first time they heard each new Beatles song, what they were doing, and who was with them. Those memories were important to them, and playing fast and loose with Beatles lyrics came across as elitist, and worse, hurtful.

Adding to George’s woes, three weeks into the tour Ravi was hospitalized with stomach problems and was unable to continue performing. Meanwhile, George’s voice grew worse, prompting reviewers to dub the tour Dark Hoarse. George was not always graceful under the pressure. “I don’t know how it feels down there,” he croaked from the stage of the Forum in Los Angeles, “but from up here you seem pretty dead.”

After a performance in California’s Long Beach Arena, he wandered alone through the stands, looking down on bulldozers scooping up tons of broken bottles, cigarette butts, discarded shoes, T-shirts, and bras, litter of every kind. Had returning to the stage been the right thing to do?

Whether they like me or not, he thought, this is who I am. He remembered a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: we should create and preserve the image of our choice. The image of my choice is not Beatle George, he thought. My life belongs to God. That’s how I feel. He was here in the world to do spiritual good, and playing the old hits would have felt hypocritical. How could he live with himself if he reinforced people’s material attachment to nostalgic tunes and images? But was this better—bad reviews and mountains of trash?

From city to city, his voice continued to waver and crack. In Los Angeles, Robert Tenets of the Herald wrote, “Opening with ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps,’ the band was cooking so fast and hard that Harrison’s vocal shortcomings were easily overlooked. But as he tore into ‘Something,’ shouting the lyrics of this most tender ballad like a possessed Bob Dylan on an off night, you realized the voice was almost gone.” Phil Elwood of the San Francisco Examiner wrote, “Never a strong singer, but a moving one, Harrison found that he had virtually no voice left and had to croak his way through even the delicate ‘Something.’ ”

Still, for every fan unsure about George’s religious overtures and poor reviews, there were as many who had a different take on the Dark Horse tour. “I saw George Harrison give thirty-five thousand fans two fine shows,” wrote a fan who attended the Toronto performances on December 6, “but not according to my more lofty and so-called professional colleagues in the local press. . . . George had [the audience] standing on their seats and clapping wildly for an encore. . . . With his now usual clasped hand salute, he wished us God’s blessing and pronounced, ‘All glories to Sri Krishna,’ then left the stage as humbly as he had arrived, but to a barrage of applause, cheers, and shouts for more.”

At a December 13 concert in Washington, D.C., President Ford’s son Jack invited George to meet his dad at the White House. Among those who joined George in the Oval Office was his father, Harold, sporting hair grown down to his shoulders, an ultimate tribute from a working-class dad to his rocker son. But even a presidential audience could not deter some critics from writing vicious comments about the tour. On December 15, George played Long Island’s Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum to what one writer deemed “perceptible boredom” on the part of the audience. The review went on to claim that organist Billy Preston “salvaged” the evening with his hit songs “Nothing from Nothing” and “Outta-Space,” which had the audience dancing. John Lennon attended the performance and went backstage to congratulate George on a successful show. George succumbed to his own exhaustion and foul mood and demanded to know why John had failed to side with him instead of Yoko over the Bangladesh concert. He grabbed John’s glasses and threw them to the floor.

Dark Horse drummer Andy Newmark suggested that George’s solo tour would have been risky even without its religious overtones. “The Beatles survived, to some extent, because they had one another to deal with the mania,” Newmark said. “They had each other to keep them grounded. I’m sure that George’s whole religious thing was, in a sense, his way of keeping himself grounded while having to be on his own. He didn’t have his friends with him anymore. On his solo tours, he was the boss and that can be a lonely position. By the time the Beatles broke up, he just wanted back into the human race.”

“George absolutely took the press to heart,” added bassist Willie Weeks. “He was not happy. He was having problems with his voice, and some people used that as an excuse to give him a hard time, maybe because of what he was trying to bring to the audiences. It was a struggle. I remember feeling hurt for him because the stress of it all was just too much. But in spite of all of that, he remained very kind to all of us, always. He’d pull little surprises. You’d check into your hotel room, and there was no telling what would be waiting for you there.”

At the time of the tour, Weeks had a taste for lobster. One night, he checked into his room and found that George had had dozens delivered to his bathtub. “There was a whole lot of ’em in there. In spite of the hard time with the press, he still kept his sense of humor and generosity,” Weeks said. “That stayed intact. Every night after the show, we’d board this private airplane and on one side would be all kinds of Indian food and on the other side American food, roast beef, what have you. Every night, we’d get our food, grab a seat, and cool out. Next thing we knew, we’d be in the next city, checked into our hotel, and ready for bed. And it wouldn’t even be all that late. It was the classiest tour I’ve ever been on, the best hotels, the best everything. He wanted to make everybody happy. It was beautiful.”

As for his own happiness, George felt helpless. “I don’t have control over anything. I believe in God, and he is the supreme controller even down to the rehearsal,” George told the press, a statement that only fueled unsympathetic writers who insisted on using print space to attack his beliefs. “In defense of his tour and new album,” wrote one critic, “George Harrison has argued that if you don’t expect anything, life is one big bonus. So expect nothing—is that the moral?” The reviewer went on to accuse him of using the stage to “spread his gospel” and of creating formulaic tunes “as predictable as his spiritual preoccupations.”

“There will always be [criticism],” George told a reporter toward the end of the tour, “but . . . my life belongs to me.” Then he corrected himself. “It actually doesn’t. It belongs to him. My life belongs to the Lord Krishna and there’s my dog collar to prove it,” he said, tugging at the two strands of tulsi beads around his neck. “I’m lucky to be a grain of dirt in creation. That’s how I feel. Never been so humble in all my life, and I feel great.” Then he broke out in song: “Take me as I am or let me go.”

He said to the reporter, “You know, I didn’t force you or anybody at gunpoint to come to see me. And I don’t care if nobody comes to see me, nobody ever buys another record of me. I don’t give a shit, it doesn’t matter to me, but I’m going to do what I feel within myself.”

Musicians, crew, and those who understood the selfless intent behind the tour rallied to his side. Resistance was predictable, they told him, from people who were expecting rock and roll and had never heard a raga before.

George tried to see divine purpose in the debacle and reassured them that “the more they try to knock me down the more determined I am.” He also accepted responsibility for his choices. “God is fair,” he told them. “He’s not watching over everybody and saying, ‘You did that, so give him a kick in the behind.’ It’s ourselves who get into a mess or get ourselves out.”

“Every show was probably hard for him,” said violinist L. Subramaniam. “He was trying sincerely to do something to benefit people. You see, in Indian tradition you cannot separate music from spirituality, and my impression was that George wasn’t just looking to popularize Indian music but also a path of spirituality. He was trying to make people aware of the music because he knew gradually they would get to the root—the spirituality. But the press really wasn’t always sympathetic. The press could sometimes be very harsh. Anyone else under that kind of pressure would have said, ‘Okay, I’m calling it off. We’ll tell the press I have a sore throat, and I’ll be on the next flight home.’ But he took the risk of going on, of people again writing something negative about him, of putting in all that effort. Why did he do it? I always had the feeling someone very special was occupying that body.”

George may have been determined to bring spirit into music, “but like John Lennon said,” he reminded a reporter during a sound check at Madison Square Garden, “Christ, you know it ain’t easy. . . . For every knot I untie I might be tying ten. I don’t know, sometimes it feels like that.” The walls of his dressing room at the Garden were decorated with Indian bedspreads and images of his favorite deities. George lit a cigarette and took a drag. He paused and then said, “With all respect to all those silly rock ’n’ rollers who have high-heeled mirrored shoes and eye makeup, there comes a time in your life when you have to decide what life is all about. There must be some other reason for being here than just jumping up and down, trying to become famous.”

His career had begun on the sidelines when he had paced himself behind John and Paul like a racehorse, a “dark horse,” taking his time, conserving energy, and absorbing the details of his terrain. Then when the moment was right, he broke free and gave it his all.

Why risk so much after waiting so long? Was it because the world had become such a frightening place? Crises filled newspaper headlines every day in 1974. Somewhere along the line humanity had suffered a loss of spiritual vision, and someone had to say it. John’s atheism couldn’t turn things around. The best that kind of existential despair had to offer was a reminder to help one another out before dying. Paul’s insistence on lighthearted entertainment fell short of remedial. Strangely, Ringo’s nearly Zen ability to find the eye of every hurricane seemed the most evolved of all.

Now George was confronting the greatest disappointment of his life. Not losing his wife, which in some ways had been quite liberating. Not losing his band, which had unleashed exhilarating creative energies. The price he paid for shouting out his message was losing his voice, in every sense. He grappled with the depressing realization that most people simply didn’t care to hear about Krishna or maya or getting liberated from birth and death. The world wanted rock and roll. The world preferred him as a Beatle.

George had counted on at least a portion of the goodwill generated by the Bangladesh concert to follow him on the Dark Horse tour, but the calculation had failed. A man whose natural instinct was to share his life-transforming discoveries with others had been rejected, and he was not his jovial self anymore.

It was at this vulnerable moment that Bright Tunes Music Corporation brought a legal suit claiming that George’s number one hit “My Sweet Lord” plagiarized their 1963 song “He’s So Fine.” As an expression of his love for God, “My Sweet Lord” was considered by many to be George’s signature creation. Despite his protestations, some part of him cared deeply that the world was rejecting him. He went into a deep depression. His smoking and drinking increased, and he developed a severe case of hepatitis from the “brandy and all the other naughty things that fly around,” as he later described his habits. Drugs had first entered his life at age seventeen in Hamburg, when amphetamines had been an easily acquired stimulant for all-night sessions. His drug use had gone up and down in the intervening years. Now it was back.

“If you want to understand what part drugs play in the life of a rock musician, see them as a person and imagine you are entering into a relationship with that person,” commented Dark Horse drummer Andy Newmark. “You’re on the road. Your life is in planes and hotels. There’s no continuity, just moving from place to place, every day a different town. You’re herded like cattle. There’s nothing particularly human about it. And this substance becomes your friend. It goes with you wherever you go, this constant in an inconstant life. This friend gives you a familiar feeling wherever you go, and you begin to think it makes the reality of your life easier to cope with. It’s there, in a vial, in your back pocket, your buddy. Ultimately, of course, you learn it’s an unhealthy friend.”

After too many days and nights of free fall, George found his way back to solid ground with the help of Olivia Trinidad Arias, an administrative assistant in the Los Angeles office of his new company, Dark Horse Records. Born in Mexico in 1948, Olivia had grown up in California and studied meditation. While she was working for A&M Records, George met her in early 1974 and then hired her away to work for his own Dark Horse Records. That was when he remembered how charmed his life was.

Everything had seemed impossible and dark, and then she was there, sensible and lovely and responsive, and everything seemed possible and bright. He never had to search far for misery; now happiness had shown up unbidden, and in her company he regained a composure and stability undermined since the Dark Horse tour.

Olivia insisted that George make efforts beyond prayer to recover his health. Within a few months of beginning acupuncture and following a healthier diet, his condition improved. “When you strive for something higher in the next world,” she said in a rare interview, “you have a much easier time in this one.” She would be George’s partner for the remaining years of his life.

By 1975, George had regained strength and relaxed his missionary zeal. Compared to its predecessors, his fourth album, Extra Texture, was a model of religious restraint. Gone were exhortations to chant and warnings about rebirth in the material world, replaced by a modest appeal for tolerance. “Scan not a friend with a microscopic glass,” he sang, quoting Sir Frankie Crisp in “The Answer’s at the End.” “You know his faults, now let the foibles pass.” Other tracks went so far as to recommend that listeners not heed his advice. No one would be wise following the likes of me, he warned in “World of Stone.” No longer an Arjuna, all George wanted now was to leave the battlefield behind and simply live “with no pistol at my brain.”

In July 1976, George was midway through recording his fifth solo album 33 & 1/3, when he took a break to visit Prabhupada at Bhaktivedanta Manor. The last time they had met was during George’s brief visit to Vrindavan two years before. The Krishna teacher’s health had deteriorated over recent months, and he was resting in bed. George entered and bowed his head to the carpeted floor. Prabhupada smiled.

“Due to age it is becoming a little difficult,” Prabhupada said. “Are you still chanting?” George assured him he was. “Thank you,” the teacher said. “That is our life and soul. Wherever you live, whatever you do, chant.” Prabhupada’s right hand remained in a bead bag where his fingers turned wooden beads worn smooth from a lifetime of prayer. His deteriorating condition hung between them unexplored, and to lighten the mood George commented that the devotees were looking strong and well. Prabhupada nodded. Good health, he said, resulted from living a stress-free life of service to God. Pointing around the room, he again thanked George for having provided such a nice property.

“We are inviting everyone to be with us here,” the teacher said, “to live here comfortably, eat nicely, and chant ‘Hare Krishna.’ We don’t want to see people wasting away in factories,” he said with a chuckle. His smile dissolved into a look of concern. “Still, people prefer to go to the factory, whole day work in the hell.”

“I suppose someday the whole of the world will just be chanting in the country,” George said, wanting to reassure Prabhupada that a lifetime of sacrifice had not been in vain. Prabhupada shook his head. Some miracles can’t be expected.

“Mainly KRSNA Book,” George replied. “I always take the Gita with me wherever I go. That’s the one I just keep all the time. But you know, I’ve never been a great reader.” He praised Prabhupada’s prodigious writing; the teacher had written nearly a hundred books.

Prabhupada nodded, acknowledging an achievement for which he took no credit. “It is Krishna’s grace—otherwise, not possible.” He looked across the table, and George knew the wise and devoted teacher understood more about his frame of mind than was spoken.

Like many of George’s spiritual heroes, Prabhupada was an innovator. He taught devotional yoga to anyone interested, including people who prior had eaten meat and taken drugs—something forbidden by Hindu tradition. Caste-conscious Brahmins in India scorned his egalitarianism, arguing that anyone who did not have Brahmin parents was unfit to receive the secrets of scripture. Prabhupada paid no heed to such politics. Knowledge of God, he said, was the birthright of all souls.

George had built a relationship with Prabhupada based on the guru’s purity and love for God. Nothing had changed that, but the world around them had changed. Gone were the missionary days of the sixties. Gone, too, were George’s burning questions about life’s mysteries. He had learned as much as he cared to know. Now he just wanted to live the truths he had already discovered. The time for intense philosophical inquiries was over.

“If that is Krishna’s desire,” the teacher said. He preferred to travel, teaching wherever he could. But that, he said, was not in his hands. The Swami quoted a Sanskrit verse by a long ago devotee-king. Since I will die sooner or later, the king prayed, let me die now while my health is still good and I can remember you, dear Lord. “This is the ideal,” Prabhupada said. “If at the time of death one can remember Krishna, then his whole life is successful. Immediately he goes to Krishna.”

Prabhupada nodded. “If she heard ‘Hare Krishna,’ she will get the benefit. So let us practice in such a way that at the time of death we may remember. That is success.” Prabhupada thanked George, saying that because of his example many others were now chanting.

Prabhupada assured him it was so and looked to his disciples for confirmation. A London devotee said letters arrived regularly from people around the world who had taken to chanting after hearing George’s records.

George shifted on his cushion. Subduing his ego, not inflating it, had become his avowed goal. Still, he had achieved something unprecedented, and he appreciated Prabhupada’s wanting him to know how much it meant.

Hearing God’s names at death was success, the teacher said. George could have added the corollary himself that since people never know when death will come, they should chant constantly. Chanting soothes the soul, Prabhupada said, quoting from scripture to authenticate his teachings. He pointed to a large volume on a shelf and asked an assistant to recite a certain verse. The young man leafed through the heavy book, then read:

I do not know how much nectar
The syllables “Krish-na” have produced.
When the holy name Krishna is chanted,
It appears to dance within the mouth,
And we desire many, many mouths.
When the name enters our ears,
We desire millions of ears.
When the name dances in the courtyard of the heart,
It conquers the mind
And the senses become inert.

George laughed and said his admirers hardly understood much even when he sang in English. Time stretched on. Prabhupada looked tired. George bowed and rose to leave. They looked at one another for a moment in silence.

In November 1977, on a thin mattress in a room of the Krishna Balaram temple in Vrindavan, Prabhupada lay dying. Around him disciples tried as best they could to chant, but tears and sobs got in the way. Prabhupada removed a ring and handed it to an assistant with instructions that it be conveyed to George with his blessings.