EDMONTON WAS PACKED, 1,350 PEOPLE CRAMMED INTO THE FRANCIS WINSPEAR, A VERY MODERN THEATER. THEY CHEERED US TO THE RAFTERS. WE PLAYED TO HUGE EXPLOSIONS OF LAUGHTER. AFTERWARD THE SIGNING LINE was immense. This morning we set off early to cover the two hundred miles of snowy plain to Calgary. We crossed the freezing white width of the Saskatoon River, its deeply wrinkled surface looking like boiling water fast frozen. Edmonton is perched magnificently on one bank of this river and on the other there is a tremendous escarpment, which I remember from all those years ago when we toured here on Monty Python’s First Farewell Tour. Now we head for Calgary. The bus plows steadily along the dark, salted highway between flat plains of snow, the wipers beating time. We pass occasional moose, farms slumped under snow, agricultural machinery frozen in the fields.
When I met George it was love at first sight. He was absolutely irresistible. We’d stay up all night playing and laughing. He made me do all the Python sketches and I made him do all the Beatle songs.
The Jubilee Auditorium is jumping. There are fifteen hundred people packed in tonight. I remember this auditorium well: it is monstrously wide. There is a huge expanse of thrust stage before you reach the audience. It is so big and deep it takes twice the energy and you have to wait for the laughs to come bouncing back from the three tiers of audience. This is the only theater I have visited on either of my two tours where I appeared with the Python chaps and it is an eerie feeling to think I stood on this same stage with Graham and John, and Mike and the Terrys thirty years ago. I tell the audience that the hook and I are the only two returnees from that time. They fall silent as I talk about George.
Today was a bad day for me. The anniversary of George’s death two years ago is on my mind all day. I know I will have to write something about him and that’s a painful thing to even think about. That man, so alive with those amazing eyes, lying so still as I scattered rose petals on him, my shoulders shaking, weeping. Sitting with him. Seeing him so thin, hearing that terrible merciless cough—no, it’s too damn painful.
Even when we first met I felt like I’d known him forever. Not the Beatle George, he never seemed like that to me, nor the bearded garden gnome George, but the man, the real man with the deep, dark eyes and the crooked grin and the loud laugh. I felt I knew him already. I felt I’d met him as a child. In fact, I was convinced we’d met in Wallasey when I was about seven, in New Brighton playing in the sand hills at the Red Noses. There’s no way to prove this, of course, but it was a very strong feeling I had, and still have. I would meet kids and play, as kids do, and have no idea who they were. So who knows sometime in the summer of 1950, might we really have met on the other side of the Mersey?
I never knew a man like him. It was as if we fell in love. His attention, his concern, his loving friendship was so strong and powerful that it encompassed your entire life. You felt comfortable and secure. We would stay up all night and talk for hours about our lives, about the hurts and pain, about the groups we had been in and the trying emotional strains and problems that being in such groups entails. He was always full of spiritual comfort, counsel, and advice. He saw everything from the cosmic point of view. Our deaths were natural and unavoidable, and he viewed everything from that perspective, even then in the midseventies. He had come off a tour of America, where things had been unpleasant for him. The “Dark Hoarse Tour,” he called it. His pseudonym—for hotels, security (and guitar picks)—had been Jack Lumber. (He was always a raving certified Python fanatic as, of course, I was always a raving certified Beatle fan.) Drugs and brandy had ruined his voice on that tour, and I think he had set out to challenge and defy the expectations of his North American audiences, presenting Ravi Shankar and the Indian music first and then doing jokey versions of various of his songs. The good news was that he met Olivia, the love of his life, and retired to Friar Park, where he felt safe and from where he would only rarely emerge. Here he would discover the other great love of his life, gardening, which became a living example of his concern to create beauty on the planet wherever he could.
Like all the other important loves in my life (my wife, my daughter, my son, and my dog), it was love at first sight. Terry Gilliam (another and inexplicable love at first sight) was with me the night in May 1975 when we attended the first screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail at the old Directors Guild building on Sunset. I think I knew George was supposed to be coming, and was slightly anxious and even unsure about meeting him, as I had heard what a raving fan he was, but I was blown away when he appeared at the end in the darkened cinema, and hugged me and launched straight into the first of many intense conversations, which began as monologues and then, as I grew confident and emboldened to interrupt and share my thoughts, became long and deep conversations about everything in our universe: life, death, love, the nature of religion; hours of sharing and “catching up” as he called it, as if he too felt he’d known me before, and his apothegms and memories and jives and rants enlivened my life for almost thirty years. We had retired to the projection room to smoke a jay and were finally kicked out of there and went off to A&M Studios, where Tom Scott was working on George’s album Extra Texture. He introduced me to Joni Mitchell in the studio next door. We then went on to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where I was staying, and talked and talked and talked, oh my God how he could talk. This was the quiet one! He never shut up. Thank God. Somehow it was immediately decided that I was to do a voice on his album—a pepperpot24—on “This Song,” and then the minute I was back in the U.K. I was co-opted to work on the “Ohnothimagen” radio campaign for his album, for which I wrote and recorded several spots.
Recently someone laid three CD bootlegs on me of George’s work from the early seventies. It was the most remarkable gift. Suddenly George was in my car. The moment I began to play them I yelled with happiness, then I burst into tears. Tears streaming down my face, I drove with his presence all around me as his music revived all those hours we had spent in the studio at Friar Park, those long nights of his playing endless tapes, pulling out old songs, many of which I was now hearing for the first time since those great evenings. Oh those nights in the studio, when fueled by the visits of the Frenchman, we would talk and laugh all night, while he constantly moved between the machines, seeking tapes at will, loading the big one-inch reels of black magnetic tape and playing them through the huge studio speakers and lighting endless Marlboros. In the little kitchen filled with color Polaroids pasted to the wall there were snapshots of George and the many musicians who had been through the Park. There were beers and endless cigarettes, and next door a room with walls lined with guitars, hundreds of them, from the Beatle days, some tie-dyed, many familiar. Double doors led into the stained-glass Victorian studio itself, jam-packed with all manner of instruments, weird harmoniums and shiny metal xylophones and vast kettledrums. Downstairs our stunning women, Tania and Liv, both dark and beautiful and American, would hang out together or prepare sumptuous vegetarian curry dinners.
The first time I visited Friar Park I was with my first wife, Lynne. The marriage was already over, and she didn’t stay very long, driving back to London after dinner, leaving me behind for the first of many all-nighters of talk and music and beer and cigarettes. We greeted the dawn playing Frisbee on the lawn. I think I got home next afternoon by train. Perhaps I stayed two days. Nothing was nicer than collapsing into the four-poster beds in the sumptuously attired bedrooms.
It was raining hard that first time when we came off the motorway and found Henley. We followed the directions out of the town up the hill and right toward the massive gates. Behind these monumental iron gates was the most beautiful little stone house with splendid gothic trimmings.
“What a beautiful house,” I said, very impressed.
“Thank you,” they said. “This is the gatehouse. The main house is up there!”
And up there it was. It was bigger than my boarding school.
Nothing could prepare me for the first glimpse of that gothic palace as we rounded a bend and saw ahead that most extraordinary building. My first thought was it was exactly like my school. It was certainly on that scale, and of around the same period, but unlike the grim forbidding Victorianism of the Ophny,25 this Victorian castle floated and twinkled magically. With its carved oak doors and windows in their lead frames, its fantasies and grinning gargoyles, its carefully stoneworked slogans enjoining thought and wisdom and the inevitability of death: nothing could ever prepare you for that. It was an overwhelming experience. I parked beneath the massive cedar outside the front door and stared at the house totally amazed. Its unique twisted chimneys and fantasy gothic gables and steeply pitched roofs and battlements; a riot of different styles that challenged the eye. I had never seen anything like it. A Hindu palace in Henley. An architectural work of inspired madness, the size of a small hotel, built as a private residence in 1890 by an eccentric and wealthy London lawyer called Sir Frank Crisp. Inside, the first sensation as I entered the oak-paneled hall with golden lettering offering philosophical advice, pre-Raphaelite decoration, and William Morris wallpaper was that smell. It’s a special incense from Madras, and I can still smell it. All Beatle houses have it. I once visited Ringo’s ex-wife, Maureen, in Bel Air to be greeted by that familiar, rich, pungent odor.
Later my son, age three, would run around inside this richly oriental-carpeted home (the rugs supplied by my cousin Haig if you can believe that—one of hundreds of carefully prepared coincidences that awaited me).
“Wibena Ewic,” George would cry in imitation of Carey’s then childish way with words.26
I would grow very familiar with the house: its soft silences at night, its twenty-four-hour warmth, with massive steel radiators drawing up heat from the cavernous depths below, its dark, echoey passages with the bright Victorian tile, its woody interiors, its oak paneling. And always the Indian presence, the floating scent of incense, the throb of tabla, sudden wild flutterings of rhythm, like a trapped bird beating its wings, the smoky chants, the thrilling runs of brilliant argument from the sitar, and George, always lighting another cigarette as he paused intently over one of the two jukeboxes filled with favorites, carefully and deliberately choosing what to play next: a version of “The Lumberjack Song,” Ravi Shankar, endless Dylan, “Oh you must hear this, Eric.” Early Elvis. “Spam.” EC’s “Layla.” And yet more Dylan.
His enthusiasm was contagious. He played the jukebox to inform and instruct. He reveled in sharing his delight in all kinds of music. He would go through periods of furious passions, often lasting for months or even years at a time, when he would insist you shared his joy of Smokey Robinson or the songs of Hoagy Carmichael or the Hawaiian music of Gaby Pahinui or even the ukulele nonsenses of George Formby. During this latter stage everyone had to learn the uke; even Liv he taught to strum away. His taste was, like himself, catholic. He embraced all forms of life. It was to be savored and enjoyed. But music was at the heart of it. It could speak more truly to the soul. And the soul was what George was about. The clear-eyed gurus gazed down in the hall from their photographs, looking straight at us. As we talked and grew to know each other I opened my heart to him as I have to no other man before or since. Indeed only my wife and my shrink have heard me speak so nearly (and at such length) of my existence and my experiences. It was, and I can only say this simply, like the beginning of a love affair, and I suppose in a way it was exactly that, because he won my heart and I fell in love with him and am filled with that love to this day. When he died, I could not believe it. I knelt at his feet and put my hand on him, and my whole body was wracked and shaken with sorrow. They had given us rose petals and finally my shoulders could stop shaking long enough for me to sprinkle them on him, and I could back away to the sympathetic embraces of the living. He now lay deathly still in his saffron and purple robes, his face painted white with the red dot on his forehead. We sat shivah, a small group of his friends and family in the room, now weeping, now laughing. Some reminiscence would start, something inappropriate he would want to share and then the realization that he would not be sharing it, that he was indeed gone, and sorrow would flood over us.
George loved Python. He paid for the entire budget of The Life of Brian because he said he wanted to see it. It ’ s still the most anyone has ever paid for a movie ticket.
Come on, everybody, Dad wouldn’t want this,” Dahni would remind us, and we would play music, the chants he loved, recorded in Friar Park, or a few of the last tracks that would constitute the basis of his final album. And, oh, the pangs as I remembered our last phone conversation, me in France, he in Switzerland, sometime in August. His voice seemed weak as we chatted for about twenty minutes.
“What are you working on?” I asked him
“I’m doing the sleeve notes for my album. If I can ever finish them in time. And if not, then you will.”
My heart felt like it was stabbed as he told me clearly he was dying. Even then I refused to believe it. Not him. Not George. George couldn’t die. I needed him too much. He was my cornerstone. A Friar Park visit always an option. George didn’t die. It wasn’t possible.
On this day last year I was in the Royal Albert Hall at the amazing memorial concert for George organized by Liv and Dahni and Eric Clapton, one minute laughing with Mike Palin and the Terrys and the next losing it as Joe Brown played “Here Comes the Sun” and having to hide in the bathroom backstage, sobbing. I wasn’t the only one with red eyes that night. Was ever a man so loved? So many friends. So many strong men in tears. I almost lost it again onstage at the finale when Joe played the ukulele so beautifully and sang “I’ll See You in My Dreams” as thousands of rose petals fell from the ceiling. Everyone left the stage quietly, avoiding one another’s eyes, here a friendly arm, there a hand on a shoulder. Too sad for words.