George Harrison might have been the happiest person on the planet. But you could not tell that by looking into his eyes.
Contemplative? Yes. Enlightened? Occasionally. Resigned? Certainly. But the twinkle of joy? The glint of happiness? In the case of George Harrison, it was never really ever there. Even during the heyday of the Beatles, when anything and everything seemed possible, there was something around the edges of Harrison’s seemingly set-in-stone wide-eyed bemused stare that said This is not real, and that he was not comfortable with living this fantasy life.
The smiles during the endless press conferences always seemed a bit too forced and a bit too false. During his time as part of the Beatles, the look on George’s face perhaps reflected the desire to slow down while his life was rushing past him at the speed of light. Did he ever look content? Yes. There were those moments, captured in the millions of photographs taken of him, when he was alone at his home or on the street, signing an autograph for an adoring fan, where the emotions of somebody who was enjoying life crept through. And once again, the tell-tale evidence was in the eyes.
George Harrison went through a lot since the days when his passion for music put him on the road to stardom and, late into 2001, the fates, karma and his own personal and professional choices combined to put sadness in those puppy-dog eyes. In the classic sense, George Harrison had arrived, well into his fifth decade, a bloodied but ultimately unbowed creation: a long-haired, pop icon-cum-Don Quixote who had tilted at one too many windmills and who had won, but, just as often, also lost.
As the subject of a celebrity biography, it all sounds too much like work, heavy on the melancholy and more than a bit downbeat. In All Things Must Pass: The Life of George Harrison, don’t look for the fairy-tale ending or an odyssey without a bump in the road. Because to cloak the life and times of George Harrison in anything but flawed and imperfect terms would be a gross miscarriage of history and of the truth. And, it would probably not have made George happy.
Because what makes George Harrison the endearing icon and the subject of just as much conjecture and speculation as blind fan praise, well beyond the expected curiosity attached to his Beatles years, are his emotional and human imperfections. Hardly a badge of honour but rather a badge of living, Harrison’s story is finally a tale of hard-fought, scarred redemption.
In Harrison’s own mystical universe, he would no doubt have described his life in terms of ying and yang, the chance encounters of spiritual elements and religious planes. And the musician would be fairly on target. His well-known generosity, patience and religious zeal has been equally balanced out in the ledge of life by stories of a rigid, often puritanical nature, philandering and rampant infidelity, questionable, often misguided creative and personal choices, and a penchant for drink and drugs.
His creative frustrations are legendary. His experiments in solo ventures were occasionally successful, his three-record opus All Things Must Pass being the prime example, but just as often pretentious and undermined by his unshakable religious beliefs. Extra Texture: Read All About It and Dark Horse, being major offenders, are famous and infamous. Harrison’s on-and-off love affair with stardom is alternately understandable and perplexing, as is the man himself.
Consequently, unlike many legendary performers who always seemed to make the right choices, George Harrison’s career has not been universally praised. More than one observer of the pop-music scene has lamented Harrison as somebody not willing to take a chance, preferring to play it safe rather than creatively roll the dice. It has also been said that while he was an intregal part of the Beatles, he never reached discernible heights as a solo artist.
Oh, and lest we forget, George Harrison could be downright boring. In later years, pottering around his garden and playing the house husband were highlights of his life. And when he would get on his high horse about Indian religion, often with a fervour of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, even his closest friends had to stifle a yawn. There’s nothing very ‘rock star’ in those moments but they are truly a telling of George’s basic humanity and his strident need to come across as normal.
And so the task at hand: to discover the real George Harrison in all his varying shades of light and dark. And it is not an easy life to put in order because George Harrison spent his entire life trying to hide from us, and, depending on how one addresses that elusive beast called Fame, he either failed miserably or succeeded to the nth degree.
Long before he became a part of history as a member of the Beatles, George Harrison, who once proclaimed, ‘I don’t want to be famous but I do want to be successful,’ was battling to satisfy his desire to be as free and individual as possible in a world that held conforming in high esteem. He pursued music as a soulful creative expression, not as a way to achieve stardom and material goods. Even during the halcyon days of Beatlemania, Harrison, who admittedly took full advantage of the perks of rock stardom, would often stand out and impress as a serious musician amid the mania.
He was regularly the object of teen-girl debate along the lines of ‘Who was the cutest Beatle?’ and ‘Which Beatle would they most like to kiss?’ But, for those who looked below the paper-thin veneer of hype, hucksterism and just plain bullshit that passed for pop stardom in the 1960s, there were other, more important tags being hung on the young guitarist as well. The Quiet Beatle. The Serious Beatle. And, yes, even the Sad Beatle. While Lennon, McCartney and Starr were often the willing foils for the foolishness of pop music’s starmaking machinery, one often got the impression that Harrison was better than what was going on around him and would eventually aspire to something more important than merely being a member of the most popular band in the annals of pop-music history.
Not that George Harrison ever saw himself in larger-than-life terms. Although his life is occasionally marred by bouts of egomania, when his obstinance surrounding his religious pursuits has threatened to consume him, the guitarist has alternated between running to and away from stardom and, at all times, keeping his life in balance. He became adept at living a stealth life, running smoothly under the radar in the face of constant public scrutiny; surfacing, often painfully so, when his musical life demanded, but preferring to shun the spotlight in favour of solitude.
The broad strokes of George Harrison’s personal and professional life have been chronicled elsewhere but always in the context of a burgeoning whole. It was always George Harrison as part of the Beatles. George Harrison as the guiding light behind Bangladesh. George Harrison as the linchpin in the resurgence of Indian mysticism as the hip, new religion for the Swinging 60s. George Harrison has never been allowed to stand alone, observing the events that unfolded in front of him and unveiling the inner workings, the personal asides and anecdotes that marked Harrison’s chequered, but never less than interesting, life.
All Things Must Pass: The Life of George Harrison will take you to that place. The history will be there – the names, dates and places. The voyage of discovery from his days in Liverpool, and his transformation from boy to man during those raucous nights in Hamburg. His struggles with stardom and the frustration of being regulated to playing second fiddle to Lennon and McCartney. The conflicts that would ultimately destroy friendships, the sadness when lovers and close friends betrayed him, and the battle between personal beliefs and public expectations that met on a collision course with Harrison in the middle.
You’ve been here before. But you’ve never been here this way.
All Things Must Pass: The Life of George Harrison will take you to a place you’ve never been before: into the life behind those sad eyes.
Marc Shapiro, 2002