NOTE: I wrote the following November 30, 2001--the day after George Harrison died, which was ten years ago today.Even with his life and his work now complete, it's hard to evaluate
George Harrison. He was, on the one hand, probably the Beatle who genuinely wanted to get most "out there." On the other, he wasn't afraid to go Lifting Material from the World in moments in which he was insufficiently inspired. But that's understandable behavior--for a
composer. So did Wagner. So did Mozart. And Mahler couldn't stop sampling...himself. Working from things of interest is simply the usual life of the great composer. And I think it's as a
composer that people should consider Harrison first and foremost.
Whereas Lennon and McCartney's songs are double helixes, with traces of both
songwriters wrapping around the other and popping in here and there in a way that suggests something extraordinary, Harrison's
compositions not only bore Harrison's sole imprimatur, but they rode over you with the heaviness that suggested they belonged to a greater oeuvre than the one you are presently hearing. They are all icebergs, lone rugged documents with miles of solid musical history running deep underneath. They are the consequence of being closer than anyone else to the two finest
songwriters on the planet at a particular time, and of trying to aim higher still.
His post-Beatles history, while thin in long patches, is nonetheless rife with manic examples of what composing meant to him: everything. The first things one notices about either
All Things Must Pass or
Living in the Material World is that they were supremely overproduced, just the way a manic composer would do it. They are filled with ideas--even each song has dozens--and lots of which are worked through and then abandoned nearly as soon as they are announced; they wander, they drift, and they float away, but they are there to come back to, even decades later, because, unlike much else in pop, they are not merely riffs, but completed ideas.
The Concert for Bangladesh, which Harrison put together with great energy, willed a whole new concept into being: music as helper to the newsreel needy in the world. It moved pop music even further, far further, towards altruism than the Beatles had brought it; it brought pop to nearly foreign policy status. If Bono and Sting hang with world leaders and UN committee types today, it's Harrison's vision in
Bangladesh that got them there.
Bangladesh was also Harrison's acknowledgment that he needed other musicians around to be fertile. More than anything else in his career, I think, it shows what Harrison was always thinking, and who he wanted to be. It was, in a very short time, a supremely distant kind of energy from the gesture of jotting off a
Savoy Truffle or two for a Beatles album; it was the energy of a fully realized composer, which Harrison only became near the Beatles' end times.
With regard to his Beatle life, it's hard to believe that someone could be both in something as visible as the Beatles and still underrated as a musician/composer, but I think Harrison was this. Later in life, as for Beatle music, it's
Within You and Without You, not only for its Indian orientation but for the Stravinski-like measureless refrain, that most interests me and many others; including, say, Patti Smith, an artist now known mostly for covers, who only covers this song among all the Beatles catalog.
A gentle soul, Harrison came away from India far more affected than the others. And of course
Here Comes the Sun, which has never lost its warmth, not even in the dead of winter with the ice slowing melting, remains for me the sole tune which feels both like it belongs near the top of the Beatles canon and is also recognizably and purely Harrison top to bottom.
Like anyone interested in the manic deep art of composing, rather than the effervescent surface art of songwriting, he never was much of a pop star. Evidence:
There'll come a time when all of us must leave here
Then nothing sister Mary can do
Will keep me here with you
As nothing in this life that I've been trying
Could equal or surpass the art of dying
Do you believe me?
There'll come a time when all your hopes are fading
When things that seemed so very plain
Become an awful pain
Searching for the truth among the lying
And answered when you've learned the art of dying
--Harrison, Art of Dying, All Things Must Pass
And so finally, there is death, everywhere in Harrison. Perhaps not death so much as cognizance of its uncertain adjunct, the bus-stop of life. Death is in almost every single lyric of note--even
Blue Jay Way suggests someone lost in fog, never arriving, and that is death too, but it's also passage.
It wasn't a surprise when Harrison was obliged to fight cancer against long odds--he always looked frail, and death was his great fascination, over and over. One suspects he was prepared for it.
