GEORGE HARRISON – Spiritual Side
Paul McCartney, like George Harrison was baptized as a Catholic.
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George Harrison was the most spiritual of the Beatles. Along with the other Beatles, the Beach Boys, and many other celebrities, George Harrison spent time in 1968 with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; but his interest in Hinduism predated that experience by several years. Wikipedia mentions several earlier encounters: “During the filming of Help! in the Bahamas [in 1965], [the Beatles] met the founder of Sivananda Yoga, Swami Vishnu-Devananda, who gave each of them a signed copy of his book, The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga.”
Following the Beatles’ last tour, and before recording on Sgt. Pepper began in 1967, George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd made a pilgrimage to Bombay, where he studied the sitar, met several gurus, and visited many holy places.
Also from Wikipedia: “[George] Harrison became a vegetarian in the late 1960s, and a devotee of the Indian mystic Paramahansa Yogananda, a guru who proselytised Kriya yoga, after he was given Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi by Ravi Shankar. (Yogananda and three other major figures from Kriya yoga, Sri Mahavatar Babaji, Sri Yukteswar Giri, and Sri Lahiri Mahasaya appear on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.)”
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The liner notes for the album were a mess, and George Harrison was not originally credited with performing any of the music, leading many to think that he merely oversaw the album; actually, in addition to arranging the music, Harrison played electric and acoustic guitar, piano, and Mellotron. Other musicians on the album include Eric Clapton on electric guitar – credited as “Eddie Clayton” – Harrison’s bandmate Ringo Starr on drums, and Peter Tork of the Monkees who plays banjo (!). In 1969, George Harrison collaborated with Eric Clapton in writing perhaps my very favorite song by Cream, “Badge”.
One disadvantage of my early exposure to Wonderwall Music was that the bar was set very high for me as far as incorporating Indian musical forms into rock music, and I was disappointed by most sitar work on rock albums since then.
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Ravi Shankar is the Indian musician best known to American audiences; this master of the sitar performed often at rock festivals like Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Following Woodstock though, he distanced himself from the hippie subculture, as Wikipedia put it (what I heard was that, basically, he thought everyone was too stoned to truly appreciate his music). Shankar has a musician daughter, Norah Jones.
Following the Beatles’ lead, many rock musicians began incorporating sitar into their recordings, including the Byrds and Stone Poneys; the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”, included on their 1965 album Rubber Soul, was the first rock song to include sitar music, which was played by George Harrison on the song. One of my favorite songs on the Sgt. Pepper album, “Within You, Without You”, was composed by George Harrison, who plays sitar and another Indian instrument, the tambura; several Indian musicians were also on hand.
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Following the break-up of the Beatles, George Harrison released a mammoth two-record album in 1970 called All Things Must Pass that also included a third disk called Apple Jam. Clearly Harrison was creating a lot of music that wasn’t winding up on the Beatles albums; for instance, Anthology 3 includes an early demo of the title song for this album, “All Things Must Pass”. By the time “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” showed up on Abbey Road, nearly all rock critics were acknowledging that George Harrison was a songwriter equal to John Lennon and Paul McCartney; but I had noticed that at least as far back as Revolver, where his songs were “Taxman”, “Love You To” and “I Want to Tell You”.
Richie Unterberger writing for Allmusic notes: “Without a doubt, [George] Harrison’s first solo recording, originally issued as a triple album, is his best. Drawing on his backlog of unused compositions from the late Beatles era, George crafted material that managed the rare feat of conveying spiritual mysticism without sacrificing his gifts for melody and grand, sweeping arrangements.”
From Wikipedia: “Among the large cast of backing musicians were Eric Clapton and Delaney & Bonnie’s Friends band – three of whom formed Derek and the Dominos with Clapton during the recording – as well as Ringo Starr, Gary Wright, [Billy] Preston, Klaus Voormann, John Barham, Badfinger, and Pete Drake.”
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The hit song from the George Harrison triple album All Things Must Pass is “My Sweet Lord”; it was the first #1 hit by an ex-Beatle and was also the biggest selling single in the UK in 1971. The song was addressed to the Hindu God Krishna, though American audiences at least could be forgiven for feeling that Harrison was singing to Jesus. The thrust of the song was calling for an end to sectarianism through the mixing of background chants of “Hare Krishna” with “Hallelujah”. While George Harrison said that the melody was adapted from a Christian hymn “Oh Happy Day” (whose copyright had expired), a court case brought by the writer of a song by the Chiffons called “He’s So Fine” found otherwise. I have written in more detail of this court case previously.
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The title song of All Things Must Pass, “All Things Must Pass” is considered to be one of George Harrison’s finest compositions. As told in Wikipedia: “Music critic Ian MacDonald described ‘All Things Must Pass’ as ‘the wisest song never recorded by the Beatles’, while author [and Harrison biographer] Simon Leng considers it ‘perhaps the greatest solo Beatle composition’. The subject matter deals with the transient nature of human existence, and in Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ reading, lyrics and music combine to reflect impressions of optimism against fatalism. On release, together with Barry Feinstein’s album cover image, commentators viewed the song as a statement on the Beatles’ break-up.”
The George Harrison song was originally recorded by Billy Preston – under the name “All Things (Must) Pass” – on his 1970 Apple Records release Encouraging Words. The lyrics were inspired by a 1968 poem by a different sort of guru, Timothy Leary called “All Things Pass”, a psychedelic adaptation of a classical Chinese text called the Tao Te Ching.
While this song was never released as a single, George Harrison had another hit from this album called “What Is Life”.
(September 2014)
