George Harrison: The fabbest of the four and his India connection

There is a droll moment — one of many — in Martin Scorsese’s new documentary about George Harrison, Living in the Material World, when his son Dhani reads one of Harrison’s diary entries from 1969, a time when the Beatles were rehearsing for the album that would become Let It Be, mired in rancour, resentment and a sense of terminal fatigue. “January 10. Got up. Went to Twickenham. Rehearsed until lunchtime. Left the Beatles. Went home.” In fact, it would be another year before the final disintegration of the group. But Harrison always displayed a remarkably phlegmatic attitude to the business of being a Beatle, and all the attendant drama and heartache that came with it.

By any reckoning, Living in the Material World is an epic. At three-and-a-half hours in duration, even the devoted Harrison fan might quail. But this deeply absorbing journey through Harrison’s sadly abbreviated life — he died in 2001 at the age of 58 — does not seem a minute too long. Rather, Scorsese’s film is another wave in the tide of revisionism, which, in recent years, has seen Harrison promoted from “junior partner” in the Beatles to being widely regarded as not only the equal of John Lennon and Paul McCartney as a songwriter and singer — and in some cases, their superior — but also the most intriguing character in the group. In his own phrase, the dark horse.

McCartney describes the Beatles as “four corners of a square — without any of those corners, you collapse”. But what the film shows is how confining for each individual that square eventually became. For Harrison, the frustration was largely to do with the feeling that his songs were being overlooked by the established songwriting “firm” of Lennon and McCartney.

“Paul was very pushy in that respect,” Harrison told me when I interviewed him in 1979. “You’d have to do 59 of Paul’s songs before he’d even listen to one of yours.” McCartney, he said, was particularly dismissive of what he called “those Indian-type tunes” and refused to play on them. “Within You Without You [from Sgt Pepper’s] was just me and some Indian musicians in the studio by ourselves.” But it was those “Indian-type tunes”, and the interest in Indian spirituality that they signified, which was to ultimately shape the course of Harrison’s life — a fact which Scorsese’s film dwells on at considerable length.

The pivot on which Harrison’s career hinged was All Things Must Pass, his first solo album, released in 1970. A meditation on the essential ephemerality of all things, the title song could be taken as a statement about the Beatles — at a time when heartbroken fans were in need of some consoling wisdom about the band’s dissolution - but also about the larger philosophical concerns that were coming to preoccupy Harrison.

“He was spiritual and you knew it, and it made you spiritual being around him,” says Phil Spector, who co-produced All Things Must Pass, and who, poignantly, was interviewed by Scorsese shortly before his first trial for murder. “It made you like those Krishnas, who could sometimes be the biggest pain in the necks, running around in their robes with their shaved heads and their white powder all over their face, scaring you half to death, coming out of a dark studio glowing.”

Song for song, All Things Must Pass remains, to my mind, the best solo album by a Beatle, and not only because Harrison had such a wealth of stockpiled material to draw on. (“It was endless,” Spector says, “he had literally hundreds of songs and each one was better than the rest.”) What is interesting is what the album tells us about Harrison himself. It is fascinating to compare it with Lennon’s first solo album, Plastic Ono Band, made in the same year. While that was an unrelenting, cathartic, primal scream of pain — about his unhappy childhood, God, the Beatles — a man flailing to find a meaning in his life, All Things Must Pass suggested that Harrison had found it. Virtually all of the songs are reflections of his spiritual philosophy, and celebrations of his belief in what he called “Krishna consciousness”.

Harrison had qualms about even releasing My Sweet Lord as a single because of its religious theme — “I thought a lot of people are going to really hate me, because people fear the unknown. I was sticking my neck on the chopping block.” It was Spector who persuaded him to release it, recognising it as the massive hit it became. Spector is the other reason why All Things Must Pass was such a triumphant success. Seldom was the producer’s “wall of sound” applied to such good effect, its dense textures bringing a wonderfully magisterial quality to the songs.

Harrison made eight more albums, but none were the equal, nor had the impact, of his debut. Scorsese evidently agrees — the subsequent albums are largely ignored in the film.