Bidding farewell to the ‘quiet’ Beatle

Krishna Gopalan

Liverpool, a coastal town in the United Kingdom, holds the dubious distinction of having the largest number of lung cancer patients in the world. One of its most famous residents succumbed to the illness on November 29 in Los Angeles.

Often referred to as the “quiet Beatle”, George Harrison lived by ideals exemplified by his famous lines from the album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, “We were talking about the space between us all, And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion, never glimpse the truth, then it’s far too late, when they pass away.”
What kind of a man was George Harrison, really? Let us attempt to put a few pieces of his life together.

He joined the band when it was still called The Quarrymen and, interestingly, passed his audition atop a bus in Liverpool! And the judges were John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Throughout the beginning of Beatlemania in 1963, right through the break-up in 1970, Harrison was clearly the serious component in the band.

The Beatles’ earliest conquest was the tour to America in early 1964. The presence of the band was expected to lend some cheer to the nation, which had still not recovered from the assassination of JFK. The music at that stage was slightly mushy, albeit unique. By the beginning of 1965, the experimentation in their music was underway.

This happened quite by chance as Harrison was to discover the sitar in an Indian store in London. As he was to say several years later, “There was an incredible sense of comfort when I held the instrument.” Harrison subsequently learnt the nuances of the instrument from Pandit Ravi Shankar. The effect was quite electrifying and it was used to perfection in the delightful Norwegian Wood. George Harrison had come of age.

The constant battle in the life of a successful band is how does one cope with fame? The answer, to The Beatles, came in the form of transcendental meditation (TM), as Harrison discovered inner peace in Rishikesh in India. His music had already attained a spiritual touch when he composed Within You, Without You and to a lesser extent in While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

Music critics aver that the best of Harrison was reserved as the break-up of The Beatles seemed inevitable. Something and Here Comes the Sun, both composed by Harrison were the best compositions on The Beatles’ last album, Abbey Road. Devoid of the pressures of being a Beatle, Harrison was all set to enter a new sphere.

Starting with My Sweet Lord, which he composed for the war-affected Bangladeshis in 1971 to a series of compositions for the children of Romania in the early 1990s, Harrison’s music and his life had attained a new pedestal. Continuously intrigued by eastern mysticism, Harrison made incredible musical progress with Ravi Shankar and devoted a large part of his life to addressing issues like charity and world peace.

People often say that the Beatle who was closest to John Lennon was George Harrison. The three surviving Beatles got together in 1995 to complete two of Lennon’s unfinished recordings and lay the ground for the historic Beatles Anthology.

Paul McCartney, on hearing of Harrison’s death, said “he was my baby brother”. As fans gathered in New York’s Central Park on Friday, it was to pay tribute to George Harrison of Liverpool.

To conclude, nothing could tell Harrison’s story better than his own lines from the song Within You, Without You, “Try to realise its all within yourself, No one else can make you change, And to see you’re really only very small, And Life flows on Within You and Without You.”
May God bless this soul. Amen.