Depending on who you asked, George Harrison was many different things to different people. There was his songcraft, which won over the affections of producer savant Phil Spector; there was his musicianship, that captured the hearts of blues geniuses Eric Clapton and Delaney Bramlett; and then there was his penchant for comedy, which made him an obvious shoo-in for Rutland Weekend Television and Saturday Night Live.But behind these traits stood a fragile man, aching for enlightenment and peace in an industry that strove to rid him of any of it. Keenly aware of this conflict, Harrison was brave enough to commit it to tape on the wistful Dark Horse, a confessional album written against the backdrop of a regrettable American tour. But Harrison was always ready to brave the conflict, and it served him better to ride it out than to return to The Beatles for an easy paycheque. He was known as 'The Quiet Beatle', although this title did him a disservice, considering his intellectual focus and thoughtful nature. Instead, he was arguably 'The Chameleonic Beatle', a moniker that only serves to understand this deeply complex guitar player better. And in a deeply complicated decade, Harrison's artistry flourished.
Eoghan Lyng is the author of U2 on track. Like U2 themselves, Lyng harbours a tremendous love for The Beatles and has long aspired to write a book about the Fab Four. For him, the band peaked with Revolver, but he finds their solo work that bit more interesting to explore. And when the solo material includes Living In The Material World and Extra Texture (Read All About It), can you blame him? Much like the guitarist he's written about, Lyng doesn't consider Life of Brian blasphemous but rates The Long Good Friday higher than Harrison. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.
George Harrison was that most curious of characters. Although pencilled as ‘the quiet one’ of the four Beatles, he was actually the most chameleonic, and certainly the most philosophical of the men who had curated the greatest music of the 1960s. Everything he wrote was shaped by instinct, every quip he delivered was carefully constructed, and everything he played on guitar was delivered with a passion that went beyond professionalism. And yet, cornered in the world’s most successful pop sensation, it was growing harder for him to acquiesce to the demands of an audience he simply had no interest in pandering to. Instead, he found solace in India (where he had travelled almost annually since he took his wife Pattie there in 1966). He was also spending more time in the balmy American climes, where Bob Dylan and The Band were enjoying a collaboration based on instinct, intuition and principle. Indeed,MusicFrom Big Pink seemed to pinpoint a new form of collaboration, but if Harrison had hoped his better-known group was going to follow Robbie Robertson’s lead, he was sure to be disappointed.
By 1968, tensions were simmering within The Beatles. Increasingly perceived as the junior writer of the group, Harrison’s desire to record more of his own material was being met with apathy by his bandmates. Aggrieved by the constraints of the band, Harrison made a bold move that radically changed the discourse of the operation, and typified the way he would work as a solo artist. Discouraged by what he perceived as their lack of interest in ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, Harrison invited Cream superstar Eric Clapton to record the propulsive guitar lick. If the intention was to motivate his bandmates to put their back into the recording, it worked, and Harrison was duly impressed with the piano part McCartney recorded as an intro. Lennon, too was relying on outside counsel, spending more and more time with avant-gardist and girlfriend Yoko Ono, and by the time the band had reconvened for their next album – one they hoped to perform for live audiences – Ono now firmly sat beside the man she was soon to marry. ‘It’s a question of mutual respect’, Clapton surmised. ‘I have a great deal of respect for (Harrison) because there have probably been a thousand times when he wanted to quit The Beatles and do something on his own ... Paradoxically, he respects me for having the courage to walk out on groups because I don’t like what I am doing. He has often said to me that he does not see me in any band for very long, and I think he has a strange regard for my facing up to impossible situations and just cutting out. Buthe never has’.
Harrison never quit, but there were moments when he questioned his place in the band: ‘There used to be a situation where we’d go in (as we did when we were kids), pick up our guitars, all learn the tune and chords, and start talking about arrangements’, Harrison recalled. ‘But there came a time ... when Paul had fixed an idea in his brain as to how to record one of his songs ... It was taken to the most ridiculous situations, where I’d open my guitar case and go to get my guitar out, and he’d say, ‘No, no, we’re not doing that yet‘ … It got so there was very little to do other than sit around and hear him going, ‘Fixing a hole...’ with Ringo keeping the time’.
In January 1969, The Beatles congregated at Twickenham Studios to successfully compile a setlist that could be released concurrently as a film and a re
