This book is dedicated to gardeners everywhere.
G.H.
Introduction
, HE lyrics to I Me Mine were known to me long before the October evening in 1974 when I met the man who wrote them. George and I had spoken by telephone many times because I worked for his Dark Horse records label in Los Angeles. Still that first face-to-face meeting, followed by twenty-seven years together, is just as vivid today as the last time I saw his face.
During our life together the issues of possessions, attachment and identification with the ego were in the forefront of our awareness and George was always quick to point out that in reality there is no I, Me or Mine. George was relentless at keeping our spiritual aim true. We were only humans walking a long road towards our shared goal of enlightenment and I, for one, welcomed any reminders.
To the course of a day I might have said, "Oh, your bit of the garden looks great", to which he would reply, "It's not my garden, Liv". It was his way of reminding himself and me that we are pure Spirit, and that the Spirit is in 'every grain of sand', belonging to everyone and no one; that nothing is 'mine' and that the T we all refer to must be recognized as the little '1' in the larger scheme of the Universe. George was tired of the I Me Mines of this world, including his own, and had been from a very early age. When searching for a title to this book, he was well aware that the lyrics to these songs would always be tied to his name and considered bis songs, even though he knew the creativity bestowed upon him was a divine gift. So rather than conjuring a book title that might try to explain away the gift of songwriting with, "Well, I wrote them but they
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Foreword
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VER since the war 1 have thought about gathering the bits of paper with my song lyrics scattered around and about.
Two drunkards cornered me in a hotel room near Heathrow
Airport in July 1977 and showed me that if I did find the lyrics, they could be bound into a nice book. They brought with them a copy of Captain Bligh's Log of H.MS. Bounty, published by Genesis, a bargain at £158 a copy.
Jack Hargreaves' programme Out of Town was on television some time later and in it he showed how old leather books could be restored to their original condition which made me appreciate the craft and seriously consider having these trivial bits of paper dignified in this Way.
In excruciating detail, just for you, at a price outside everyday experience, we offer the small change of a short lifetime. It was to have been called The Big Leather Job but became known as / Me Mine for it could also be seen as a "little ego detour".
I have suffered for this book; now it's your turn.
George Harrison Somewhere in England
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Part I is narrated by George Harrison with introduction and notes by Derek Taylor in italics.
Chapter I
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HERE was a view that when everybody else was 'growing up' we were just fooling around being rocknroll stars", George Harrison said when we were preparing this book. In the context of what you will read, this specious view, which was undoubtedly widespread at the end of the nineteen-sixties, will be shown to have been as inappropriate as the unquestioning idolatry which it had replaced.
I Me Mine, a sly paradox of a title chosen by a man concerned for many years and for many reasons to send his ego packing (still trying and not always succeeding) is a book which tells a story of growing up, not necessarily the hard way but certainly not the easy way, for no matter how greatly privilege and wealth may have seemed to grace the Beatles' evolution, 'easy' is not the word for what happened to them on their way to what has come to be known as The Top.
In writing this opening portion of the book, I shall quote substantially from George himself (from conversations recorded in California, in Oxfordshire and in Suffolk) because although we have been chums for years and years, I do know less about him than he does of himself, and in any case, he is blessed with two gifts as a storyteller: an extraordinary memory for detail (dates, directions, weather, mood, time of day, appearance, etc.) and he has a guileless desire to make his attitudes absolutely distinct. This latter attribute has infuriated his detractors ('why does the man have to preach so?') yet it has secured from more open-minded folk — millions of them — a real sense of gratitude for the reassuring quality of his optimism, and he has won enduring love for his honesty.
There is another reason for offering such a wealth of first-person recollection
and that is that like all public figures whose fame went further and deeper than the mere state of being Very Well Known, the Beatles were greatly second-guessed, 'interpreted', assessed, and under-and-over-estimated to the point of
I first saw the Beatles at a concert on joth May 1961, when Joan {my wife) and I visited the Odeon cinema in Manchester where we then lived and where I worked as theatre critic and columnist for the Northern edition oj the London Daily Express. The Beatles were closing a remarkable ^package show' (a phrase ofthe/pjos and 19 60s indicating a concert in which a sizeable number of recording artists, performed for half an hour, or less, twice nightly, and mostly in cinemas) which included Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Roy Orbison. The promoter was Arthur Howes, a worthy man of the day.
Joan had seen the Beatles on television and liked them very much. I bad not seen them but, although word took a long time to reach newspapermen, I had heard of them and we both thought it would be a good night out. The show was quite astounding. We were on the front row, able to see every detail of the performance, although, untrained as we then were, we could scarcely hear the music above the loudest screaming me had ever experienced. The Beatles were excellent (so were Gerry and the Pacemakers and Roy Orbison) and it was quite clear that something exceptional was happening.
I wrote an excessively laudatory review, stating that "the Liverpool Sound had come to Manchester" and that it had been "magnificent" and that because of it, "popular music had, after years of unspeakable rubbish, become healthy and good again". 1 described the Beatles as "fresh, cheeky, sharp and young" and even now these words an as good as any to explain what they were like and after the first show they were all as one to me; I had no idea who was who. To compress what followed... / interviewed their manager, Brian Epstein, followed, noted and reported every scintilla of their progress every single day thereafter and became a regenerate Beatlemaniac.
As their identities became clearer to me, I observed that George was The Quiet One (see Rutles later), and when the Editor of the Manchester Daily Express, John Buchanan, to whom, even now, a graceful 'thank you' is renewed, said that one of the Beatles should be invited to write a guest column in the Daily Express every Friday, I suggested that the fortunate Beatle should be George. He asked if there was a particular reason. I said there were several: George seemed to be a decent chap and when I had met him at press
conferences and backstage he had been approachable and transparently sincere ' expressive. Buchanan and I proceeded to draw up a draft proposition for Epstein whom we met at his offices over The Wizard's Den (a magic shop) in Moorfields, Liverpool. John Buchanan put the situation to Brian Epstein: a Beatle should have his name on a weekly article in the Daily Express, yet a Beatle would not write it. It would be written by me. "Oh, why?" asked Brian. ^'Because Derek knows what the reader wants", replied John Buchanan. {This Reader and what He wants!... Did I know?) Brian accepted this proposition and asked if we had any Beatle in mind. I said that we had in mind George. Again Brian asked: "Why?" I said that George had seemed to me to be a nice lad, easy to talk to, quiet, pleasant, all of that. Brian said: "How interesting. A rather nice idea. It would be good for George, it would give him an interest, an extra interest. John and Paul have their song-writing and Ringo is rather new."
He asked if me had any amount in mind, a fee per week. John Buchanan looked very nervous, for Brian could be intimidating in this regard. '''Fifty pounds, we thought", said Buchanan. Epstein feigned astonishment. "Fifty pounds", he said, bis voice squeaking. "Fifty pounds for one of the Beatles in the Daily Express? Most certainly not! I am not letting George put his name to an article in the Daily Express for fifty pounds." John Buchanan said it would not involve George in very much work, after all I would be doing the writing, and I didn't earn fifty pounds for a full week's work. That, said Brian, was nothing to do with him and it was worth pointing out that Derek, if he would forgive the bluntness, was not one of the Beatles. So, said Brian, the fee was a hundred pounds and that was far too little and he would put it to George and see what George said.
There followed a meeting between Brian and George and the result was that at the end of i$ 63, George Harrison became a columnist in the Daily Express as Beatlemania appeared to be at its height. The Beatles had released two albums in England, and five singles, four oj them number ones in the British record charts. Ahead... the unknown response of the United States, and most of the rest of the world. The indications from Europe were that Britain had a phenomenon on its hands. In our third joint article, George and I expressed, in a cliche, cautious optimism.
1 wrote the first piece without consulting him much about the content, promising him that he could see it before it was published. I had talked to him
about his family, knew that he had two brothers and a sister, all older than he, that both his mother and father were alive and well, father a bus-driver with Liverpool Corporation, a kind, pragmatic man, supportive towards George's career, mother strong, friendly, tolerant and keen; in all, a sociable well-integrated upper-working class Liverpool family.
Of George's attitude to his own life and status as a Beatle I knew little. He had not found it easy to communicate much of this, although we had become friends swiftly. He has said since: "Friends are all souls that we've known in other lives. We're drawn to each other. That's how I feel about friends. Even if I have only known them for a day, it doesn't matter. I'm not going to wait till I have known them two years, because anyway we have met somewhere before,you know."
However, I wrote our first column in which George told his father that his career would mean that he would have to go out into the big world and that he would not be around much. I invented a ''quote' for his father which read: "Never you mind about that, son, you just go ahead and play your guitar and I'll carry on driving the big green jobs." There was much more in the same vein; statements, pulled out of the air, attributed to this регзоц and that; motives tossed in from a newspaperman's ragbag of stereotypes, all dressed up in quasi-Liverpoolese. Articulate Scouse as She is Spoke on Council Estates with Nice Gardens. In short: the very stuff of the standard ghost-written article in the British popular press.
I went by train from Manchester to London to meet George at Brian's fiat at Whaddon House, Williams Mews, in Belgravia. All four Beatles were there, John wearing thick hornrimmed glasses—a surprise — Ringo smoking a great deal, saying very little, Paul suspicious of journalists and George, my new friend and collaborator anxious to see what he had 'written* for his first-person statement to the readers of the Northern Daily Express. I handed him the two typed pages. He read the first passage quietly, and then he cried "What's this: 'I'll drive the big green jobs, I'll carry on driving the big green jobs', what are big green jobs?"
There was a horrible silence. George looked quite as much amused as
amazed but there ivas still a terrible hole in the air. What were big green
jobs? "Buses", I said, "Liverpool Corporation buses, big, green things, jobs,
er, well, you know, big green jobs, double-deckers." "I've never heard anyone
call them big green jobs", said George, really laughing now. "I must say I
haven't either, Derek", said Brian. " Have you?" "No", I said. There was a feeling of insane hysterics. "Big green jobs", George repeated, shaking his head. "I'd better keep on reading this."
So he read on, and he said that it wasn't all bad, but there were ways of putting it right, for instance... and another thing, and then there was this and that. And so we began to collaborate, and so we have done, ever since; literally from that day to this, and me wonder how the relationship has rolled through such strange years, through the mania and the break-up of the Beatles, through drugs and drinks and big rainbow coloured jobs, never mind the bright green Apple job! Now that was a big green job.
In the weeks that followed, we sustained the weekly column, properly as a duet; I cannot recall who wrote what, but it was his column and I was always
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glad that George was the one we chose, because it did give him, as Brian had said, "an extra interest", and he is, so far from being the Quiet Beatle, a very talkative man, with as much interest in expressing himself as anyone else and maybe more than most.
To begin, not at the
beginning, but at the only
beginning he knows, we
have to travel with him,
in his own words.........
....... to try to imagine
the soul entering the womb of the woman living in 12 Arnold Grove, Wavertree,
don't really belong to me", he took the opposite approach and the risk of claiming this book in a slightly cynical trinity of pronouns.
Reading what Derek Taylor had to say about George was captivating once again. Perceptions of the man I dearly love by some-one as insightful and articulate as Derek have become somehow more important to me. Derek and George exchanged a special banter that often left others in the room completely bewildered by their verbal shorthand. It took time if you wanted to join in because their points of reference were wide reaching and covered decades of colourful and obscure characters and events, many shared during the phenomenal days of the Beatles that gave them a private world of experiences from which to draw. George quoted the wisdom of the great swamis, the Bhagavad Gita and the ancient Vedas, as well as the humor of Lord Buckley, The Goons, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks's The Producers and Monty Python. At the same time Derek regaled us with history lessons on both wars, commentary on current events and politics. If anyone in our household had a question pertaining to one of those subjects George always said, "Call Derek and ask him". He was very well read and shared with us information of all sorts, some of which we did not really wish to know, but all of it presented amusingly. I wasn't always certain what was fact or folly (although it didn't seem to matter).
The days they spent together working on this book were happy ones and took place over continuous cups of tea (for which Brian Roylance, who conceived and published the original, limited edition of / Me Mine, was mostly responsible, being the biggest fan of tea since Earl Grey himself). George and Derek's dialogue in these pages reveals much about their relationship, which began in Liverpool—and as they used to remind us, "Being born in Liverpool carries with к certain responsibilities". They'd worked together for thirty years, so Derek's interviews with George were second nature to both of them, yet they always managed to produce fresh recollections of their experiences. All of us around during the writing of / Me Mine took laughter for granted. It must have been a real eye-opener for Brian, whose previous publishing endeavors we considered to be more serious documents, such as The Log of the HMS Bounty and Charles Darwin's Journal of a Voyage in HMS Beagle. I would wager Brian was surprised at the emergence of his own sense of
Liverpool 15: there were all the barrage balloons, and the Germans bombing Liverpool. All that was going on.
I sat outside the house, in the car with Olivia, a couple of years ago, imagining 1943, nipping through from the spiritual world, the astral level, getting back into a body in that house. That really is strange when you consider the whole planet, and all the planets there may be on the physical level... how do I come to that family in that house at that time and who am I anyway?
So, in this incarnation, on 2jtb February 1943, deep in the Second World War, deep in Liverpool and deep in winter George was born in 12 Arnold Grove, a cul de sac, terrace houses with an alley1 at the back. It still 4t\s "Arnold Gro"ve Unadopted". Still no one will own it.
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To look at, it is just like Coronation Street: no garden, door straight on to the street. From the street, step into the front room. Then there's a back room with the stairs going up to two bedrooms. But thentwe moved, after about twenty-five years on the housing list, we moved. But back then, in Arnold Grove in my early days it was OK in its own period. It had one of those little iron cooking stoves in the back room which was the kitchen, where you had the kettle on the fire and the oven alongside the fire. Each room downstairs was about ten feet square (very small) and in the winter it was cold in the house.
Outside there was a little yard, almost all paved except one bit where there was a one-foot wide flowerbed, a toilet at the back, a dustbin fitted into the back wall and for a period of time we had a little henhouse where we kept cockerels.
When Olivia and I went up there no one was in, so we sat outside and imagined what it was like inside now. Probably it has had the fireplace knocked out and one of those little tiled jobs put in and it has probably got running hot water now. We used to have a zinc bath, a big one, hanging on the wall outside. We used to bring it in and put 1 Known in Liverpool as a "jigger".
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it in front of the kitchen fire and then fill it from pans and kettles with hot water. Good place to wash your hair, Liverpool. Nice soft water.
Everyone who lived in those houses, or indeed in most houses in the pre-fijties and sixties remembers how cold it could be. There had been very little central heating in Britain,1 and during the war and post-war years, precious little fuel.
Cold? It was cold in those times, cold. We only had one fire. Freezing. The worst. Only one fire in one room. No heating. And in the winter there used to be ice on the windows and in fact you would have to put a hot water bottle in the bed and keep moving it around for an hour before getting into the bed (keep nipping upstairs to keep it moving) then whip your clothes off and leap in. And then oooooooohhhhhhh, lie still and then by next morning you'd just got warm and then you'd wake up, "come on, time for school", put your hand out of the bed. Freezing. Oh dear.
It was OK that house, very pleasant being little and it was always sunny in the summer. The worst thing was leaving the junior school and going to the big grammar school. That's when the darkness began and I realised it was raining and cloudy with old streets and backward teachers and all of that, and that is where my frustrations seemed to start. You would punch people just to get it out of your system. The whole idea of it was so serious. You can't smile and you are not allowed to do this or that. Be here, stand there, shut up, sit down and always you need those exams, those eleven-plus exams, or scholarships or GCE. That's when the darkness came in.
I didn't like school. I think it was awful; the worst time of your life. 1 Certainly none in little houses in Liverpool and such cities.
The infants or juniors weren't bad, just because it was football, sports and all that, though there were times when they caned us. Once when I was eight or nine years old, Mr. Lyons (brother of the local insurance salesman) a teacher, caned me and got me on the wrist. It was swollen and when I got home, I tried to hide it but my father saw it and the next day he came down to the school and Mr. Lyons was called out of the class and my dad 'stuck one' on him.
The Big School, Liverpool Institute was a real pain in the neck. The teachers were either old war veterans or fresh out of college so they didn't know much anyway and if you see the picture of them you will see what I'm saying. I knew then they were not the type of people to teach but then 1 was unqualified to say so, however now, after all the years, I can tell they were not. The way they sent you out into the world was miserable. In my case, the testimonial to help me to get a job for the rest of my life, said: "1 cannot tell you what his work is like because he has not done any".
It was such a dump. It could have looked good, it could have had the paint scraped off the woodwork and been decorated like the Victoriana it was. J took Olivia to see it. Coming from California she couldn't believe it. There was night-school going on so we were able to wander around and look at all the rooms where I had been.
George's distaste for school—hatred even, resentment certainly — is pulling because quite soon after leaving, he became an eager, earnest seeker after information, truth and learning. It is odd also that a grammar-school boy — that most British elite—should have rejected all that this well-respected Liverpool school had to offer. Certainly there was encouragement at home to do well. Both his brothers completed full apprenticeships and his sister Louise passed all the necessary examinations (in those days, up to and including Higher School Certificate) to go to college and became, herself, a school teacher.
George, now, is a success in all the conventional meanings of that word, yet school was unable to strike a single chord in the boy who later, and as you read this now, craved and obtained available details on almost everything. Yet, he does not equivocate, in his recollection of secondary school in Liverpool in the nineteen fifties.
It moulded us into being frightened. There was a rot which set in. They say that children will learn something if it is exciting, but when
the rot sets in, you stop learning and being open to everything. That's what you have to watch. All that started when T went to the grammar school. All those logarithms, and square roots; and algebra was a terrible thing, x+3 over z =y. I would have learned Chinese or Sanskrit sooner than that. It seems to them to make sense, to the academics, the intellectuals. Algebra? 1 have no idea of what it means or where it came from. It seems to have no harmony or rhythm or basic feel because really you can understand people without knowing the same language. If you look at each other, or touch each other, you know, say have tea or something... and then, of course, even language can be learned. But algebra for me had nothing to do with 'reality'. I watch it now on Open University and 1 still can't connect.
Music? I even got out of music because at that point, although 1 liked music, in school it was holding your mouth like this.... He puckered up his mouth in a caricature of an amateur in an operetta, and continued: Well, you could play recorder or violin, and nowadays I think you can play guitars and all sorts of things, but not then.
To take the GCE (General Certificate of Education) at 16, we had first to pass three subjects in the 'mock' GCE. The first result in the 'mock' was art, which I passed. But that's because Stan Reid, the art teachet was nice, you see (he's the one with OM on his tee shirt on the Dark Horse album). Even though I wasn't that good at art, I got enough to pass the exam. I thought: 'Wow, Fantastic'.
Then the next result came. I failed, and the next. I failed, failed, failed, failed: I failed every one except art; even English Language which they had decided everyone could take regardless of what their marks had been, everyone except me! I got two per cent. Really, I didn't pass any and then they said, you can go, OK, you can go, everyone's off doing the exams,
They were ttying to put me into the next year with the class coming up behind me, to stay on and take the exams next year and I was in this class for one hour and I thought: "No thanks, squire, I'm not going to get into learning all these new people and their tricks" so I went over the railings to the movies and didn't go back until the last day to pick up my fine.
So... I didn't have any of those things, those qualifications. What
did my parents think? They didn't know what had been said because I burned my report and testimonial. I wish I had kept them now. It-would have been interesting in retrospect to see all those teachers' signatures and what they said about me. The headmaster said: "He has taken no part in any school activity whatsoever"... they kept going on like that, until I felt so bad and guilty that I had to burn it before my parents got home.
Like many of the schoolboys who had grown up after the Second World George Harrison could see no meaning in army cadet corps, still flourishing in British grammar schools.
The army. The fear of the army. I had already made my mind up when I was about twelve that I was not going into the army at any cost and then at school from about thirteen years old to sixteen or seventeen they had chose cadet guys. I could never figure it out. They never actually told you, "All right. Do it." There was never any recruiting or any bulletin boards, but every Monday afternoon, or Wednesday, you would look out and see these boys and they would
all be there marching up and down with the geography teachet or the maths teacher, all dressed as soldiers, going "hup, two, three four". It's not the sort of thing you should either want to like or to dislike. It shouldn't be there! I would think "WHAT?"
] never could discover why those normal things were normal. They always seemed crazy to me: everyone acting 'normally' but it was so like The Prisoner1. You never quite know what it is they are talking about. It is like assigning your nervous system up to somebody you don't know. I always knew there was something I was not going to get from school. I knew school wasn't the be all and end all of life's opportunities. That's why it didn't bother me too much. There was always that side of me in school which thought, 'well, if that's what it is, then I don't want it'. I knew—there was something. I was fortunate enough to feel there was an alternative.
The alternative was something which became very much bigger than anyone, anyone at all, could have imagined. Yet George's optimism in the face of a depressing school-life was not a vague idea that something would turn up. He had already begun to perform musk when he was very small and in a very small way {standing on a stool) but at school he had formed an alliance with an older boy {Paul McCartney) who was one of the passengers on the daily grind of school buses.
George recalls his early musical treats and influences, and painting in subdued colours pictures of Liverpool suburbanj council estate life in fascinating and occasionally excruciating detail, brings us to his meeting with McCartney {one year ahead of him at Liverpool Institute and who left one year after George, better qualified in a grammar school sense) who was quite soon to join with John Lemon in the Quarry men. They went through various combinations of names and personnel before emerging as the Beatles.
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