George's sister-in-law, Irene Harrison, wife of his eldest brother Harry remembers the years leading to his decision to 'have ago' at something different.
Irene was Harry's girl-friend when she first met George just after his
1 The classic Patrick McGoohan television allegory of a controlled environment. McGoohan's cry, in each of seventeen episodes; 'I am not a number. I am a free man'. It made a great impression on the Beatles and their generation.
thirteenth birthday, in 19 j6. She was seventeen then. She is still a close friend.
"The reason we hung around together was that Harry was away doing his National Service, and I suppose because I was the only child in our house, it was like having a little brother; and for George, I was maybe replacing bis older sister who had fust left home to go to Canada.
" We went out together to shows and that sort of thing. It was that rock V roll time and all the big acts, Lonnie Donegan and so on1, came to the Empire {theatre in Liverpool) and I'd get seats, and off we'd go. It was nice to have the company, you know. Then Harry and I got married and we had a flat in Liverpool and George came round there quite a bit, with Paul. Sometimes George would say 'Where are you going today?' and I would say iOh to so and so', and he'd say 'OK' and he'd go on his bike and I'd go on the bus. We got on very well together. He was a funny little fellow.
"Now he's keen on learning but everyone who wants to get out of school realises later that it was important. It depends who's teachingyou, though, and he really did hate school and he stayed off a lot. He would come round and say 'Don't tell my mum'. She used to give him his lunch money for the day and he used to waste it. I think he spent it on the pictures; he used to go to horror movies a lot, when they first came out,you know. I don't think he had very nice teachers but it is important to him to learn and everything sticks in his mind. He's lucky to have met so many people since, to learn from them. He could have left school and not gone any further.
"His mother and father were very tolerant, sensible, lovingpeople. They were so warm and brought you into everything. To go into their house was great. It was absolutely amazing. There's something about a bis. family that when you're an only one, you sort of sit back and weigh it all up. My own house was nice, always warm and kids trotting in and out but there is something about a big family. George has got a lot to thank his parents for, for the way he is today, liven up to last year'1 they.were very protective of him, because they knew he was vulnerable, a trusting soft-naturedperson. They worried a great deal about him and I don't think he knows how much. I know it's true from things they said. They worried constantly, I'm sure he was never aware of it. If he had known how much they worried about him, he'd have been amazed.
1 The Crew Cuts, Freddie Bell and Bell Boys, Frankie Lymori and ihc Teenagers,
the Everly Brothers, Eddie Cochran and many others.
2 1978, when George's father died. His mother had died eight years earlier.
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"Early on, his Dad had the idea they were all going to be... well, like this: Harry was a mechanic, Pete (George's elder brother) was a panel beater and welder, and George was going to be the electrician, and Dad had the idea they'd get a garage. 1 think he was going to manage it and have his three sons all working in a family business. "George blew it.
" Dad bought him a set of electrical screwdrivers one Christmas when George was working at Blacklers and he got quite worried because he said: 'Does he want me to stick at this? I think he does'
"He came round to see us, about twenty years ago, so he must have
t' • " '" 25«SSS been sixteen, and he said he had the
— "' ■ ' - - ~ chance of being with this group and
he wanted to know what Harry thought he should do. Harry said 'Have a go',you know. 'You're still young enough to do what you want to do, if you give it a year or two, you haven't missed out.' Harry and Pete had gone into a trade, straight from school and the things they might have had in their minds to do didn't materialise, you know. George was the last one to have the opportunity to say whether he wanted to do it or not. He went off to be in the group.
"Well, you know what it was like in Liverpool; if you had a trade you were made. If you wanted to do anything else,you were a bit bonkers. I don't think our sort of upbringing allowed you to have other ideas.
"But their Mum and Dad were not the sort of people to stop their children being themselves. I remember John (Lennon) getting a flat somewhere down by Liverpool Cathedral and the idea was they were all going to live in this flat. Her (George's mother's) idea was 'You go and do it, but уоu'll be back in two
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or three weeks' — which he was. It didn't last long, because there were no home comforts. She was very wise." |
I liked music since I can remember One Meat Ball, very early, Hong Kong Blues, that's one of the first songs I can remember (I must have been about four) a real bluesy song, Those were happy times. I went out with my parents from when I was a baby and we went out a lot. I remember being at one place or another, dancing at the club or at old Mrs. Such and Such. I remember as a baby standing on a little leather stool, singing 'One Meat Ball'.
When the Harrisons moved from the cosy constrictions of Arnold Grove, it spas because their names had finally reached the top of Liverpool's still endless re-housing list. They went first to ят Upton Green, a house on an estate owned by Liverpool Corporation out at Speke. Soon after this he left the junior school in Dovedale Road near Penny Lane and went to the Institute. The bus journey took, an hour; an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening.
It took from four o'clock to five to get home in the evening to the outskirts of the Speke estate and it was on that bus journey that I met Paul McCartney, because he, being in the same school, had the same uniform and was going the same way as I was so T started hanging out with him. His mother was a midwife and he had a trumpet.
Paul, as we have learned, remained at school to take examinations, and George, dissatisfied, but confident of an alternative, left school, but not before he had expressed himself unusually, in the matter of dress.
I didn't really have money to buy clothes that meant anything but at school I did manage to get 'out there' in the last year or so when I bought a white shirt with pleats down the front, black embroidery down the corners of the pleats and a black waiter's waistcoat. It was double breasted with drape lapels and Paul had given it to me. 1 think he got it from John, who got it from his stepfather Mr. Dykins. I also had one of our Harold's sports jackets dyed black and you could still see the checkered design underneath. I wore black trousers made into drainpipes and those blue suede pointed shoes. That was how it was: pretty cheap and sloppy.
Out of school, without a direction, already playing a guitar, but not well
enough to mean much outside a close circle of'friends, George borrowed small amounts of money off his father and eventually felt bad about it.
We were playing in a band, and this went on for about eight months, borrowing ten bob off my dad, and in the end he said: "Hadn't you better get a job or something?" So I went to the Corporation (Liverpool) but 1 didn't pass the test, I wasn't even good enough to get into the 'Corpy'.
I wasn't bothering, I wasn't trying, but after a lot of time, I had to—because it was getting too embarrassing, but it was a long time before I could get a job. I went down to the Youth Employment Centre by Dale Street. The man there said "OK, there's a job as a window dresser at Bladders1," so T thought '"Why not. ГЦ do that'. It was something to do, to make everybody happy. I thought 'I'm not going to be doing it for long', but I did think T was really skiving, not having a job. When I got to Blacklcrs they had given the job away. They said: "Go and see Mr. Peet in maintenance; he's looking fot an apprentice electrician". So I got a job cleaning all the lights with a paintbrush, all those tubes to keep clean, and at Christmas T kept the grotto clean and occasionally we broke the lifts so we could have a skive in the liftshaft and then also there was darts. I learned to play darts and I learned how to drink fourteen pints of beer and three rum and blackcurrants and eat two hamburgers (Wimpy s) all in one session. All this I learned and at night we were doing gigs and we got the gig to Scotland2. 1 went and told the boss at Blacklers "I'm leaving, I'm sorry". This was great, really nice to say. Still only seventeen and I resign! They really got their money's worth out of me; they sent me off to Bootle to lay one of those big ten-phase cables in a warehouse which they owned. Thirty bob3 a week I got.
As a band, we had been playing Hoylake (over the river in the Wirral peninsula) and places like that in the evening, or at least one gig a week which would earn an extra two pounds ten shillings
1 A much loved Liverpool landmark and department store. In Liverpool all
department stores are landmarks and have a personality, character, ranking, and
joke-quotient of their own; Blacklcrs scores high in everythiog except snob-stams.
It has always been cheerfully down-market.
2 This was a tour, regarded in Beatle-lore as a turning point, when the group
backed a known singer who styled himself johnny Gentle.
3 One pound fifty pence in decimal currency.
mischief and humour, which was appreciated and encouraged. George and Derek led him astray in the best possible way and he became one of George's closest friends and confidants, especially after Derek passed away in 1997. Brian and I now share the memories of those days along with the love and respect we all had for one another.
George and Derek found hilarity concocting captions unrelated to the photos they were supposedly describing, some of which made it into the book. The photo on Plate ХХШ shows George holding his sitar, but the caption provoked letters to Genesis complaining that the reader's copy must have the wrong photos because "George is not eating a cheese sandwich with anyone in the book".
And only fans of Monty Python's Flying Circus would understand the caption to Plate XVII—an obscure reference obviously meant to be shared with those of like humour. Prinz "Walter, a Python character, had wooden teeth. Compare the smile of Britain's ex-prime minister Harold Wilson and you get the idea. First choice for the caption to Plate XLII, showing another ex-prime minister, Edward Heath, at the piano with George standing behind, was:
(George:) "Do you know your balls are hanging out?"
(Ex-prime minister Heath:) "No, but you hum it and I'll play it".
It was an old joke but Derek and George were shameless. If I put my mind to it, I can still see and hear them laughing around the kitchen table and I miss them both dreadfully along with the joy their combined humour, intelligence and affection brought into my life.
For me the essence of this book is the lyrics and I believe they stand the test of time because they are written about man's eternal quest, dilemmas, joys and sorrows. George's lyrics were, in my opinion, the most spiritually conscious of our time, although George, in turn, usually referred to the lyrics of Bob Dylan when trying to make a point or elucidate his own feelings of isolation and frustration brought about by things in and beyond this life. Many times he said, "I wish I knew more words", but perhaps all the words in the world, including the Sanskrit and mantras integral to his vocabulary, could not fully express his depth of feeling and realisation.
As I have found with other songwriters, George didn't give much away when explaining his lyrics. Wasn't it enough that he laid his emotions
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and that was quite good in those days. My attitude to playing in the band was that that was the good part of life, that was what it was all about. Definitely the most pleasurable time. The people at Blacklers had known I played guitar, although I wasn't there long enough for them to know much about me. They found out about it, then they came and saw us a couple of times and then I was gone.
I have the impression that it was now grow-up-fast time. George, the failed schoolboy, the bad lad messing around at work, the scamp who knew he would be OK somehow, was becoming much more adnlt, playing rock n roll with the other lads. He went with John and Paul and Stuart Sutcliffe and Johnny Gentle to Scotland and remembers it partly as a pain in the neck.
At least we were getting famous, except it made us realise we didn't have any clothes. We looked a funny lot of buggers. We were dead rough and we were lucky to be there really, even though it wasn't very much. We travelled by van and you know there was a lot of fighting in those days, fighting for your inch. That's another thing. There's always fighting for your own space, even if it's only an inch. "Give us the credit for having an inch." So there was always a lot of that going on. That is why bands who make it rich quickly are quicker to get their own limousine. Eric wasn't with Ginger or jack1 in one car. They always had one each. I'll tell you this; if I could have afforded my own limousine, I wouldn't have gone in the van,
Now, today, if I could go on the private jet I wouldn't fly TWA. That would make everything better wouldn't it? If we could only go on the private Warner jet more often I'd give everyone concerned a free copy of this book and pay for the fuel.
Space, the importance of it, the battle for room to move and breathe and to be alone now and again, recurs in the book, as well it might. It is not a problem unique to George. But for now, in the ragged embryonic band, he is still based 1 The Cream: Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.
in Liverpool and we are still moving in and out of happy reminiscences of childhood. He is, however, soon to leave Liverpool for the first trip to Hamburg.
Liverpool was always OK. Calderstones Park. Do you remember that rock outside Wavertree baths and the library? It was a meteorite which had fallen out of the sky. 1 remember sliding on it. It was all polished, a big lump of black shiny rock; there were tunnels going up to Childwall Five Ways and so many other things...
And when it was holiday time, there were other simple pleasures in ordinary places not far away, country pleasures, seasides, nothing that cost much.
We went to Moreton1 (because my ma had a friend there, Phyllis Anderson) and Bidston Hill not far away, New Brighton, Southport2, and of course the big one, Blackpool, only once or twice, to see the 'lights'. We went all over Wales, staying in little places, nice old stone cottages with slate roofs. Probably they cost next to nothing to rent. You could actually live a whole happy life in a place like that.
Liverpool produced some funny little fellows: insurance salesmen, I never knew what it was about but they came every week, different ones; maybe there'd be two, then a priest would come and just knock and you'd give them money and they'd go away. On the corner of this place I lived, in Upton Green, Speke, there was a guy Mr. Bewley, and he started coming round the houses selling fish from a box and then after a while he had a handcart and then after that he got a truck with a flatback and he came round selling potatoes and all kinds of stuff.
Then he got an old Qosville single-decker bus parked round the back on a piece of wasteland and he had quite a place going there, and then he bought himself a Standard Vanguard, followed by a Ford Consul and then a Zephyr Zodiac and then something happened and they were all wiped out. Well.
Years later the Harrison family, having been on another housing list, made another move, away from Speke. They went to live in jj4 Macketf s Lane near
1 A plain little part-resort bat mostly a residential, light industrial town with
few amenities on the Wirral/Mersey coast.
2 'Common' and 'posh' resorts respectively, suitable for day-trips, more than for
overnight stays.
Woolton and it was while they
ШШШШЩЩЩШ шге limn& then that Geor&e re~
members his career was 'getting going'. It was from Mackett's Lane that he first 'left home' in the sense that he went away to k — to Hamburg for the first of many visits with the young Beatles.
Mackett's Lane was a nice, council-owned house {much preferred to Upton Green where George had spent so many of his school years but never, because of the urgency of his career, as much 'home' as Upton Green) where George's parents lived until the palmy days of 1966 when, with all the children married and settled elsewhere and he rich and famous, they moved into a pretty bungalow near Warrington, an honest town with some character of its own but chiefly known as being about halfway between the great cities of Liverpool and Manchester.
Chapter II
1 RIAN Epstein's part in this shadow play has been described many Mimes. My own involvement with him was as interviewer for the \ Daily Express, ghostwriter for his autobiography A Cellarful of Noise and then (for twice the Express salary) I became, in 19 64, his personal assistant and Joan and I and our four children followed Brian and the Beatles on the trail to the metropolis. All of our provincial lives were over. We had no choice and maybe, anyway, it was time to go crackers. Hold tight. Close your eyes.
Now on Epstein's staff, I was writing his book, as well as George's column, newly negotiated at a hundred and fifty-pounds a week, and I was Brian's assistant and Beatles' press officer. It was 7964 and it was a very hard and sometimes unhappy year. But I am ahead of the story.
There was a feeling we all had, built into us all that something was going to happen. I felt extremely positive. It was just a matter of time and how to get it happening. Everything had seemed to take years and years. That is where Brian was good. He knew how to get it happening. "We had felt cocky and certain but when Epstein said "you're going to be bigger than Elvis you know", we thought "well, how big do you have to be? I mean, I doubt that". That seemed outrageous yet he did have the right attitude.
The Beatles moved to some hotels. Some crummy places. I forget. I remember the main place we stayed was the Sloane Square Hotel, near the theatre. Then we moved to the President Hotel. John was already married and later Paul went to live at Jane Asher's parents' house in Wimpole Street and Ringo and I got a flat in Green Street, Mayfair.
Brian was good. Just before he died he was on the verge of possible
realisation which might have brought him to another level. The only time that Brian and I had a real good talk about serious matters, outside of business affairs, was just before he died at the last house he lived in, in Sussex, 1967. He asked all kinds of things and wanted to know what T was doing in India and I tried to tell him, and he was very interested.
Brian Epstein died over the final holiday weekend towards the end of the extraordinary "acid summer" of 1967; this was the summer when the Beatles met Mabarishi Mahesh Yogi, when the Monterey Pop Festival and kindred (if smaller) events consolidated a touching belief among the young — and then were hundreds of thousands of young people all over the world who shared this belief — that with sufficient love and faith, the world could be saved from the mistakes inherited from its "straight" masters. Today, on the terrifying edge of the i$8os, this simple approach with its "flower-power" slogans: brotherhood, love, peace and music (usually followed by the word 'Man', borrowed from an earlier black] ia?? generation) is material for jokes and it is dismissed as naive. Maybe it was.
Yet at the end of that of all summers, Brian Epstein was dead. Although he had been adjusting to a more open and sharing perception of life with the Beatles, his usefulness as Father was diminishing, in the natural course of events. The Beatles were no longer touring. Their final concert had been held in 1 (/66, in Candlestick Park, San Francisco. They were all, apparently, settled with women-folk.
With George Martin to keep an eye on them, they were second to none as masters of the recording studio, so Brian's role was changing. I talked to him at his house in Sussex, in May, in that last summer when Joan and I flew over from f^os Angeles for his housewarming party — a psychedelic affair which can be described only (and I shall not use the phrase elsewhere) as 'mind-blowing'.
He was extremely happy — and this was before we had 'taken anything' that evening—-and reflective and he realised that now that the Beatles were established as one of the world's great treasures, with Sgt Pepper soon to re-confirm their supremacy, he had time to expand other interests, set up a country house, manage what was a very busy and profitable international group of companies (with his partners, Nat Weiss1 and Robert Stigwood) and still take care of
1 A New York attorney, manager and now owner of his own record company. At the end of Brian's life, Nat was his closest friend and confidante.
the Beatle details, give the sort of care which had at first lifted them just those inches above their Liverpool origins and contemporaries, and allowed them to shine on most of the available world.
His death was sudden, shocking and almost certainly accidental. He drank too much (quite a few of us did) and he took too many drugs (again, so did others among us — in those days) and he died of a combination of both. An open verdict was returned at the inquest, there was no presumption of suicide then, or now. I raise the word only to lower it, and maybe to bury it. It happens every day. End of sermon.
Things happened quickly after we moved to London. Kingo and 1 moved from the first flat to another, better one downstairs, and then moved to Whaddon House, to the flat below Brian's, because we couldn't get the lease renewed in Green Street because of all the litter caused by fans and because of the fans themselves. The fans, all shapes, all manner of humanity, were everywhere. We couldn't get In and out.
I had met Pattie by this time and she was with me in Whaddon House, and after a time we moved to Esher because I had to get out of town. That was when the novelty of being popular wore off.
George saw that it was time to escape and moved to Esher (which became a Monty Python joke town representing so much that was post-fifties, thrusting,
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property-Lopins merchant-
Tory-voting
London Britain) because
the Beatles' accountant
lived in Weybridge nearby,
and had found him a
house.
It was the first one I saw, thought 'that'll do', moved in and then Ringo and John came
down that way, both in St. George's Hill, helping to make St. George's Hill worth what it is today. Pattic and I "were married and stayed in Esher until 1969. The house there on the Claremont Estate was really an extension of living in London except that it was outside and it had a wall round it which was necessary.
Necessary. Everywhere the Beatles lived in the nimteen-sixties, everywhere their parents lived, everywhere they had offices or their officers had offices,
(' у i/ jj jj ->-■ '
everywhere they made films or records, wherever they spent their leisure or were rumoured to spend it, was surrounded, attended, placed under 24 hour surveillance by fans. They were mainly, but not all, young people, the bard core were the people who were buying, the records but there were a lot of loonies in there too, attending the concerts, screaming in their tens of thousands at the airports. As the years passed the numbers dwindled, inevitably, but well into the nineteen-seventies the central core remained, outside the Apple offices, and outside EMI studios and they became known {their own name for themselves) as the Apple Scruffs. We were all very fond of them and George wrote a song for them, and included it on an album.
But in the hey-day, the mad days, the presence of the fans in vast swarming buying numbers made the living of normal lives impossible. As George has said, by таби the novelty of being, famous had worn off. He was not to enjoy the fame in the same way again.
In a nutshell, if you get all that persecution of being born in a war, vibrations like that to set you on your way wondering what it's all about, you can see where it all comes out. I mean in your dreams. You know, "when the day (or life) winds you up, relax with a cup of Ovaltine". So it's the unwinding of your nervous system. The corresponding experience to what winds you up comes out in your dreams. To write a song then, even one like Don't Bother Me, helps to get rid of some subconscious burden. Writing a song is like going to confession. That was also the result of the lsd really, writing songs to try and find out, to see who you are.
I have asked myself what right I have to write a book, this book, I Me Mine. It is a medium I suppose and we either do it well or do it badly. What right have I to think I should even be saying this? All you can do in the end is to keep on doing the best you can for yourself. You can't control anything. You have to guard things the
best way you can but there is nothing much you can do, except to try to keep unattached.
In 1969, George and Pattie moved into a beautiful, Gothic house and park in Oxfordshire, of which more later. This move brought him a relationship with the mind of the man mho designed the house and created the gardens, Sir Frank Crisp, a kindly, brilliant, errant and eminent Victorian baronet of whom George frequently talks as if he were alive.
Sir Frank helped my awareness; whatever it was I felt became stranger, or found more expression by moving into that house, because everything stepped up ot was heightened.
The climb, because it was all bigger stakes, was difficult. I mean, it just didn't stop. There were disasters all around at that time. Some were great, some were awful, some were drawn out, painful, miserable. Some wete not disasters after all, but the thing about Sir Frank with his advice, like: 'scan not a friend with a microscopic glass...' I mean that helped me actively to ease up on whomsoever I thought I loved, gave me that consciousness not to hang on to the negative side of it, to be more forgiving.
George, blessed or cursed with his exact, detailed, long, long memory, recalls all deeds, good and ill, committed, omitted, by, for and against him and his loved ones and frequently his first response is to attack. Yet, over the years, the solid decency of his childhood reinforced by his search for self-realisation, and much supported by the wry, warm little mottoes, either carved in the stone and wood or scattered in the gardens by Sir Frank, have all assisted George to seek another n>ay around an inclination to grumpiness.
I was only letting out agony. I have also been grumpy at times because there were a lot of things we had to do collectively that didn't grab me personally (in Beatle days) that deeply. There was never anything, in any of the Beatle experiences really, that good; even the best thrill soon got tiring. You don't really laugh twice at the same joke, do you, unless you really get silly. Anyway, when you suffer it makes you grumpy.
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