This book is dedicated to gardeners everywhere. 3 страница

George has never been short of friends, from all over the world, from all

manner of professions and skills and sometimes from nothing that one could identify as ^ca background' but simply from a recounition.

There is a lecture where Yogananda was talking In 1939 in a Self-Realisation Fellowship book about friends explaining that the vibra­tions the soul sets up, and the love and equally the hate we feel causes the attraction of souls to one another—from one life to another. Those people who you know much more easily or more quickly are people whom you've known in other lives. It is very specific. There's more to this than meets the eye. It's like Dominic¹, he always seemed very familiar. It's great when you can spot them straight off. He's the first person I've seen all the way through from birth who I felt I knew straight away.

There was more good than evil in be­ing a Beatle but It was awful being on the front page of every­one's life, every day. What ah intrusion into our lives. Remember when John said we had smoked a reefer in Buckingham Palace? What really happened was that it was the Palace, and it was heavy with those big rooms and all the guards and lines and lines of people and such seriousness and the guards were drilling us. They were saying: "OK, you come along here and you do this and then you stop and then you bow. Then you walk forward and then you bow and then you know you don't say

¹ Dominic Taylor, youngest son of Joan and Derek Taylor.

anything unless she says something to you, and then you back off and then you bow again, then you clear off."

Well, it was very heavy, and we went to the lavatory and simply smoked a cigarette and then later your mind makes it heavier than it was and the cigarette turns into a reefer and by the time Allan Williams¹ tells the story it'll be that we had a bomb in there!

Anyhow, it was definitely a dream being at the Palace. It was good as an experience though.

But the Dick Lester version of our lives in Hard Day's Night and Help! made it look fun and games: a good romp? That was fair in the films but in the real world there was never any doubt. The Beatles were doomed. Your own space, man, it's so important. That's why we were doomed because we didn't have any. It is like monkeys in a 200. They die. You know, everything needs to be left alone.

That is the trouble with partnerships; you get roped in on other people's trips. Completely roping everyone into a whim. Then you start getting into it and they can't handle it any more. It is very important to try and minimise the aggravation and spaciness in our lives.

But that was impossible in the beginning. Those tours in the United States were crazy. The first big American trip, when we arrived in San Francisco, in 1964, they wanted to do a ticker tape parade and I remember saying "No, no, no". That imagery of people being shot. Kennedy, Beatlemama, madness. Talk about pressures!

I remember going to Chicago. There had been riots in the black ghettocs, and as we drove through, the cops, tense, trying to be smart, directing the traffic, no hands on the handlebars, were falling off their motorbikes. As we came through in a limousine, one would go ahead to the next junction, stop the traffic, we'd then cross and the other one would go ahead and so on. These guys would be so flash, so 'into the mania'. They drove those big Harleys, holding both hands up, with a loud whistle in their mouths, sun-shades on, braking and skidding off their bikes. They were like madmen.

Then in Montreal, they were burning British Hags and we were supposed to stay the night there and somebody reported a death threat

¹ From Liverpool, an. early 'manager' of the early Beatles.

and thoughts on the line for everyone to hear? I finally stopped asking George what his songs were about because his answers never seemed to satisfy my questions. "Liv, I just needed something to rhyme with 'love', so I used 'glove'".

We relate music and words to our own personal life experience, but some of George's songs are truly revealed only through a deeper reali­sation of meaning and by allowing the melody, the lyrics, intonation and phrasing to seep in to tell the story, unfiltercd by our own interpreta­tions- Last summer we were discussing his songwriting and he told me that whatever thought or theme inspired a lyric usually metamorphosed by the end of the song, sometimes before the pencil even reached the paper, as in Your Love Is Forever. He began that song by writing about the days we were first immersed in our love affair with Hawaii and each other but the love in the opening verse soon turned to Divine Love. George wrote, "My love belongs to who can see it" and his songs belong to those who can really hear them. George's lyrics often captivated us with one image and then led us to a loftier realm, transcending his initial inspiration.

Reading this book 1 could hear him singing each arid every song and seeing the handwritten lyrics again, some on the stationery of places we were staying at the time, vivified my recollection of those moments. I sec my handwriting on the airmail envelope of Learning How to Love You. I wrote the first line of lyrics down for him as he was working out the melody. Then he took the pen from my hand and wrote words that would later guide him back to the thoughts he wanted to express. Leon Russell once told me I should write down all the amusing things George said, and often, I did. Some of them ended up in songs and some were just plain endearing, such as, "1 like being master of nothing. It makes a change from all the smart arses". On other occasions it might be some­thing someone else had said that would catch George's attention, like drummer Jim Kcltner who often told George he was a "soft touch", which inspired the song.

Whatever the inspiration, it was always a privilege being witness to the birth of a song. You could see the creative force of the muse at work. George would be playing guitar, ukulele or piano and suddenly become intently focused as if she had tapped him on the shoulder to warn him it

in the papers, directed at Ringo, so we did the concert and got on the plane and flew oft.

Yet even then, where could we fly to? The next concert was to have been two days later in Jacksonville, in Florida, but there was a hurricane hitting there, so we were redirected to Key West where the runway was not supposed to be big enough for our plane, the Electra prop jet. Chaos. Montreal to Key West!

Dallas was another madness. That was less than a year after Kennedy's death. It was a terrible arrival there. It is no wonder they got Kennedy in Dallas. I remember pulling up in the lim­ousine at the hotel and they had brought us to a truck-loading ramp, so when we jumped out of the car and ran, it was about six feet high, off the ground.

The next time we went to Texas, we went to Houston and our advance man advised the police on the problems they might meet, and said "you should do this and this" and the cop, their chief, said "That was Dallas—we're not like that down here. Mind your own business." So he put only five cops on duty to wait for our arrival at the airport. As the wheels touched the runway, our pilot had to switch the engines off and coast, because there were thousands of people all running down the runway. The pilot just parked the big grey job (the jet plane) there and within minutes, with us all inside, the crowds had climbed on the wings and they were knocking on the outside of the windows, and then falling off the wings.

You know all those people who have been stuck in cars and people have been pushing them and rocking them, but on a plane! Then they finally brought that truck with a very high back and we climbed out into it. The truck drove with the back about twelve feet off the ground through all the crowds to the limousines but they were all right

behind us and around us and we had to jump the twelve feet to get into the cars.

And on our days off, our dentist was putting lsd into our coffee, yet people wrote that when everybody else was growing up, the Beatles were just fooling about being rock 'n⁵ roll stars. You know, people have written things like that.

God, you don't know how close we could have been. Everybody had escapes. I met a guy in about '72 or '73, flying out to Los Angeles. I had been in New York. I got on the plane and settled down. The newspapers in the back of the seats all had a front-page story of some other plane crash, so I was trying not to look at that and then a guy from a seat up ahead came up and said: "Hey, George, remember me. I was the pilot of the Electra that you rented for the Beatle tours, from American Flyers Airlines". I said "Oh yes, how are you doing?" and he sat by me and said "you'd never believe that plane we had, with bullet holes, and how close we came..." I said "well don't tell me; tell me when we get to LA".

So later he told me what had had happened. He said that when we had finished the tour, the plane, its tail, its wings were fuli of bullet holes, and he said: "these crazy guys... they were at the end of the runway trying to pot us off." Jealous boy friends had come down with pistols and rifles trying to kill us.

The owner of the airline was a man called Pigman. He invited us to his ranch in Arkansas and we flew from Dallas in the Electra to an intermediate airpott where Pigman met us in a little plane with the one wing, on top, and with one or maybe two engines. It was just so like Buddy Holly, that one, that was probably the closest we came to that sort of musicians' death. I mean it nearly crashed because it didn't, but the guy had a little map on his knee, with a light, as we were flying along and he was saying, "oh, J don't know where we are", you know, and it was pitch dark and there are mountains all around and he's rubbing the windscreen trying to get the mist off and anyway, finally he found where we were and so we landed in a field with tin cans on fire to guide us in.

I remember the brief holiday at the Pigman ranch. We were resting before the Beatles* final concert of the first great tour, a mistaken endeavour planned

for charity for the Paramount Theatre (or Theater) on Broadway, the same Paramount of Benny Goodman and oj Frank Sinatra in the nineteen-forties. The Pigmans were good hosts with hundreds of acres and many horses but for the most part we took stay-awake pills and played cards and did ourselves no good. Mr. Pigman died the following year, together with the crew and too servicemen flying the same American Flyers Airline turbo-jet we had used which crashed over middle America. Mr. Pigman was the pilot.

George never cared for flying, and in mid-sixties times would avoid it whenever possible. Now that he is more philosophical, he deals with it more comfortably, considering his options carefully, using good private planes with much alacrity and great interest in the machine and its potential; and he limits his time in the air by using Concorde.

Many of his recollections of Beatle days appear to be linked to flying and airports and the miseries thereof now that all the lustre is off air travel. It may be that his desire for real control over his to-and-fro (his passion for

driving himself in his own safe if fast cars) com­pounded by his knowledge of the limitations and variables of powerful machines, make him feel vulnerable. Yet frail Grannies, making their first flight, often on, say, some appalling journey from Inverness, via London and much of Europe and most of Asia to Australia, once over the horrors of modern airports (searches, documentation, Customs and so forth) are quite happy to be hurtling across the sky in a ton of metal at 100 miles an hour eating chicken fashioned out of old face-cloths and watching the worst films ever made.

Sydney, Australia, in 1964 was another hassle altogether. We drove round and round the airport under a tropical storm in an open truck so that the crowds could see us, waving to them, and then after we reached the city they wouldn't let us into the big hotel and so we went into the one opposite, a motor hotel.

At the airport they had put us into cars with our names on, John,

Paul, George, Ringo individually, in huge Dayglo paint. They were advertising BMC¹; the cars were Minis, together with an Austin Princess with "Beatles" right along the side in Dayglo. And this rubbish was all happening while cloaks we had had made in Hong Kong were shrinking, several inches in minutes, on our backs and suits we had had made in гд. hours also in Hong Kong the day before, were 'melting'—the cloth, the lining, the stitching, everything vanishing. Then after the drive round and round in the truck in the rain each of us was put in a Mini with our name on it. Thanks, The promoter had done a deal I believe. Brian told him he would nail him. We were very into not letting people use us for advertising.

Beatlemania. I would never want that again. Really it's awful but sometimes it was good, whatever... it's like "Cuckoo's Nest", you know, where you are sane in the middle of something and they're all crackers. You know, the guards and nurses and the government, everybody. There was definitely a point where jt became obvious that we were not crackers but that all we had to do was come to town and people would all break the shop windows and the cops would all fall off the motor bikes.

Everyone fell into the Beatle trip. We didn't encourage it. The problem was that people got into the 'trip' and started "Hey, man­ning". Like, "Hey, man, this" and "Hey, man, that". Say, "Hey, man, Elvis is at the Roxy". The record business is all based on getting into the trip; that's how it is. Making the trip all big, you know, 'BIG*.

The business side is trying to take something and then talk about it so much so as to spread more and more ripples until they become waves, whereas my own personal life, having been all waves, has to change to a normality where I try to stop the waves, quieten them down to make myself a calm little pool. It is hard work trying to do that with your life. One is trying however, while at the same time the people you are involved with are sometimes trying to stir it up. There is such a collision.

¹ British Motor Corporation. Now, inexplicably and inelegantly named BX.

In an interview with Melody Maker, in London, George went over the ground again, as best he could. He had been asked, not aggressively but with thai rather plaintive 'but surely...' tone, if be and the other Beatles were not removed jrom reality.

He replied: Reality is a concept. Everybody has their own reality (if they are lucky). Most people's reality is an illusion, a great big illusion. You automatically have to succumb to the illusion that ^!I am this body'. I am not George. I am not really George¹. T am this living thing that goes on, always has been, always will be, but at this time T happen to be in 'this' body. The body has changed; was a baby, was a young man, will soon be an old man, and I'll be dead. The physical body will pass but this bit in the middle, that's the only reality. All the rest is the illusion, so to say that somebody thinks that we, the ex-Beatles, are removed from reality is their personal concept. It does not have any truth to it just because somebody thinks it. They are the concepts which become layer upon layer of illusion. Why live in the darkness all your life? Why, if you are unhappy, if you are having a miserable time, why not just look at it. Why are you in the darkness? Look for the light. The light is within. That is the big message.

The interviewer asked if it was not unreasonable to expect people who lived everyday lives to have philosophical insight, surrounded as they were by everyday events.

Why? I am surrounded by the everyday. I have as many potential worries as most people. Just because you make a record or two doesn't mean you don't have any worries.

Nobody ever writes to some invisible saint in the Himalayas whom nobody can ever see. 1 mean he's up there. Just because you can't see him or haven't heard of him doesn't mean he isn't there. Nobody ever writes and says "who do you think you are, what a cushy life being a yogi living in a cave or walking along the Ganges, eating mangoes".

That's more fun than being an ex-Beatle.

Out of the lsd madness (and there were few horrors) there came a few 'zaps'. It made me laugh. I'd never thought about, couldn't even say the word 'God'. It embarrassed me, but you know it was so

¹ Karma name only.

strange, GOD, and it washed away all these fears and doubts and little things that hang you up.

That is why I said "God. My sweet Lord, I really want to see you, I really want to know you. "Why should I be paranoid all my life? Wash away my fears." Since then it has been a matter of trying to hold on to that little shining light which one's lucky to have glimpsed, and manifest the light more and more and more until you become that. And it's hard. Sometimes you just want to yell about God because it's right there, but the moment you try and explain it, it's like rabbiting.

I'm really quite simple. I don't want to be in the business full-time, because I'm a gardener. I plant flowers and watch them grow. I don't go out to clubs and partying, 1 stay at home and watch the river flow,

Chapter III

T is hard to explain that there is a choice, never mind to get it into a book. Anyway, there is one thing I have learned and that is not to dress uncomfortably, in styles which hurt: winklepicker shoes that cripple your feet and tight pants that squash your balls. Indian clothes are better. Talking of India...

We have not yet talked much of India. In icj6j there were hints. In Help, in a scene where they were riding bicycles, they were sitting on the corner oj a road m Nassau waiting for the camera crew to line up another shot.

The Goodyear blimp was up above and we were waiting for instructions and Swami Vishnu Devananda walked up; he was the first Swami I had met and he obviously knew we were there.

It was also my birthday, 25 February 1965, I was zz, and he told me years later that whilst meditating he had a strong feeling that he should make contact. He gave us a book and I did not look at it in detail for some time, but at a later date (I was getting to the point when I wanted to go back to India, to Rishikesh, because from what 1 had gathered, Rishikesh is very good fot me) 1 found the book that he had given me all those years before and I opened the cover and it had a big OM written on it. He was from the Forest Hills Academy of Rishikesh. It's a small world after all.

To the disgust oj the secular, to the pu^lement oj the good people oj Liverpool who were wondering where the moptop jrow Speke had vanished, and in defiance oj that arch blend oj dismay and glee with which The Press point at the unusual in society, George Harrison (as is well known) became deeply involved with India and things Indian, musical, smellable, edible and spiritual.

order to arrive there, however, it is necessary for him to describe what was the worst 'nightmare' of the entire Beatles' tour experience, and, inevit­ably, we find ourselves on more aeroplanes. The nightmare was Manila, Peter Лsher, who had been to the Philippines with Gordon Waller said it might not be a good experience. Understatement, The passage to India began, curiously enough, in Germany where fame, that dangerous bird, had first brushed their cheek, and to which country, in 1966, they returned, in great style.

We played Munich, and took a train up to Hamburg. We were on the train the Queen had used, with marble bath-tubs and all rhat. We stayed the night in a nice castle-hotel and then flew to Tokyo. On the way we were diverted to Anchorage, Alaska, and stayed there, waiting about eight hours in a hotel because there was a hurricane or something hitting Tokyo and then we flew into Japan, into the aftermath of violence.

That was strange because there had been students rioting against the cops and it was like being back in World War Two because the police had those little steel helmets I remember we used to have left over from the war (with gas masks). Here were all these strange little people in weird cars and the flyover into Tokyo centre going on for ever and they took us straight to the Tokyo Hilton and wouldn't let us out.

I did not set foot outside the Hilton except for doing the concert. Everything was timed perfectly. You know... the guy came to the door, chhhunggggg, we all left by elevator, down to the garage, everything was stopped, out on to the street, all the traffic at a stand­still, out to the Budokan, cops on every corner. We went there, did the show, came back, same thing next day, amazing. When I say 'we' I am generalising. Paul and John did escape for about twenty minutes. Rlngo and I didn't. We were 'prisoners'. Somehow.

Manila. One of the nastiest times I have had. It relates to the sort of life we were leading. We were open to that sort of unhappiness. They took us right off the plane (these gorillas, huge guys, no

smiles, white shirts, short sleeves) and then immediately confiscated out 'diplomatic bags'¹, and took just the four of us, John, Paul, Ringo and me, without Brian or Neil or Mai², and then removed us to a boat in Manila Bay surrounded by a ring of cops, guns everywhere, and for the first time ever no Neil or Mai. God! What do we do now? It was terrible tropical heat and straight away we thought we were all busted because we always carried our hand-luggage with us, with our shaving gear, cigarettes and various other things. We thought they would go right through them, find all the dope³ in our bags and there we were on this boat, in this on cabin, surrounded by cops. So depressing.

It lasted two and a half hours and then Brian Rpstein arrived, going mad, demanding they let us off and finally they did so and put us in our hotel. More guns; everywhere we looked, guns.

We don't know why they took our bags, we don't know why they took us off the plane, nor why they put us on the boat. No one would explain anything. This сгагу security thing, just the four of us with nobody. It was the first time we had ever been cut off from Brian and our 'roadies'.

I should be stated that for the Beatles, during the years of mania-supreme 1963 to 1$67 inclusive {and

¹ Personal hand baggage, from which they had never been parted and which had never been searched; Beatles' privilege.

² Neil Aspinall and Mai Evans, old friends from Liverpool, Neil from Liverpool
Institute, Mai from the Cavern Club, then inseparable road managers, familiar with
every need and mood, crucial in an emergency which this clearly was. Poor Mai
died in Los Angeles in 1975. Neil is still fit, well and happy.

³ Cannabis, nothing 'nasty'.

was coming. His head would tilt as if listening to something only he could hear and his hand moved as if it was finding its way to the next chords, like a divining rod finding water, I would be quiet and try not to interfere with the process, although on occasion I have heard myself on some tape blabbering in the background about what to cook for dinner. Oh, I could kick myself when listening to those tapes. George was so patient and concentrated. He just kept playing, whether dinner was hap­pening or not.

We were in the British Virgin Islands in 1976 when George wrote Soft Touch. His short paragraph about the writing of that song describes the mood and what was going on around us, but for me there is so much more on that page, both in sentiment and notation—just tiny notes that speak to me. At the bottom of the second page of the Soft Touch lyrics he printed "Bridge (noch ein mat)" —German for 'one more time'. George used this phrase occasionally from the time that they (the Beatles) used to shout it from the stage when they played in Hamburg.

I remember Eric Idle joined us on that holiday. One afternoon we were playing a song on a small cassette player, when I answered a knock on our door. Television producer Norman Lear introduced himself and told us that the music was too loud and disturbing his wife who was try­ing to write. (The year was 1976, before the days of laptops, so we'd been holidaying with the clacking of the typewriter next door and were hop­ing she was writing letters and not a book.) This minor conflict briefly put a damper on things, since it wasn't as much fun knowing the people next door were grumbling about us. The next day Norman found out it was George Harrison playing the music and again knocked on our door, this time apologising and pleading for George to play as much music as he liked, not that he and liric needed much encouragement, since they always travelled with acoustic guitars.

Listening to his recordings has also taken me through the agony of his absence even as the sound of his voice and slide guitar bring comfort. George singing was always beguiling to me and countless times I was his audience of one. Run of the Mill was a song I often asked him to play, the lyrics so wise, especially the reminder that, "Tomorrow when you rise, another day for you to realize me" ("me" being God)—words that George not only wrote but lived. The songs have also conjured up memories

probably before and after that only less so) one essential safeguard was the omnipresence oj a small, experienced and subtle retinue during any public exposure. Tivo road managers, Brian Epstein {or bis nominee) and maybe a press representative might be the maximum on most occasions and very often Neil or Mai would suffice. But somebody bad to be around to take care of business and to keep away a crowd of people, many of whom were mad as hatters.

It is also worth saying that, for three reasons, in general Beatles' security was minimal and restrained. One reason was that each of the four had a distaste for the concept of servants. Л second reason is that these were the nineteen-sixties, before the growth of terrorism, kidnappings, etc.; and a third is that in those years, pre-Monterey, pre-meaningfulness, 'pop' had not become 'rock! with all of its swagger, presumption, poses and teams of retainers.

Those bags, that's what first freaked me out because at the airport they were shouting "leave the bags, leave the bags, leave them". Drive on to one boat, then another. We got to the hotel however and the bags turned up and we had not been busted.

But the atmosphere! Manila represented all that Americana of guns and cars and violence but they didn't seem to have the veneer of North Americans to balance it out a little. They were thick and violent.

We did the concert, but things were definitely not right. Firstly, the place we played was supposed to be about 70,000 seats and so much for admission, but the promotor just opened the 100 acre site and let the whole world in.

He had made a number of deals, obviously, with other people, without telling us, and he had probably been lying to President Marcos as well because next day, we were woken by people saying "you are supposed to be at the Palace" and we said "no we're not" and they said "yes you are" and they turned on the television and the commentators were saying "well they're still not here yet" and there were rows and rows of people in long wide marble corridors, lines of adults and children all dressed in their best clothes, and live the commentators were saying "well, they're still not here, the fab four are still not here". Could we have jumped into our black suits and gone? No, we had no chance to do that. It was the first time we had heard of it and it was too late.

So we watched ourselves not turning up, until, finally, we hadn't turned up and the President's wife, Mrs. Marcos, had given up (Marcos himself was away) and then it was all in the papers and on television and radio news—"Beatles snub first family!"

Дата добавления: 2015-09-29