tt was reported really viciously and nobody would give us cars or taxis or anything to get us to the airport. Mai and Neil were doing what they could to look after us, but all local services were withdrawn.
Somehow we scrounged some transport to get to the airport. Beatlemania was still going on around us, with all the kids screaming and trying to grab hold of us, but with all the adults and thugs punching us, throwing bricks and kicking us as we passed. The airport had nights of stairs to climb and we had to carry all the equipment, the amplifiers, the instruments, the suitcases and wait in line.
The officials wouldn't let us through and they encouraged and enabled the crowd to molest us. So, anyway, we finally got through that bit and went into the lounge where you wait for the plane and then these guys showed up again—the gorillas with white short-sleeved shirts, the ones who made us leave our bags when we arrived.
This time they were just moving around, hitting out, going 'bang', they were getting close to us, but they were hitting on our people, and I spotted that, and one said "you get over there" so we would move over there, and another would come up the other side and be banging and say "get over there". It was a matter of trying to see them all at the same time and keep moving away from them all.
Finally we were on the plane but we waited there for a long time and then a call came "Would Mr. Epstein and Mr. Evans get off the plane". Mai was almost in tears and saying "tell Lil I love her".
Mai thought he was going to be marooned there. Then, in the end, they took most of the money off Brian (our earnings in Manila) before they would let the plane leave. That was the first time I was ever sitting on a plane saying "come on, let's go".
These events, had they happened to ordinary citizens, would have been frightening enough but for the Beatles there were two additional factors. By
1966 they were maybe the most famous people in the world and therefore {a) accustomed to special and friendly treatment however hysterically administered and (b) they were vivid targets when the mob turned ugly. The price of being fab was becoming high indeed.
The funny thing about that trip is that when we planned it I had decided that I was going to go to India on the way back, to have a look and to pick up a sitar. Neil said he would come with me. I had bought earlier a crummy sitar in London and played the Norwegian Wood bit. That wasn't the point. I did want to go to India. Neil was coming because I didn't want to be on my own but during the early part of the tour, in Japan, the others said "I'll go too, oh, I think I'll go too" so in the end, everybody was going to India, except, maybe Brian and Mai who was with the equipment.
But by the time we had got through the Manila experience, nobody wanted to get off the plane when it arrived at Delhi, they thought "no
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thanks, no more changes, let's get home!" They didn't want to go through some other strange country and so I said to Neil "Are you still coming?" and he said "Yes", so we got our hand baggage and prepared for Delhi and then a steward or stewardess came down the plane and said: "Sorry, we've already sold all your seats to London, so you'll have to get off" and so they all got off. We all did. I must say I knew that India would be OK, but after that
Manila thing I also thought it would be better to go straight home. Anyway, the choice was taken away and the Beatles were in India.
I thought "Well anyway, India won't ever have heard of the Beatles", because somehow 1 always thought of it as so remote. And rhen we got off the plane, in the atmosphere of Delhi, the smell and humidity and all that and it was night-time and suddenly there were all these black faces shouting: "The Beatles, the Beatles", and I thought "Oh no! Not again".
They drove us to the hotel, a strange journey because in India there are so many people everywhere that it always looks as if something drastic has happened, and in New Delhi, being built by the British, it has dual-carriageway streets, and roundabouts. It looks like Hunts Cross and all the people sit out on these roundabouts in the evening and all down the streets and there were kids on mopeds, shouting and following us.
Tt turned out to be a good trip though, except that when we went out of town, in old fifties Cadillacs (carrying our Nikon cameras given to us in Tokyo) and walked around the villages I realised that the camera I had was probably worth more than they could earn in their entire lives.
Anyway, I got a sitar and after four days we left.
George was to return to India several times; soon after the first visit he became a friend of Ravi Shankar and in the same breath his student and mentor. There was much that each did to help the other. For Mr. Shankar's Indian music George shone a torch right across the West. For George Harrison, Hong Kong Blues, Blue Suede Shoes, Your Cheatin' Heart on the one hand, Indian music on the other, influences were indeed deepening. Today, he will say that he has many favourites and few of them have anything to do with today's Western popular culture, or with the charts, at which his record company no doubt supposes he is aiming his music.
Hoagy first, I suppose I liked most of what I was 'exposed' to-— there was not such easy 'access' in those days and you were grateful for what you heard. The 'old' Jimmy Rogers and Hank Williams, Kay Starr, Slim Whitman and Teresa Brewer... they were good for me until I was about twelve and Django with two fingers paralysed, restrung his guitar, but he influenced more people in more styles than
anyone. He was a gypsy; he and Grappelli, they all played together so long ago with the Hot Club of France. I think like Chaplin or Groucho he has been there really since I was knee high. You know I think I would rather listen to Lady Be Goodhy Grappclli right now than almost anything. He is probably the best violin player in the West. I don't listen to much of today's music—most of it leaves me shell-shocked: prancing ugly egos.
Well that was one set of views offered one evening in California last year and recently Hoagy Carmichael was a fixation with George. But at a greater depth, and much more enduringly, North Indian classical musk is his most profound solace, and its leading proponents his heroes. Or, at any rate, this is what I believe to be true.
Chapter IV
IS first meeting with Ravi Sbankar was in i$ 6j. It was at dinner at ■ the home of Air Anghadi, the man who ran the Asian Music Circle,in Lotidon.
Later he came to Esher and gave me a quick sitar lesson and a little concert with Allah Rakha, the tabla player, and John and Ringo came to watch. The first sitar lesson was interesting in that it was so nice to find somebody who was such a master being able to start from scratch with a beginner. One thing that happened said a lot. The telephone rang and I put the sitar dowTn, stood up and went to step across the sitar to go to the phone and Ravi whacked me on the leg and said "the first thing you must realise is that you must have more respect for the instrument". There are other things you shouldn't do too—like holding your beads with the first finger or pointing your feet towards someone else or even blowing out a stick of incense with your mouth. It is all part of the discipline, and it is true, you can't appreciate anything if you have no respect. I never was into those people smashing up their guitars anyway. That was just rubbish.
Anyway... a few months after first meeting Ravi, and beginning with the sitar, I went for my second visit to India, this time with Pattie. We were there quite a long time; six or seven weeks. We went to Bombay first and I began yoga exercises because I had to learn how to sit and hold a sitar. It had been killing me. My legs were in terrible pain, just to hold the instrument takes a lot of practice because it is such an awkward shape and size that you have to sit in a way where the gourd on the bottom rests in the ball of your left foot.
You sit cross legged, with your right leg over your left leg on the floor and the base of your foot is almost facing upwards with the gourd resting within the base, or the ball, of that foot. That part of your right arm between your elbow and your wrist rests on the gourd and the left hand that plays up and down the fretboard shouldn't be supporting the sitar.
When I started playing I was holding it up and trying to play it at the same time, whereas you learn that there is a balance so that if you are sitting correctly and holding it in the right way, the balance will be there so there is no weight on your left hand and you can go up and down the fretboard. You have to practise with your eyes shut so you know all the fret positions in your mind's eye because if you try and stretch your neck around the front to see what fret you are on you get a hump back and you are in the wrong position.
The right hand with the 'pick' (Misra) is so important with the sitar, the stroke that you give to the note (Bol). There are so many exercises, just for the way you hit the string. If you strike the string downwards, it's called 'da' and if you strike it upwards, it's called 'ra' and if you hit it down and up and down and up it's called 'diri diri', so there are whole exercises going up and down the scales: 'da ra diri diri da diri da ra da ra diri diri da ra da ra da' and up a note 'da ra diri diri da diri da ra da ra din diri da ra da ra da' going all the way up and down the scales.
There are exercises also for clipping the string (Krintan) for instance hitting the note above the one on which you are eventually going to end. There are other exercises for bending the notes because in Indian music much of it is bending (Meend). When people play blues guitar it is a matter of pushing the string the way you can and trying with your own ears to get the pitch right (you know, a lot of current guitar players have no sense of pitch at all and it doesn't seem to matter) whereas in Indian music you must practise scales by pulling the strings until the pitch is perfect. It is murder on your fingers. AH in all, a lot to get into.
So... on the second trip to India—yoga. Then, in Bombay, I was doing sitar practice every day with Ravi's students and after that we went to visit all sorts of sights in India and then we went to Kashmir
and stayed on a houseboat and did a lot of sharing, a lot of practice, in a nice peaceful way. India was good to say the least.
I went back in 1967, to record the Wonderwall album, and also did the Inner Light track and then in February 1968. I went back for the Rishikesh trip with Maharishi. I went with Pattie and the others and the world's press. After that 1 was supposed to have joined Ravi in the south of India where he was making the film 'Raga' and I was to have done a short sequence for it. But I caught dysentery and ended up missing the filming and finally met up with Ravi at Esalen in Monterey, California, and we did the work there.
So, I don't think I went back to India until 1974. There had been that long intervening period when I kept trying to go and it never happened. Tn 1974, though, there was a busy time because I had many Indian musicians coming to England to do an album and tour of Europe before going on to the U.S.A.
Two years later I took Olivia with me and we went to the wedding of some friends.
I learned the sitar from 1965 until 1968, until we filmed the 'Raga' clip in Monterey. After that, in the winter of 1968, I checked into a hotel in New York, had my sitar with me and staying there was Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. It was soon after that Eric gave me a Les Paul guitar and also around that time, Ravi was trying to find out from me what my roots were. He was asking whether Liverpool was my roots and I was saying that I felt more at home in India these days. Yet I decided 'well maybe I should get back to the guitar because I'm not getting any better at the guitar and I'm not going to be a great sitar player'.
By this time I had met a few hundred sitar players who were all sensational, yet Ravi had hopes only for one of them that he would be a really great player. So you see the standard of being a great sitar player is probably higher than that of a great classical musician in any culture and I realised that that was not to be because i should have started at least fifteen years earlier.
However, it really did help me as far as writing strange melodies and also rhythmically it was the best assistance I could have had. In the years from 196; to 1968, I used to practise every day, at least two or three times, an hour each time. T was doing quite well, actually, for those three or four years, and the best of it was that I had not had any lessons in music before that. But when you get involved with Indian music then you can appreciate what is going on. Without instruction or knowledge of the techniques, you can't really appreciate what they're doing.
It was all good, that sitar period. The yoga... I was getting up, as they do in India, having a bath, my yoga exercises, doing my meditation, then practising the sitar and then having breakfast, instead of jumping up out of bed and having a cup of tea or coffee. So it was a great discipline, vital for me, to be able to start getting a bit of culture'.
After the Monterey filming, after the New York reunion with Clapton and Hendrix, after being forced, by Ravi's question about roots, to determine, again, who he was, where he came from, and where he was going, George decided to return to the guitar.
He says: "I was neglecting this pop music, losing interest in it, and at the same time it was clear to me I wouldn't be a great sitar player".
So you will see that we did talk of music; in our conversations, but only when we had dealt with early days in Liverpool, school, teachers — including Nobby Forbes, his German language teacher, who had bought a tram and tried to buy the IJverpool Overhead Railway1- — when we had indulged ourselves in all things non-Beatle, for it is well to remember the Beatles released their first record in 1962 and their last eight years later, and that George is now thirty-six years of age so that being a Beaile is only a fraction of his chronological life and much less of his waking thoughts. So, when, as I say, ive had talked of many things, we did talk about music; at least he did. Much of what he said you will find in his discussions on the songs he has written, but of his perception of himself as a musical person, he said to me, as follows.
I have never really thought about myself as someone who writes songs as a craft. Many songwriters do. I suppose I have seen it that
1 The 'Docker's Umbrella', alas demolished. In the nineteen-fifties; one of the first of the many post-Hitler acts of brutality against the great sights—and sites—of Liverpool.
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way without being conscious of it, but not often. Mainly the object has been to get something out of my system, as opposed to 'being a songwriter'. The note that you use makes you think in a certain way. Listening to a sitar, for example, you think in those terms, anyway some people write riffs to which you can go out and bebop and some compose good stuff that is well-planned and thought out and musical. It seems to me that for a certain type of writer, it is not so much what he feels or stories about what he is going through, but it is more like a craft.
Now this Indian music we are listening to now is directly conveying the feelings of the player. So to try and write a song is, to me, more з case of being the vehicle to get over that feeling, of that moment, of that time.
One such song was Bangla Desh, a song for the times, terrible times in the unhappy seventies.
It must have been in 1971 when I was in Los Angeles doing the 'Raga' soundtrack album. Ravi was talking to me and telling me how he wanted to do a concert, but bigger than he normally did, so that he could raise maybe 25,000 dollars for the starving in Bangla Desh. He asked if I could think of some way of helping, say for instance for me to come on and introduce it or maybe bring in Peter Sellers... something to help, anyway.
Then he started to give me cuttings from magazines and newspapers, articles on the war and the poverty and I began to learn what it was about, and I thought 'well, maybe I should help him do it'.
The Beatles had been trained to the view that if you're going to do it, you might as well do it big and why not make a million dollars.
of those early days together—especially a song like Your Love Is Forever, which was written in liana, Maui, in February 1978, where we were awaiting the birth of our son, Dham.
George loved the tropics and was always happiest there. He was
inspired and wrote several songs during those days— Dark Sweet Lady,
Soft Hearted Hana and Here Comes the Moon, the lyrics of which are
dated 2 5/2, his birthday. The local general store stocked guava jam, bam
boo fishing poles and machetes, but was short of gifts for the man who
has everything, so I bought George lots of pens and paper to encourage
the writing and, as I read the lyrics from that period, I'm glad I did. We
swam in black lava rock ponds with names like the Venus Pool and a
tiny cottage on a bay became our luxury home for those days—the
greatest luxury being the absence of a telephone and freedom from the
usual demands on George's time. The locals bestowed upon us not only
privacy and Aloha spirit, but also tropical flowers we had never seen
before; shell, torch and каЫН gingers mixed with fragrant plumcria lcis.
"We couldn't wait to return and plant our own tropical garden. Over the
years, Derek and Brian became guest gardeners, leaving a lush legacy of
their visits with us. '
The many photos from that first holiday to Hawaii had disappeared for over twenty years. While 1 was writing this introduction, they were returned to me. Among them was one of the rising full moon, known in Hawaii as Mahina, that inspired George to write Here Comes the Moon. The last time George and I were there together was in February of 2001. The simultaneous sunset and moonnse in a gloaming sky, the waves crashing over the rocks, the whales breeching the sea, the reprise of rainbows and Haleakala Crater rising 10,000 feet in our backyard once again humbled us and turned our faces towards God. We picked gardenias and played Hawaiian music over morning coffee while sitting in the sun... the sun, so loved by George, partially because he felt deprived of its warmth as a child growing up in England. But if it rained and the 150-foot waterfalls flowed, George was just as happy. "Sublime is the summertime warm and lazy. These are perfect days like heaven about here", he wrote in Your Love Is Forever. Yes, they were perfect for me too, George—about as perfect as it can be in this physical world.
So, I did get involved, and for three months I was on the telephone setting up what became the Concert for Bangla Desh, trying to talk people into doing it, talking to Eric1 and all those people who did do it.
We had very little rehearsal, in fact there was never actually one rehearsal with evetyone present. We did it in dribs and drabs and under difficulties-
For a date, we had picked a period during which it had to be done. An Indian astrologer had said "this is a good period" and he gave me around the beginning of August, and then we found the right day in August and that was when Madison Square Garden was free and so we rented it, and did the show then. We did two shows, putting in the second because the first one sold out and as luck would have it, everything went off pretty well; it sounded really good in Madison Square Garden.
We had The Band's production people to do the sound mix, and we had Chip Monck for lighting, and Allen Klein's people did the film of the event. The film was not well done. After the first show we came off, having been almost fried under great big white Rights. There had been no stage lighting at all. I asked Chip what had happened and he said the film people had told him to keep the white lights on and one of them said "oh no, we didn't need those lights for filming" but secretly he thought "ha, ha, we've got it anyway now, so they can have the coloured lights for the second show". The second show was, I think, the best one. The lighting was very good but the film didn't 'come out' really. The one camera right at the back of Madison Square Garden produced film that was all black, with just a little pin of light in the centre, couldn't see a thing. Another camera, halfway down the right of the building was out of focus all the way through; there was a fault on the camera. Over on the left of the building, half way down, there was another camera; this one had huge cables hanging in front of it all the way through, so we were left with the camera that was just in the pit in the front of the stage and another one hand-held but with no sync, pulse. The film that you see is the result of a lot of juggling. For example... my first song, Wah Wah has twelve 'cuts' into the
1 Clapton.
film, twelve edits. Three of them were real, the other nine were fake. We had to put in different shots from different places. We had to blow up some parts of it, with the result that they were very grainy and it was just stupid. There were other things, negative things.
But the artists were all good, they all did it and I tried to guarantee to them that if they didn't like the record or the film they could get out of it. I didn't want them to end up not being my friends after ail that. It was a huge responsibility and it worked out well.
But with Klein, well he didn't structure the affairs properly; he went to Unicef after the event rather than before it and since then we have had lawyers trying to solve it with the American tax people who still (although they have now almost got it covered) are saying: "Oh well, we think you might have been putting it on for your own profit". The money has been held up in an escrow account for years and years— 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 dollars.
Anyway, the main result was that we were able to attract attention to events over there in Bangla Desh, because while we were setting up the concert the Americans were shipping arms to Pakistan. Thousands were dying every day but in the newspapers, coming after Biafra, it was just a few lines saying "oh yeah it's still going on".
So our thing was, we attracted a lot of publicity, turned it round and even now I still meet waiters in Bengali restaurants who say: "Oh, you Mr. Harrison. When we were in the jungle fighting it was great to know somebody out there was thinking of us".
It did have a good effect; it was a necessary morale booster for the Bengalis and it shone a light on some of the Pakistani Hitlers. The bad jazz that a cat blows wails long after he has cut out.
Chapter V
ANGLA DESH, the Beatles' break-up, My Sweet Lord, into! all of these plays-within-the-play, leaping in from the wings, dressed tall in green, comes wily manager Allen Klein from New Jersey, of whom George says: He's quite nice really. But there's a part of him that's odd. He operates on the basis of: 'Do unto others as they do unto you except you do it first'. Thing is, they think you are going to do them, even though it never crossed your mind.
The My Sweet Lord affair also features Allen Klein in a bizarre footnote to the court case in which George was alleged to have copied some notes from the song He's So Fine into his song My Sweet Lord, as if theft were necessary.
George says that the law-suit is still going on. Fie told an interviewer this year, rp/y. What happened after the court case was that the judge said My Sweet Lord was similar to He's So Fine; that I was not guilty of stealing the tune but that there was a copyright infringement. He wanted me and the guy who was suing me to get our lawyers together and sort out some compensation. But the guy wouldn't settle for that; he kept trying to bring the matter back into court. Now he has died and Allen Klein has bought the right to He's So Fine and the right to continue the law-suit. It's a joke; having settled all the Beatle law-suits he must have felt lonely not having somebody to sue. So it's still going on. I even tried to give My Sweet Lord away to get the thing settled— just let 'em have it; it doesn't matter to me. I've never had any money from it—it's always been in escrow—and as far as I'm concerned the effect the song has had far exceeds any bitching that's been going on
between copyright people; it's jus: greed and jealousy and all that. Give them the song— I don't care. But my lawyers said "Oh no, you can't do that; it's impossible...." So, it drags on, but it's certainly not giving me any sleepless nights.
Our conversations on tape for I Me Mine began in California when I was doing Ronald Colman impersonations at Warner Brothers Records at Burbank. I played the English Director of Creative Services, and \/ice President. The conversations ended in England, a year later, after I had left Warners and moved to Suffolk, to become a typist; Joan and the children preceded me.
During that year, George had, as the 'sixties phrase would have it, 'been through many changes''. He completed his second Warner Brothers album George Harrison, he married Olivia Arias who bore him a brown-eyed handsome son, Dhani, born in the Royal Borough of Windsor on ist August i97S.
His interest in Formula One motor racing had been rekindled and in the natural course of events he has become friendly with many of the great names of the most competitive business I sport. He turned more and more to the improvement of his gardens, and he joined in the great Rutles adventure: the notion of a marvellous existentialist Beatles.
Less and less, he was the rock У roll hero (never inside his own head) and he spoke dismissively of the trappings of the business. I had just been to the Grammy awards- — the music business equivalent of the film industry's Oscars. Nice, if you like that sort of thing.
That sort of thing is awful. I feel as if that has really gone out of my life. I never want to see any of that stuff" again. It is such a had diversion in your life. I would rather go and see the head-hunters up the Amazon or watch Monty Python.
Monty Python. Eric (Idle) is incredible. Michael Palin too. He is very funny. They all are. They filled that empty space for me; after 1968, 1969, they really kept me going, you know. What should have
happened is that the Bonzos1 and the Beatles should have turned into one great Rutle band with all the Pythons and had a laugh. Instead, we had to laugh on the other side of our face.
Eric Idle became one oj George's merriest friend! in the mid-seventies. Probably the most musical member oj the great Python team, be saw limitless absurdities in the Beatles' story and his skill as a writer of inventive comedy ran away with the silver spoon with the extraordinary story oj the 'prefab four' who became /die's Ruths, jrom their beginnings as four penniless rockers to their break-up during the decline oj their company Rutle Corps.
The Rutles was the tribute beyond all other tributes to the Beatles story. The death of Brian Epstein, the MBEs at Buckingham Palace, the peace efforts of John Lennon and his wife Yoko, 'Quiet' George's Indian connection, Paul's cuteness and Ringo's noisiness, all these were sent up, not without love and understanding and style.
The sureness of Eric Idle'sjudgment was encouraged and confirmed by George who plunged into Eric's project as publicist, adviser and as actor, playing a nosey reporter interviewing press officer Eric Manchester (Michael Palin) as he lied about and denied the decline of Rutle Corps.
The Rutles told the story so much better than the usual boring documentary. Try and see that film. That is a recommendation rather like saying: "Don't bother me—see my lawyer. He will explain everything". That was an escape valve: being in the Rutles. Escape from school, escape from Bladders, escape from the Bearles, escape into happiness. The great escape. No time to lose.
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