Living in the Material World was on television last night. George Harrison is by far my favorite Beatle. There are so many great stories about him but I like Tom Petty commenting on George as the "quiet Beatle." There was nothing quiet about him, Tom said, "he never shut up." Petty continued, "he was the greatest hang you could imagine."
George got stuck with the tag because he was the youngest of the Fab Four and was constantly being overruled by Paul and John. Most of the songs he wrote during the Beatle era never appeared on any album. When the band finally broke up in 1970, George had all this personal back catalog, spilling it out on one great big triple vinyl album All Things Must Pass, which came out the same year. Few can argue this isn't the greatest Post-Beatle album of any of the Fab Four. It's one of the greatest albums of all time!
In many ways, it surpassed anything the Beatles did, as George reached far and beyond what Paul and John did at the time. Not surprisingly, George called on his friends to back him on the tracks, which included members of Badfinger and Delaney and Bonnie, among them Eric Clapton. Ringo lent a hand as well. This resulted in a richly textured set of ballads.
What set George apart from the other Beatles was his musicianship. He took it very seriously, and as Tom Petty noted, surrounded himself with the best. That included Ravi Shankar teaching him how to play sitar, which he spent three years doing before coming out with this monumental album. George didn't dictate. He gave space for others, which is why so many musicians liked to play with him.
George also was genuinely engaged in relief work, resulting in the subsequent Concert for Bangladesh, which included Shankar, Clapton and many others in a charity concert at Madison Square Garden. It was the first of its kind.
He would also pick up projects no one else would touch, literally mortgaging his house to finance Monty Python's Life of Brian, for which he was given a brief cameo appearance. This was obviously a guy who took chances and for the most part they paid off. Not that it really mattered to him. He genuinely enjoyed working with the Monty Python troupe when most others just saw them as a madcap bunch of fools. Not only that but he gave them all the creative room they needed to pull off their unique vision.
Unlike Paul, he didn't need to put himself front and center on every project. He was often content just being a sideman, appearing on the Go-Go's debut album no less. According to his wife, George liked Belinda Carlisle's voice and agreed to join in. This was after his hit album Cloud Nine, on which he worked with Jeff Lynne, and the first of their collaborative Traveling Wilburys albums.
Many people saw this as the return of George Harrison but he never was really gone. He was just biding his time, engaging in numerous activities that no one really took notice of. He had shed the Beatles tag to the point his son Dhani didn't know his father was a Beatle until he was a teenager. He just thought his father puttered around in the garden, never thinking where the money came from. Dhani eventually discovered the treasure trove of his father's music, including the 1968 Wonderwall soundtrack, which is his personal favorite.
I suppose in this sense he was the Quiet Beatle, as he didn't call attention to himself. Although he could be crusty, famously taking a dig at Neil Young, but even here his self-deprecating humor comes out, noting that Neil is "the one person who sings worse than me." They brushed shoulders during a 30th anniversary tribute to longtime friend Bob Dylan in 1992. George apparently didn't like the way Neil was trying to steal the limelight from everyone else on stage. That wasn't his style.
Sadly, George left just when everything was looking up. He had been battling cancer of one form or another for several years before succumbing to lung cancer in 2001. This was shortly after culling through the music of All Things Must Pass with his son Dhani to put together a 30th anniversary edition. Twenty years later, there is a 50th anniversary edition that expands the range of the album dramatically with eight vinyls and five CDs in the deluxe set.
Needless to say his music lives on as does the image of George being the most unassuming of all the Beatles, which is why he is endeared by so many followers.
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