I Live For You, George Harrison (1970)

This past month I was stricken with bacterial pneumonia and landed in the hospital for 10 days so my plan to comment on the long-awaited documentary on George Harrison by Martin Scorsese, Living in the Material World, went by the wayside. I am now recuperating at home and thinking about George is back on the agenda.

Note: I Live For You is not a cut on Let It Roll shown above. I just love the beauty of his likeness here.  The song isn't in the documentary either, but to me it exquisitely sums up what George's life came to be about.

Every Scorsese music doc I've ever seen suffers from content that zigs and zags and leaves me hanging. This one is no exception. Fortunately, it does settle down in enough places to further my education about George and for that I am supremely thankful.  

My primary interest was understanding his spiritual journey and getting some sort of bead on the entirety of the life that the Beatles' only true outsider had led.  I remain sorry that he left us too soon and so painfully but have no doubt that George made the most of the life he had, in spades.

The man had so many friends, and they are liberally featured in the film. One of the most intriguing aspects of his personality was how many he had despite having such a devotion to solitude and cultivation of his inner life.  And of all of them, there was an uber-friend - Ravi Shankar.  I am clear that we have Shankar to thank for George's liberation as a solo artist committed to putting the material world in its proper perspective after a life where all of his worldly needs had been met very early on but brought little happiness. He states unequivocally that Shankar ("my blessing") was the first person in his life to ever impress him who wasn't trying to impress him. He showed him how his beloved music had the power to take him directly to God, George's paramount objective.

Nothing about his Catholic upbringing, which exhorted him to simply believe, resonated. His ongoing exposure after a certain point to holy men, swamis and mystics helped him to arrive at one major epiphany: you must see God, you must perceive the soul, otherwise it's better to be an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite. His life became a quest for direct spiritual experience and meaning, while doing the things he loved with the people he loved. As much time as is spent on this topic in the film, I would have been open to seeing more.   

As we all do, George had a dark side. Eric Idle and others point out the bitterness and anger that he always struggled with. Sources of those emotions varied, and aren't fully explored here, but certain things can be deduced and at the very least revolve around the Beatles - and taxes. 

On the Beatles years, not much is new, but the doc distills it well - how marginalized he was despite his obvious and prodigious talent as a musician and deep knowledge of so many genres, and how ready he was to fly the coop of the oppressive group politic. A lowlight: too many of the comments excerpted from McCartney interviews here were maddening in their condescending tone. Put a sock in it, Macca. What a massive ego that man has.

Yet I would argue that George's quiet personal influence and competence as a band member probably kept John and Paul from destroying each other sooner - as George Martin points out, they were far more competitive than they were collaborative. George does acknowledge, though, that the four of them depended on each other every overwhelming step of the success ladder they ascended. ("How many Beatles does it take to change a lightbulb? Four!") 

The composer of Taxman truly loathed the punitive British tax system, although that's not given any major emphasis either beyond one early interview where he and John were asked if they were millionaires yet. No, they said. Where does your money go, then?  "A lot of it goes to Her Majesty," John says. "She's a millionaire," George says.  While he was dying he bought a house in Switzerland so that he wouldn't have to pay exorbitant taxes. 

In one of the final moments of the film Ringo relates going to that house to visit George in what turned out to be the last weeks of his life.  Ringo's daughter Lee was battling a brain tumor in Boston and he had to immediately depart for the U.S. following the visit. With tears in his eyes, Ringo, who in every interview excerpt clearly communicates his love for his bandmate, says the last words George spoke to him were, "Do you want me to go with you?" 

George believed that leading a spiritual life was a choice and was available to anyone who was willing to work to find what was already present but hidden.  It does seem he was more evolved than the rest of us for having put forth the effort with such dedication. And when he finally died, "he just lit the room," according to his wife Olivia.

Beware of Darkness, George Harrison (1970)

I was very jazzed to hear that Martin Scorsese has directed a documentary, due out next year, on the one Beatle about whom I know the least and want to know the most.  Living in the Material World will be sort of a co-production with George Harrison, in that it will contain footage that George himself shot for a documentary that he intended to make someday.

Watching Paul McCartney receive his Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress recently, I couldn't help but wonder what George's legacy would have been had he lived longer.  Because, of the four of them, George's body of post-Beatles work is more pleasing to me - by many orders of magnitude - than that of any of the others.  Paul's mostly goofy, saccharine songs ... John's mostly heavy-handed, take-no-prisoners songs ... Ringo's mostly, well, fluff songs - on the whole they've left me cold.  Not so with George's work, both as a solo artist and with his pals the Traveling Wilburys.  Marginalized though he was while a Beatle, I am convinced their sound would have been far less memorable without his particular touch, and that his musicianship was every bit as evolved, if not more so.

Beware of Darkness is just one of many examples of George's gift; I've already written about his masterpiece, While My Guitar Gently Weeps. His unusual nasal singing voice - pervasively Liverpudlian - and the breadth of the licks he charmed out of his guitars over the years were entrancing to me. A YouTube commenter called the song George's "musical instruction manual for living life." I never thought of him as preachy, but his songs always seemed to emanate from a deeper place, where he could transcend the madness of life as a Beatle, something he would always be to the rest of his days. 

The longer he was on his own, the more George seemed to become supremely comfortable in his own skin, whereas as a Beatle he always seemed quite the opposite. The others always projected an essential sameness - what they were like as Beatles, just more so.  Beatle George was "the quiet one," almost morose, he rarely smiled; he was the youngest, and he seemed no match in the charisma department for Lennon and McCartney. He looked like he didn't even want to try. It was always obvious that he was a guitarist of considerable talent, and his guitar leads were distinctive, to say the least, but it was a mystery why he was treated as a bit player by the two alpha dogs. (I'm sure I answered my own question there, but at the time ...)

So when the Beatles finally parted the ways amid tremendous acrimony, George went solo before the year was out. Talk about your pent-up demand!  He had a backlog of material that couldn't find an outlet as a Beatle, and the floodgates opened with a 3-album release in All Things Must Pass, a title probably chosen for its many potential meanings. Beatles fans didn't think the Beatles could break up; they were supposed to be permanent. Weren't they?

Sadly, no, and even sadder, George shuffled off this mortal coil in at the peak of his powers as an artist. It affected me badly - it was not long after my father died, so I was already predisposed to mourn, but I felt then and still do that we'd lost someone we hadn't known well enough. Those people he counted as friends - and there were many - did him proud when they joined Eric Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall the next year for the memorial Concert for George, one of the most moving tributes to a musician I've ever seen. And left me feeling even more than this was someone we needed to know better than we did. 
  
Maybe that will be rectified with the Scorsese doc. According to his wife Olivia, George didn't throw much out, so we should be treated to things we've never seen or heard before from all stages of his career. All things must pass, but sometimes what people have held on to give us a pathway to get back to where we once belonged.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Beatles (1968)

I look at the world and I notice it's turning

While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps

Songs that are too big to contain only the material world are indeed something to be thankful for when one's heart is as battered and sore as mine is this week. Songs like that help promote a healthy catharsis because they annihilate our perverse preoccupation with ego and somehow put our suffering in its larger and proper context. That's how I feel about While My Guitar Gently Weeps, ostensibly a Beatles song that I don't think anyone for a minute believes is a true Beatles song.

No reason why they should. It's pretty well known that the other Beatles were initially less than enthused about George Harrison's contribution to what became known as the White Album (apparently originally conceived as an acoustic number), and it took pressing the reluctant Eric Clapton into service as lead guitarist to make it the transcendent song it became and remains today. (The above link is to the version the grieving Clapton unleashed during the 2002 memorial Concert for George, with Harrison's son Dhani - and many others - accompanying him in one of the most moving performances I've ever seen of any song. However, this Todd Rundgren/Joe Jackson/Ethel version from 2005 also blows me away.)

Why Harrison had to fight to get his stuff due consideration remains a mystery, but I guess it all worked out in the end - of the four Beatles, he was by far the most influential as a solo artist. Prior to this, Harrison's output was relatively meager and marginalized. I had always regarded the Quiet Beatle as a strong lead guitarist but that was about it.

'Guitar' was a game changer and his masterpiece. And it stood out like a sore thumb against most of the other 29 songs on the album; I maintain only a slender handful of the cuts can be defined as remotely exceeding mediocrity. I loved it from the start, but in being such an anomaly, it sounded a bit of a death knell for the Beatles as recording artists, which was a scary prospect at the time. The White Album was a messy concoction that seemed to belong to just one Beatle at a time rather than a synthesis of their talents as a group. Certainly 'Guitar,' as a harbinger of what was to come when the group dissolved and went their separate ways, was a revelation in this regard.

Forty years later, it's still a powerful spiritual balm. Despite this week's weeping, "I look at the world and I notice it's turning." And I'm learning.

I Saw Her Standing There, The Beatles (1963)

On far too many days of late, the cumulative effect of all the things that are pervasively wrong in the world, close to home and far away, weighs far too heavily on my psyche. Made worse by the sense that there is almost nothing that can be done to right many of the wrongs - or nothing that will be done, in any case - it's hard to look forward to a better day.

That's when the balm of music seems to have its most profound effect. And there are few songs that are as therapeutic as I Saw Her Standing There. Yeah, it's 45 years old, but every time I hear it, it sounds new. And it transports me into a realm where it's possible to believe that something good could be just around the corner.

A YouTube commenter writes about the song, "The rock'n'roll bass riff. Cool guitar solo dripping with reverb. Rock-solid drumming. Tight, soaring harmonies. Never ever let it be said that The Beatles couldn't rock!"

I certainly would never say that. I'm not sure which Beatles song was the first one I ever heard - it could have been this one - but regardless, I know that whatever I was doing at the precise moment Paul McCartney's 1-2-3-4 count-off assaulted my ears became supremely unimportant. (Count-offs ordinarily would have been edited out in the studio but Beatles producer George Martin intuited the shift in the zeitgeist that was about to occur and left it in - an inspired decision.)

I've said before that many of my favorite Beatles songs were the earliest, the ones that were steeped in their seminal influences. From The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul by Walter Everett, we learn that Paul's persistent (ostinato) bassline here was an homage to a similar one in Chuck Berry's I'm Talking About You (here they are performing it in Hamburg in 1962) and that many of the guitar licks from Little Richard's Ooh! My Soul were incorporated as well, primarily by George Harrison. The Beatles' joyful interpretations of the works of their musical heroes exposed young America to whole new galaxies of rhythm and melody that made us happy to be alive.

And even on a bad day - they still do.

I've Just Seen A Face, The Beatles (1965)

For some, the most perfect Beatles album is Revolver, but I've always reserved that honor for Rubber Soul, which in the eyes of many marked a sea change in the way the Lads from Liverpool presented their gifts to the world. I still remember my heart pounding the day I bought the glorious-looking package to the right, my anticipation over its contents was that intense.

Digessing for just a moment (although there is a Rubber Soul connection), today is a special day where other avocations are concerned, to wit - I accomplished the unthinkable this morning and finished, without googling, the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle.

For those who may be unaware, the Saturday puzzle is the hardest of the week and, very often for me, impossible in terms of gleaning more than a few answers, much less finishing it. That I did is probably as much a testament to today's puzzle constructor, the devious and delightful Mike Nothnagel, as it is to my growing solving skills, but in any case, I want to remember this day forever. My fellow daily solvers and bloggers (check out an example of our underworld here at Madness ... Crossword and Otherwise) will understand the rush.

The connection between the puzzle and Rubber Soul is that one of today's clues was "it's heard on the Beatles' Rubber Soul" and of course that answer is SITAR. So today's as good a day as any to share one of my most favorite songs from that LP, albeit one without a sitar, I've Just Seen A Face.

In the UK, fans will associate this song with Help! instead; it was common to release slightly different versions of Beatles albums on both sides of the pond. Confusing, and never clear what the nuances were that led to such decisions. My research now reveals that in this instance it had to do with Capitol Records wanting to take advantage of the surging interest in folk rock, so this acoustic number - on which George Harrison shines with his 12-string - was one of several replacements for harder-edged songs like Drive My Car and Nowhere Man.

In the U.S., however, it was the first song on Rubber Soul, and what an exhilarating, joyful one it was. What fun it was to marvel at Paul McCartney's vocals on the tumbling lyric; he sang line after line with no apparent intake of breath. I love to sing this song.

A film I've not seen yet, but which is a rage among some of my young co-workers, Across the Universe, has a cover of the song by the actor who portrays Jude, Jim Sturgess, and the recasting is pretty interesting. If it introduces a new generation to the Beatles, I'm all for it.