Harrison, George

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GEORGE HARRISON

Born: Liverpool, England, 25 February 1943; died Los Angeles, California, 29 November 2001

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: Brainwashed (2002)

George Harrison was the lead guitarist of the Beatles, the twentieth century's most influential pop group. Tagged "the quiet Beatle" in the early days of Beatles stardom, he maintained a low profile throughout his four-decade career, sidestepping the calculated moves typical of a rock star of his stature. Instead, Harrison chose to make music that was a path to personal enlightenment. His rock mysticism opened the door for future musical journeymen. The youngest Beatle, Harrison became a world music pioneer by introducing Eastern rhythms, instrumentation, and philosophy to a generation of Westerners. By organizing the Concert for Bangladesh, rock's first benefit concert, he demonstrated on a mass scale how rock culture can serve as a vehicle for raising social awareness.

Harrison worked outside the Beatles primary songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but he contributed songs to successive albums that were equal to theirs. In his role as lead guitarist, Harrison broke new ground and his introduction of the sitar to a Western pop group was unprecedented. Although Harrison made songwriting contributions to earlier Beatles albums, his breakthrough was the song "Love You To" on the band's landmark album Revolver (1966). With several Indian musicians playing the opening chord flourishes on sitars, the song erupts into a bustling rhythm accented by heavy Indian percussion.

Harrison continued to play the sitar all his life—he last recorded with it on his 1987 comeback album Cloud Nine. But when he was still with the Beatles, he further expanded the group's boundaries. On songs like "Within You Without You," "Fool on the Hill" and "Long Long Long," he demonstrated how pop music can be a conduit for meditative bliss. His songs reflected on death and God. Harrison's contemplative side was also paired with a scorching pessimism. Songs like "Taxman," "Piggies," and "I Me Mine" railed against social hypocrisy, and he joined Lennon as the group's most outspoken critics of fame.

When the Beatles broke up, Harrison recorded solo. The result was the three-vinyl collection "All Things Must Pass" (1970), a sprawling, twenty-three-track masterpiece that aimed for transcendence through country-tinged pop songs.

Harrison created his own label, Dark Horse Records, and quietly released eight solo albums, many not selling well. He also produced films and in 1979 released an autobiography. But besides a high-profile, two-album tenure with the Traveling Wilburys—a supergroup featuring Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne—Harrison retreated from public life.

Spot Light: Brainwashed

A year after his death came the album George Harrison fans had waited fourteen years for. Brainwashed (2002) was mostly at the demo stage when Harrison died, but he reportedly left instructions of his intentions to his son Dhani and producer and past collaborator Jeff Lynne. Some of the notes were specific—Harrison hummed string arrangements to tape and even listed the song sequence. Harrison's vocals and slide guitar playing are at the fore-front while all additional work—background vocals, drums—is seamlessly woven in behind. Harrison was no austere mystic and Brainwashed is proof. He zips along playing a ukulele on a cover of composer Hoagy Carmichael's standard "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" and later makes Hawaiian beach music and the blues unlikely cousins in "Rocking Chair in Hawaii." The title song is the most revealing. Over several segments, a meditation is quoted by page number, along with a joke about his granny, a choice expletive, a chorus that rings "God, God, God," and an ending featuring Vedic chants. As contradictory as it all sounds, the new songs show Harrison was hardly afraid of dying. Created in the final stages of his life, it resonates with the same themes he explored in all of his music—that life is eternal and the material world is a meaningless cage. It is a perfect swan song summing up who Harrison was: a cranky spiritual seeker who played guitar so very sweetly.

In 1987 he broke his seclusion and released Cloud Nine, which yielded a number one hit, "Got My Mind Set on You." He briefly returned to touring in 1991, playing a few dates in Japan with guitarist Eric Clapton. Harrison returned to his seclusion in the 1990s, helping contribute to The Beatles Anthology, an officially sanctioned video and compact disc series documenting the group. He recorded two new Beatles songs with band mates McCartney and Ringo Starr. In 1998 he announced he had throat cancer and a year later was stabbed and nearly killed in his home by a deranged intruder who was later found not guilty for reasons of insanity. Harrison died of cancer. His album Brainwashed was released posthumously in 2002.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

All Things Must Pass (Apple, 1970); Concert for Bangladesh (Apple, 1972); Living in the Material World (Apple, 1973); Dark Horse (Apple, 1974); Somewhere in England (Dark Horse, 1981); Cloud Nine (Dark Horse, 1987); Brainwashed (Capitol, 2002).