His Magical, Mystical Tour

By Robert Sullivan

He was the quiet Beatle only in that he was standing alongside two louder-than-life characters and in front of a guy playing drums. He held many strong opinions--on Beatlemania, on global want, on his right to privacy, on his God--and gave firm voice to most of them. But George Harrison was certainly the most reluctant Beatle, wanting out almost as soon as he was in. He often said that his luckiest break was joining the band and his second luckiest was leaving it. And he said once, "Being a Beatle was a nightmare, a horror story. I don't even like to think about it." He never really looked comfortable in his tight suit and pudding-basin haircut, not even in the fun-fest A Hard Day's Night, and in this he was perhaps the most honest Beatle, the one least convincing when wearing the mask. The standard line is that George Harrison was an enigma, but perhaps he was transparent: a terrific guitarist, a fine songwriter, a wonderer, a seeker and, overriding all, a celebrity who hated and feared celebrity.

Harrison died at a friend's home in Los Angeles last week at age 58, losing his last battle with cancer. In 1997 he had a cancerous lump removed from his neck; earlier this year he was operated on for a cancer found on his lung and subsequently received treatment for a tumor on his brain, including a controversial form of radiation therapy at the Staten Island University Hospital in New York City. "George is very different from many people in that he didn't have fear of death," said Gil Lederman, one of his doctors there. "He felt that life and death were part of the same process." Harrison's passing leaves only Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as surviving members of the Fab Four--John Lennon was murdered in New York City in 1980.

Harrison's wife Olivia and son Dhani, 23, were at his bedside when he died, and as word spread about his death, Harrison was mourned and eulogized by the crowds who gathered outside the Abbey Road studios in London and in Strawberry Fields, the area of Manhattan's Central Park across from where Lennon was shot, and by his former bandmates. "He was a beautiful man. He was like my baby brother to me," said Sir Paul, who lost his wife Linda to breast cancer in 1998. Starr, long Harrison's best friend in the band, said, "We will miss George for his sense of love, his sense of music and his sense of laughter."

That hosannas from the beknighted would be sung for George Harrison, born the son of a Liverpool bus driver during the darkest days of World War II, is in keeping with the kind of miracles the Beatles made for themselves. The most famous of the Beatles' fated hookups involves McCartney wandering by a summer festival at St. Peter's Parish Church in Liverpool's Woolton district on a hot day in 1957, and being transfixed by a skiffle band called the Quarry Men. Paul happened to have brought his guitar and impressed the band's leader, a cocky lad named Lennon, with raucous renderings of Eddie Cochran and Little Richard songs. That's the big cosmic moment, but in official Beatles lore there's an even earlier bit of predestiny. It is 1955, and George Harrison, just 12, is a miserable student putting in an hour's commute on his dad's bus, traveling from the family home in Speke to the Liverpool Institute. He is engaged in conversation by a boy a year ahead of him in school, the son of a cotton salesman from Allerton. Paul McCartney is just as crazy about guitars and American rockabilly stars as is Harrison, and soon he is joining young George in the evenings to practice their distinctive versions of Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O and Besame Mucho.

Without rehashing the many permutations of the evolving Quarry Men of the late '50s--the Moondogs, the Silver Beatles, the endless series of exploding drummers--we arrive in the Reeperbahn, the famous cabaret district in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 1960s with a band whose front line is Lennon-McCartney-Harrison because Lennon, in his wisdom, had decided that he would put at risk his dominance to build the strongest group. The way to think of those early Beatles is as one of the grittiest, nastiest, best punk bands ever, getting tighter by the night during sets that might last eight hours. "We were frothing at the mouth," Harrison remembered in The Beatles Anthology, a scrapbook of photos and reminiscences published last year, "because we had all these hours to play and the club owners were giving us Preludins, which were slimming tablets. I don't think they were amphetamine, but they were uppers. So we used to be up there foaming, stomping away." On many occasions he said that the best Beatles shows were in the clubs of Hamburg.

Harrison was the baby of the band, and if the inner dynamic of the Beatles had been different, his age might have cost him his place in history. During the group's first five-month gig in Germany, authorities discovered that Harrison, at 17, was too young to be working in the Reeperbahn nightclubs. They had him deported. Guitarists can be replaced, but by then McCartney and Lennon were protective of their little brother--the Beatles were as much a fiercely insular family as they were a ferocious rock band--and a few weeks later the boys were playing together again in England. Sounding better than ever, and much better than other Liverpool pop bands, the Beatles became local legends through their shows at the Cavern Club. They got a record contract, replaced their drummer with the talented Starr and were on their way.

For Harrison, much more quickly than for the others, the magic of the moment flickered and died. "At first we all thought we wanted the fame and that," he said in 1988. "After a bit we realized that fame wasn't really what we were after at all, just the fruits of it. After the initial excitement and thrill had worn off, I, for one, became depressed. Is this all we have to look forward to in life? Being chased around by a crowd of hooting lunatics from one crappy hotel room to the next?"

During the Beatles' grand conquest of America in 1964, when their initial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show drew an astonishing 73 million viewers and made them an overnight phenomenon, Harrison spent his days holed up in the Plaza Hotel with a high fever while the fab other three paraded around town, wowing the world's press with their vitality and wit. Then it was on to Washington for a concert at the Coliseum before more than 7,000 screaming fans. "It was bloody awful," Harrison told biographer Geoffrey Giuliano. "Some journalist had apparently dug up an old quote of John's that I was fond of jelly babies and had written about it in his column. That night we were absolutely pelted...Imagine waves of rock-hard little bullets raining down on you from the sky. Every now and then one would hit a string on my guitar and plonk off a bad note as I was trying to play. From then on, everywhere we went it was exactly the same."

Harrison's guitar idols had included not only rocker Carl Perkins but also Andres Segovia, and he had worked hard to master an intricate, precise technique (his later experiments with 12-string guitars, not to mention his sitar playing, would be vastly influential in rock music). Now concertgoers couldn't even hear him, and, worse, they didn't care. Harrison, who turned 21 just after that first brief American tour, wondered to the others on the flight home, "How f______ stupid it all is. All that big hassle to make it, only to end up as performing fleas."

It wasn't long before the other Beatles shared that opinion, and the band's last public concert was at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on Aug. 29, 1966. (The city had wanted to give the group a ticker-tape parade, but the boys nixed the idea. They were terrified by the crush of Beatlemaniacs and thinking not only of John F. Kennedy's assassination but also of death threats the Beatles had received in the wake of Lennon's recent "We're more popular than Jesus" comment.) With the end of live performance, the band, and Harrison in particular, moved on to what he considered more serious endeavors. His marriage to Patti Boyd in early '66 had altered his perspective, as had what he called "the dental experience," which, he said, "made us see life in a different light."

The dental experience happened in 1964. Hamburg club managers had introduced the Beatles to uppers, and Bob Dylan had turned them on to marijuana. Now, at a dinner party at George's dentist's house in London, the host slipped sugar cubes laced with LSD into the after-dinner coffee of George and Patti, John and his wife Cynthia. Within months, all the Beatles were experimenting with acid, and eventually Paul was into cocaine, John into heroin and George a fan of hashish (for which he would be busted in March 1969). The music they continued to make in the studio changed. It got denser, trippier. The single Strawberry Fields was followed by the seminal album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the Beatles led their generation into a psychedelic world. As Harrison began to emerge as a songwriter, his exquisitely arranged compositions--Within You, Without You; Love You Too; Blue Jay Way--were informed not only by drug use but, in their melody and message, also by his increasing interest in Eastern religion, culture and music.

He came by this interest, which would become the driving force in his life, when the script of the second Beatles film, Help!, called for chase scenes involving cartoonish Hindu villains, and Indian sitar players were brought in to provide some zippy chase music. George started noodling on a sitar--if indeed one can noodle on a sitar--and asking questions. This led to exotic instrumentation on the Lennon ballad Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) and later to an apprenticeship with master sitarist Ravi Shankar, who gave Harrison lessons on the instrument and in life itself. "He was a friend, a disciple and son to me," said Shankar, who visited Harrison for the last time on Wednesday. "George was a brave and beautiful soul, full of love, childlike humor and a deep spirituality. We spent the day before with him, and even then he looked so peaceful, surrounded by love."

The Beatles' famous trip to India in 1968, where they meditated under the guidance of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was largely Harrison's show. He and Patti had become devotees of the religious leader and arranged for the band to spend time at the maharishi's ashram in the Himalayan foothills. Other celebrities--Mia Farrow, the singer Donovan, Mike Love of the Beach Boys--went on retreat as well, and the episode is remembered as one of the pivotal, if oddest, events of the Flower Power '60s. Indisputably beautiful fruits of the getaway were the songs composed there. John said he wrote "hundreds"; Paul came up with at least 15; and most of the Beatles' White Album and Abbey Road were conceived in Rishikesh. George contributed four songs, including the anticarnivore screed Piggies and the gorgeous Here Comes the Sun and Something. With more than 150 versions recorded, Something is the second-most-covered Beatles song after Yesterday, but a measure of Harrison's obscurity within the band is that Frank Sinatra used to introduce Something as his favorite Lennon-McCartney tune.

Such confusion would end with the band's acrimonious breakup, announced in 1970. For Harrison, the split opened the door to artistic liberation. He had been piling up songs for months--years--songs that couldn't be squeezed onto Beatles albums, brimful as they were with Lennon and McCartney's efforts. Now, in a work that is the very definition of magnum opus, Harrison poured forth the three-disc set All Things Must Pass. (A 30th-anniversary reissue earlier this year only confirmed that this was Harrison's masterpiece.)

The bulky boxed set went to No. 1 in 1971, propelled by such hits as My Sweet Lord and What Is Life. Harrison had found a new spiritual mentor, Srila Prabhupada of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, and Hindu sentiments and sounds permeate the record, further spurring sitar sales and causing many listeners to investigate Eastern religions. In the early aftermath of the Beatles demise, Harrison, the revelation, rivaled Lennon or McCartney as a pop icon, and Shankar realized his friend might be the perfect front man for a good cause. In August 1971, Harrison and friends Dylan, Starr, Leon Russell and Eric Clapton staged two concerts at New York City's Madison Square Garden to raise money for the flood-and famine-ravaged Indian subcontinent. The Concert for Bangladesh established Harrison as a pioneering rock philanthropist, and set a model for future celebrity fund-raising efforts like Live Aid, the We Are the World record and the Concert for New York City, starring McCartney, at Madison Square Garden six weeks ago for victims of the World Trade Center attacks.

With George now front and center, his fans got to know him better. It became evident that the quiet Beatle was, in fact, possessed of the same dry, sarcastic, Liverpudlian wit that Lennon was known for. (During the Beatles' recording session with producer George Martin back in 1962, he asked them, "Is there anything you're not happy about?" It was George, not John, after all, who famously answered, "Well, there's your tie, for starters.") Harrison, with individual success, seemed more at ease, and his geniality throughout the 1970s saw his image evolve to that of the happy mystic.

Clapton, along with Dylan, became one of Harrison's best friends, and it's rather astonishing that this friendship was not destroyed when Patti became Mrs. Clapton in 1979, two years after she and George divorced and a year after George married the American Olivia Arias. By the late 1970s Harrison was as much entrepreneur as musician. He had started his own record label (Dark Horse, in 1974) and his own movie-production company, HandMade Films, which he set up to help his pal Eric Idle finish his Monty Python film Life of Brian. Other HandMade productions included the 1981 fantasy Time Bandits and the 1986 noirish drama Mona Lisa, which launched actor Bob Hoskins. Harrison's cinema dabblings also included a cameo in Idle's faux rockumentary All You Need Is Cash, about the Rutles--the "Prefab Four." According to George, the parody told the Beatles story "much better than the usual boring documentary."

Scared into near reclusion by Mark David Chapman's killing of Lennon in December 1980, Harrison spent most of his time meditating, music making, gardening and watching Formula One races on the telly at Friar Park, his extraordinary estate in Henley-on-Thames, and at his hideaway on the Hawaiian island of Maui. He ventured out occasionally to record and play with the Traveling Wilburys, a supergroup that included Dylan, Tom Petty and others. But various legal battles took up even more of his time. In 1976 he had to pay $587,000 for "subconsciously plagiarizing" the old Chiffons hit He's So Fine in his melody for My Sweet Lord. In 1991, he brought a seven-figure defamation-of-character suit when the tabloid the Globe published a story calling him a "Big Nazi Fan." And in 1996 he won an $11.6 million judgment against his former business partner in HandMade films, Denis O'Brien, for not assuming his agreed-upon share of the company's debt. That same year Harrison asked authorities to investigate a series of death threats.

None of those threats were proved to have come from Michael Abram, but it was Abram, a 33-year-old Beatle obsessive from a Liverpool suburb, who, in the dead of night on Dec. 30, 1999, got past the alarms and razor wire at Friar Park and broke into the Harrisons' mansion. George suffered an inch-deep stab wound to his chest before Olivia knocked Abram down with a bedside lamp. Harrison recovered, and Abram was sent to a mental institution.

While Harrison was able to survive the pressures of being a Beatle and an assault by a maniac, he couldn't beat cancer. But he made the passage to death easier for himself by believing so passionately for so long in a life after this one. Said his old friend Mia Farrow last week: "One of the things that was so inspiring was his lifelong search to know his God. And if God exists, I don't doubt that George has a place near him. " If she's right, Harrison is happy. He may have been scared of the adoring crowds, but he was not afraid to let go.