The Private Life of George Harrison

The skinny boy with the thick dark hair sat in the back row of a full classroom, head down, intense brown eyes fixed on his notebook. As his teacher lectured, the boy scribbled with his pencil, as if taking down every word. But George Harrison wasn’t lis­tening. The 13-year-old son of a bus driv­er drifted into visions of his future, filling his notebooks with obsessive drawings of guitars — the instrument he’d been long­ing to play since he’d heard Elvis Pres­ley’s hits, the sonic embodiment of all the fun and joy missing from dreary postwar Liverpool. Soon enough, he was filling his notebooks with lyrics and chord charts, and maybe an occasional sketch of a motorcycle.

He became close friends with an older classmate, Paul McCartney, who needed a guitar player for a new band. “I know this guy,” McCartney told the group’s leader, John Lennon. “He’s a bit young, but he’s good.” Harrison passed his audition, play­ing the guitar instrumental “Raunchy” on the top half of a double-decker bus one night — and with that, he was a Beatle, or at least a Quarryman. But his bandmates never quite shook their idea of him as a ju­nior partner — an “economy-class Beatle,” in Harrison’s sardonic formulation — and he soon began pushing for an upgrade.

Harrison wasn’t really the quiet Beatle. “He never shut up,” said his friend Tom Petty. “He was the best hang you could imagine.” He was the most stubborn Bea­tle, the least showbizzy, even less in thrall to the band’s myth than Lennon. He was fond of repeating a phrase he attributed to Mahatma Gandhi — “Create and pre­serve the image of your choice” — which is odd, because his choice seemed to be no image at all. He was an escape artist, forever evading labels and expectations. Harrison challenged Lennon and Mc­Cartney’s songwriting primacy; almost single-handedly introduced the West to the rest of the world’s music through his friendship with Ravi Shankar; became the first person to make rock & roll a ve­hicle for both unabashed spiritual expres­sion and, with the Concert for Bangladesh, large-scale philanthropy; had the most Hollywood success of any Beatle, produc­ing movies including Monty Python’s Life of Brian; and belied a rep as a solitary re­cluse by putting together the Traveling Wilburys, a band that was as much social club as supergroup.

As Martin Scorsese’s new documentary and accompanying book make clear, Har­rison had no casual pursuits. He followed his interests in the ukulele, in car racing, in gardening, and especially in medita­tion and Eastern religion with fierce ener­gy. “George had a really curious mind, and when he got into something he wanted to know everything,” says his widow, Olivia Harrison, who met him in 1974 and mar­ried him four years later. “He had a crazy side, too. He liked to have fun, you know.” Harrison’s first wife, Pattie Boyd, de­scribed him veering between periods of in­tense meditation and heavy partying, with no middle ground. “He would meditate for hour after hour,” she wrote in her memoir, Wonderful Tonight. “Then, as if the pleasures of the flesh were too hard to resist, he would stop meditating, snort coke, have fun, flirting and partying…. There was no normality in that either.”

Says Olivia, “George didn’t see black and white, up and down as different things. He didn’t compartmentalize his moods or his life. People think, oh, he was really this or that, or really extreme. But those extremes are all within one cir­cle. And he could be very, very quiet or he could be very, very loud. I mean, once he got going, that was it. He wasn’t, you know, a wimp. I’ll tell you that. He could outlast anyone.”

Harrison and his bandmates lost local talent shows repeatedly in the beginning, but that didn’t shake them. “We were just cocky,” Harrison said. Things turned around rather sharply, and Harri­son loved it all at first, embracing the stag­es of success in “sort of a teenage way”: his underage apprenticeship in Hamburg’s red-light district (where he lost his vir­ginity while his bandmates pretended to sleep in the same room — they applaud­ed at the end); the painstaking process of developing his own country-and-R&B-inflected guitar style; the beginnings of Beatlemania; the fame, the money, the girls, the tight bond among the Fabs. “We were four relatively sane people in the middle of the madness,” Harrison said. In the early years, he also idolized Lennon in particular: “He told me he really, real­ly admired John,” says Petty. “He proba­bly wanted John’s acceptance pretty bad, you know?”

But in 1965, Harrison dropped acid, and all at once, he didn’t believe in Beatles. “It didn’t take long before he re­alized, ‘This isn’t it,’ ” says Olivia. “He re­alized, ‘This is not going to sustain me. It’s not going to do it for me.’ “

“It’s all well and good being popular and being in demand, but, you know, it’s ridiculous,” Harrison told Rolling Stone in 1987. “I realized this is serious stuff, this is my life being affected by all these people shouting.” He felt physical­ly unsafe. “With what was going on, with presidents getting assassinated, the whole magnitude of our fame made me nervous.”

On the set of A Hard Day’s Night, he met Boyd, a lithe blond model; on the set of the Beatles’ next movie, Help!, he en­countered Indian classical music — which led him on a quest that would last far lon­ger than the marriage. Trying to master the sitar led him to yoga, which led him to meditation, which led him to the East­ern spirituality that would help define his life. “He was searching for something much higher, much deeper,” said Shankar, the sitar virtuoso who became Harrison’s mentor and friend. “It does seem like he already had some Indian background in him. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain how he got so attracted to a particular type of life and philosophy, even religion. It seems very strange, really. Unless you believe in reincarnation.”

For a while, it was like he was sitting in the back of the Beatles’ classroom, doo­dling sitars — hence “Within You Without You,” that beautiful, anomalous Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band track. But after he realized he’d never be more than an average sitar player, he refocused on the guitar and songwriting, coming up with some of the Beatles’ best songs: “Some­thing,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” not to mention “Not Guilty” and “All Things Must Pass,” which Lennon and McCartney wrongheadedly rejected. He also began playing slide gui­tar, developing an emotive, distinctive in­strumental voice that reflected his newly liberated spirit.