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3 December, 2001
FAREWELL
TO A BEATLE
I'm feeling guilty. Despite the media's rosy nostalgia over George Harrison, I have to admit that George wasn't my favorite Beatle, and the thought has left me with a fretful lack of closure over his death from cancer this week.
| As a kid I thought of the Beatles' dalliance with Indian mysticism as a mere fad, but Harrison stayed on his spiritual path the rest of his life. |
Like all baby boomers, I was caught in the inescapable grip and influence of the Beatles.
Their unrestrained vitality leapt off the TV screen when I first saw them, not on the Ed Sullivan Show like so many of my generation, but on Japanese TV, as they played in Tokyo in 1964, the Year of the Beatles and the Year of the Tokyo Olympics. For me, the Beatles' invasion of Japan is part of the mythology of a country climbing out of the post-war era and into modern times. The crazy, shaking, mop-top hair and the electric guitars playing in Tokyo seemed as significant as the Olympics coming to the city.
The moment I was old enough to have my own spending money, I began buying Beatles records.
I bought a handful of Beatles singles bearing the striking orange-and-yellow swirl of Capitol Records on their label. The Beatles' "Rubber Soul" was my first full-length album. "The Beatles," better known as "The White Album," was my first double-record, and made me feel more mature just for owning it.
I turned 13 the year the Beatles officially broke up, in 1970, and by then I had already read writer Hunter Davies' "Unauthorized Biography of the Beatles." Looking back, I was well on my way to becoming a rock critic, even though I didn't know it at the time. The Beatles had started me on my career path as a writer.
But during my whole childhood with the group, my favorite Beatle was John (not an uncommon choice), followed by Paul. George and Ringo were important but somehow incidental to me. I knew Ringo's steady, simple, raucous drums and George's understated guitar were subtle but important keys to the Beatles' sound. I liked George's songs, whenever he wrote one (John and Paul seemed to allow one token George song on most of the group's albums), but there were too few on the records to consider him the equal of Lennon-McCartney. I just didn't pay that much attention to George.
All of which was unfair, I know now.
In hindsight, Harrison's guitar talent towered above the others and informed much of the Beatles' catalog. His best songs, such as "Something" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" stand strong with the best his groupmates produced. And his lesser-known songs, from "Don't Bother Me" to "For You To" are as vivid and alive for me today as they were when I was a pre-teen.
Harrison impressed me with the album he released after the Beatles' breakup, the sprawling three-record boxed set "All Things Must Pass." It had filler (one whole record of unfocused jamming with other musicians), but some of the songs equaled the Beatles' heyday.
His followup, another three-record boxed set, was a soundtrack to his performance film "Concert for Bangladesh," a fund-raiser for the third-world country. He had just invented the benefit rock concert, a concept that didn't fully bloom until the 1980s' Live Aid concert and subsequent Farm Aid shows. Harrison's later albums were less interesting to me, but then so were the later solo albums by the other Beatles.
Do I think George Harrison will go down in history as a great rock and roll composer and musician? Surely yes. On a par with Lennon and McCartney? Nope. That's why I'm feeling guilty while the world weeps for his passing.
Another reason I'm somewhat unmoved by Harrison's death is that his was a natural death, and his illness had been reported (though he denied it) for some time. There was no sudden shock and sense of loss like John Lennon's 1980 murder. It's worth noting, though, that Harrison is at the vanguard of an aging generation of rock stars who will follow him with illness and even old age. The baby boomers' heroes - and therefore boomers ourselves -- are facing mortality.
The one thing I can unabashedly credit Harrison for is his interest in Eastern philosophy, religion and culture.
When he first introduced the rest of the Beatles to transcendental meditation in 1967, he helped establish one of the foundations of alternative culture. Without his endorsement, Westerners may not have the abiding interest in Buddhism, meditation, yoga and Indian culture that we have today.
Harrison first picked up the sitar, the multiple-stringed Indian instrument with the droning, hypnotic sound, during the filming of the Beatles' second feature film, "Help!," which spoofed Indian culture. He took both the culture and the sound of the sitar seriously, and my introduction to the sitar was on the album "Rubber Soul" - that first album I bought.
As a kid I thought of the Beatles' dalliance with Indian mysticism as a mere fad, but Harrison stayed on his spiritual path the rest of his life. And I think his insistence on introducing his fans to the culture opened doors for many of us, not just to Indian music and philosophy but also to other Asian cultures.
John married Yoko Ono and made an impression on me by accepting a Japanese woman as his equal. He made me feel proud somehow that I was Japanese. George made an impression too, but in such a low-key way that I didn't notice until years later how ahead of his time he had been by embracing the East in his life.
And Buddhism's take on death is less final, more natural than Western concepts of dying. In the end, maybe that's why I don't mourn for George - all things must pass, after all, and he's simply moved on to the next level.
I don't feel so guilty any more. Have a great trip, George.