George Harrison Gets Back
Harrison is trying to be a good sport, and the film crew is just doing its job, but between the script’s wildly incongruous baseball references and the former Beatle’s obvious discomfort with being required to hawk his new album, the shoot is something less than a cinematic triumph. “How does this relate to the record?” Harrison asks at one point, his frustration palpable. “That’s what I’d like to know.”
Shortly after the shoot, Harrison unwinds in one of the Warner offices. “They all mean well,” he says indulgently of the Warner crew, as he pulls a pack of Marlboros from his bag and lights one up. “It’s just that they’re trying to cater to their staff. They’re all into baseball. I can understand what they’re trying to do, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. Fred, Oooh, whew.”
“You look like the only person here who might be from New York,” is the first thing Harrison says when he picks me up, two months before the video shoot, at the train station in Henley-on-Thames, the London suburb where he lives with his wife, Olivia, and their son, Dhani. I was told that someone would meet me and drive me to Harrison’s estate, called Friar Park, but I didn’t expect the man himself. Harrison is smiling and friendly as he leads me to a black Ferrari 275 GTB for the short drive to his home.
George Harrison has spent a good deal of time since the Beatles’ split-up avoiding the public eye. “Got out of the line of fire” is how he puts it in one song on Cloud Nine.
The psychic roller coaster the Beatles rode in both their public and private lives was a large part of the reason for Harrison’s withdrawal. The first impact of that experience for him was a disorienting sense of being swept along by something much larger than himself. “We were just kids, getting carried away on the whole snowball effect,” he says. “It was later, when all that smoking reefer and LSD came about, that you started getting into thinking, actually saw what was happening. Before that, we didn’t have time to think. We were just going from one gig to another and into the studio and TV studios and concerts.”
Partly as a result of their outspokenness about their experiences with “reefer and LSD” — and John Lennon’s famous remark about the Beatles’ being “more popular than Jesus” — the Beatles began distancing themselves from the less open-minded segment of their audience. But they paid a price for their freedom. “We were loved for one period of time, then they hated us, then they loved us, then they hated us,” Harrison says. “We went from being the cute, lovable mop tops to being these horrible, bearded hippies — and back out of it again. The press, they put so much praise on you that the only thing left to do is start knocking you down. We’d been through that, and it got to the point that it didn’t even matter.”
Throughout all the external shifts, Harrison, the youngest member of the group, stood in the shadow of John Lennon and Paul McCartney as a songwriter and had a difficult time both establishing himself within the group and defining his own identity once the band broke up. Harrison’s interest in Eastern music and mysticism — which got its start when the Beatles were filming Help! in 1965 — helped center him, but it also contributed to his image as a stern figure outside the pop-culture mainstream. To free himself from his past, Harrison often went unnecessarily far out of his way to deny the significance of the Beatles and to discourage any expectations of him as a former member of the most popular band in history.
Over time, however, he has grown much more relaxed about the events that took place all those years ago, and he has become more outgoing as a result. Last June he appeared at the Prince’s Trust benefit concert in London with Ringo Starr and a pickup band of musician friends, including Eric Clapton, and played two Beatles songs. He also popped up one night last spring at the Palomino club in Los Angeles and jammed with John Fogerty and his old friend Bob Dylan “after sitting there for four hours, drinking beer,” Harrison says, laughing. “It was a bit raggedy to say the least, but we had a laugh.”
Friar Park, where Harrison spends much of his time out of the spotlight, is an apt symbol of his essentially private nature. The grounds are dominated by an enormous, ornate mansion, built by the nineteenth-century British eccentric Sir Francis Crisp, that served as a convent before Harrison bought it in 1969. “It’s like Disneyland — ‘Give me some coupons and I’ll show you this,”‘ he says of the tendency of visitors to be intrigued and distracted by the estate’s fairy-tale-like environment. In its whimsicality, spiritual heritage and atmosphere of protected seclusion, Friar Park is so much the perfect home for Harrison that he has twice celebrated the place in song: in “Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp” on All Things Must Pass and “Crackerbox Palace” on 33 & 1/3. Friar Park also affords plenty of opportunities for one of Harrison’s favorite solitary activities: the decidedly un-rock-star-ish pastime of gardening.
