All things must pass, but we all have a Beatle. Not a favorite Beatle, but a Beatle that somehow represents our essential nature. Paul was the greatest musician; John, the greatest artist. Ringo is beloved by children and the French. George called himself “the Economy Beatle,” which was a very George thing to say, a way of deflecting what became obvious: of all the Fabs, he was the deepest thinker. (If you are a George person, so is Bob Dylan.)
Paul said the Beatles were a square—you needed all four for them to exist. Do the Beatle math and it’s startling. There are a total of 213 Beatles songs, and among those, 180 are written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 25 are covers, and another 25—25!—are by George Harrison, about 11.7 percent. But it’s unquantifiable. There are no Beatles without him.
He took some time to catch up, and when he did, he had to fight to get two songs on an album, and those two songs on Abbey Road—“Something” and “Here Comes the Sun”—are now the top two streamed Beatles songs. The Economy Beatle could not only make masterpieces but masterpieces that could have come only from him and his quest, the most convincing inner journey in rock ’n’ roll.
If you are reading this, you may be a George person. It’s a seriously un-George world we’re living in: aspiring to get the most clicks, vying to be the most influential influencer, insisting on the biggest crowd size. Harrison even thought U2 were too egotistical; he had no idea what was coming.
When it’s all too much, and it is, find a place of calm, put on your headphones, and listen to “Within You Without You.” It is Harrison’s sole contribution to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and there isn’t another Beatle present. Indian and Western classical musicians sublimely guide us through something that is as confrontational as it is meditative:
We were talking—about the love that’s gone so cold and the people,
Who gain the world and lose their soul—
They don’t know—they can’t see—are you one of them?
Are you? Is it your fault that the love has gone so cold? Are all the messages barraging you on your phone leading you astray? That Headspace app is there, but who has the time? The song knows more with every repeat.
Enter Seth Rogovy’s Within You Without You, not a biography but a meditation on the music and the man who meditated for us all. We learn that, when he was a child, Harrison was described by a teacher as a “very quiet, introverted little boy, who would sit in the furthest corner and not even look up”—the quiet Beatle right away.
Harrison’s first contribution was a song called “Don’t Bother Me,” a darker turn than early Beatles fare, and his opening chord to “A Hard Day’s Night” has confounded musicologists: Mixolydian over overtones over more overtones, less a chord than an assemblage of notes. Rogovy calls it “the single most emblematic sound in the Beatles’ entire recording catalogue.” Said like a true George person.
In 1965, Harrison first encountered a sitar on the set of Help! and was dosed with LSD by his dentist. The world got much bigger, and he lost patience. In “Think for Yourself,” you hear an argument with Pattie Boyd, who still married him: “Although your mind’s opaque, / Try thinking more, / If just for your own sake.” This was a long way from Nirvana.
The next year he opened Revolver with “Taxman,” the coolest thing he had done up to that point, and, on “Love You To,” he sang, to sitar and tabla, “Make love all day long / Make love singing songs.” Would that we could. After the final Beatles concert, he said, at 23, “Now I don’t have to be a Beatle anymore.”
And being a Beatle became a drag when he could write the eternal “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and McCartney, who sang a kick-ass harmony on the track, rejected Harrison’s guitar part on “Hey Jude”—it was his song, so he had the right—and was so condescending to him, on film, that he quit the band for a little while. Before he was even out the door, McCartney said, “If he’s not back for three days, we’ll get Clapton.” Harrison really meant it about his guitar gently weeping. What would it take?
As the book closed on the Beatles, Harrison came up with “Something,” a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but Rogovy points out the negativity in the language. Sure, Frank Sinatra said it was the greatest love song in a half-century, but you try celebrating your anniversary by telling your wife that you don’t want to leave her.
Harrison had the biggest motivation to leave the Beatles—the three-record set All Things Must Pass was stuffed with Beatles rejects, all spectacular—and though his solo career initially blossomed, there was a dark side. He was found guilty of plagiarizing “My Sweet Lord” from “He’s So Fine,” and while the songs are uncomfortably (and unintentionally) close, the song is still magic, even if you don’t believe in a sweet lord.
Then there was “The Concert for Bangladesh,” an incredible event that mostly lined the pockets of crooked manager Allen Klein and an army of lawyers. Harrison started HandMade Films to fund Monty Python’s Life of Brian, only to be fleeced by an investor who filed for bankruptcy and left him so desperate for cash he participated in The Beatles Anthology to save his own house. Then, in that house, he was stabbed in his own bed by a psychopath, and he died of cancer two years later.
McCartney and Starr visited him in bed, and as McCartney was about to leave, a witness noticed that Harrison was holding McCartney’s hand. Harrison was prepared for the inevitable, but he was giving comfort to his onetime frenemy. The “Art of Dying,” indeed.
The day he died, not long after 9/11, I panicked. How could I live in a world without George? I spent the day playing every George Harrison song I knew on piano, and even if I didn’t share his beliefs, I believed in the Economy Beatle.
The material world gets worse every day. And yet there are those people who are streaming “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something” over any other Beatles song. George is gone, but the George people remain. He knows you need to be handled with care. There’s an inner light, and he wants to share it with everyone. Stick with him. If you don’t know where you’re going, he sang, any road will take you there.
David Yaffe was a professor of humanities at Syracuse University and the author of Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. He died last month; you can read Matthew Gasda’s appreciation of him here
