George Harrison (1943-2001)

[Charles_Obscure]

Happy Bird-Day in Heaven, Georgio!

[dragster]

RIP George...you are missed

[JethroTull]

Watch this and you just might start crying....

[Jahfin]

From Entertainment Weekly:

George Harrison doc by Martin Scorsese to air on HBO this fall

by Lanford Beard

Image Credit: Jurgen Vollmer/Redferns/Getty Images

After the success of 2008′s Rolling Stones documentary Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese set his sights on another musical giant: George Harrison. George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Scorsese’s doc on the former Beatle, has been acquired by HBO for a two-part airing on Oct. 5 and 6 of this year.

“From rock’n'roll icon to moviemaker, to spiritual seeker and humanitarian, George Harrison was a true renaissance man. This amazing film will illuminate every aspect of Harrison’s remarkable, multifaceted life,” said HBO Programming president Michael Lombardo.

Unlike Shine a Light’s in-concert angle, Living in the Material World will focus on Harrison’s musical and spiritual journey — from his youth in Liverpool to his post-Beatles life as a philanthropist and filmmaker — through the icon’s own words and through never-before-seen photos and home movies. Some of Harrison’s closest friends will appear in the film, including Eric Clapton, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, George Martin, Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Tom Petty, Phil Spector, Ringo Starr, and Jackie Stewart.

Harrison’s widow Olivia is among the film’s producers. She said of the project, “Martin Scorsese’s intuition towards George was evident the first time we met to discuss this project. He sensed what George was about: his music, his strong beliefs, his art, his place in the Beatles’ story and his extraordinary life afterwards. Marty’s wonderful film has found all of that and more.”

[kenog]

A new book has been published about George. ‘George Harrison: Behind The Locked Door’ by Graeme Thomson is published by Omnibus Press, priced £19.95.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2442688/The-Beatles-George-Harrison-feared-shot-hated-pushed-Paul-McCartney.html#ixzz2gtPGDqHB

The madness of king George: The Beatle who feared being shot and hated being 'pushed around' by Paul McCartney

By GRAEME THOMSON

Barely a week into recording what would become The Beatles’ final album Let It Be, George Harrison was ready to quit.

He was no longer willing to fulfil a subservient role in the band, and by lunch on January 10, 1969, things came to a head.

Having rowed with Paul McCartney over what to play, or rather what not to play, on the track Two Of Us – ‘Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it,’ said Harrison acidly – during a break he told his band mates he was leaving.

When? ‘Now. You can replace me. Put an ad in the New Musical Express and get a few people in. See you round the clubs.’

‘It was very uncomfortable,’ says Let It Be producer Glyn Johns. ‘To watch this begin and be there in the immediate aftermath was very unpleasant.’

Harrison and McCartney had had a fractious relationship since meeting at the Liverpool Institute.

The junior partner by eight months, George chafed at Paul’s domineering streak, and grew increasingly angry at being treated like a glorified session-man. Harrison’s friend and fellow guitarist Peter Frampton recalls being with Harrison in 1971.

‘I’d put on Paperback Writer and say, “I love the guitar on that,” and he’d say, “Oh, that’s Paul.” I put all these other Beatles tracks on: “Oh, that’s Paul.” It wasn’t until then I realised he had been stifled. It was very frustrating for George.’

Immersed in the religion and philosophy of the East, Harrison was unimpressed with McCartney’s concept for The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper. Aside from his Indian-influenced Within You Without You, he played a peripheral role on the album.

McCartney contributed lead guitar on several tracks and was later heard to comment: ‘George turned up for his number and a couple of other sessions but not much else.’

The following year, his insistence that Harrison play less guitar on Hey Jude proved another flashpoint.

‘George saw Paul as difficult,’ says model Pattie Boyd, married to Harrison from 1966 to 1977.

‘They would tolerate each other, but I think George basically didn’t like Paul’s personality. I just think they really didn’t love each other.’

By 1969, ‘George was terribly unhappy,’ Boyd continues. ‘The Beatles made him unhappy, with the constant arguments. They were vicious to each other. That was really upsetting, and even more so for him because he had this new spiritual avenue.

‘Like a little brother, he was pushed into the background. He would come home from recording and be full of anger. It was a very bad state that he was in.’

Harrison’s disaffection was years in the making. It wasn’t just the personal niggles, lack of outlet for his songs, or the patronising attitude of Lennon and McCartney. It ran far deeper.

From as early as 1965 being a Beatle had become ‘a horror story… awful… manic…crazy, a nightmare’, an experience defined by ‘madness’, ‘panic’ and ‘paranoia’.

It was a trauma Harrison spent his entire life trying to blank out.

‘I got the feeling from him that it was a bad memory, something he didn’t want to go back to,’ says his friend Roger McGuinn, singer and guitarist in The Byrds.

The escalation in Beatlemania from 1964 to 1966 brought on a kind of psychic travel sickness. Harrison got through flights by taking uppers and drinking whisky and coke.

Decades later, his memories of this time focused almost entirely on the horrors of aeroplanes, airports, cars and crowds. The thrill of pressing flesh soon wore off.

‘I remember thinking, I’d love to meet someone who would really impress me,’ Harrison recalled.

It all paled in the face of death threats, bomb scares, astrologists’ curses, terrifying flights, mobs and provocative police escorts.

Everywhere they went suggested imminent catastrophe. Nine months after John F Kennedy’s assassination, Harrison vetoed a cavalcade through San Francisco.

‘I was very nervous,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like the idea of being too popular.’

Producer Ted Templeman says: ‘He told me often how afraid he was in The Beatles, how he thought he was going to die. He had a terror of it, and that did affect him a bit overall. He could never be allowed to forget it.’

He spent three years hiding: in bathrooms, bedrooms, dressing rooms, cars, armoured vans and ambulances.

‘He’d phone or write me lots of letters, saying, ‘We’re stuck in our rooms,’ says Boyd.

‘They couldn’t go out, and the audience couldn’t hear them, and it all started to seem a little pointless.’

Beneath the surface noise, The Beatles were still capable of being a tight little live band, but compared to the searing energy of their early days in Hamburg and the Cavern it felt more and more like an act.

As a perfectionist, the satisfaction Harrison once gained from performing all but vanished.

‘George didn’t want to know the touring,’ says Liverpudlian writer Bill Harry, a close friend from their days as The Quarrymen.

‘It wasn’t like when we used to watch them for an hour and a half on the Cavern stage – a few feet away, hairs up on the back of the neck.

'On the tours they were doing 20 minutes and you couldn’t hear them. They were basically just standing there for people to look at.’

‘I wanted to stop touring after about ’65, actually,’ said Harrison.

Perhaps he should have. The world tour of 1966 would prove to be truly nightmarish.

After a trip to Japan in June, where snipers lined the roof of the hotel, The Beatles travelled to the Philippines. The gig was dangerously oversubscribed. Worse, the promoter had told President Marcos that The Beatles would meet him and wife Imelda at an official reception.

Nobody had told the band, who refused to alter their plans for the corrupt Marcoses, creating a wave of national anger. When they arrived at the airport to leave, they were pushed, shoved and spat at, while roadie Mal Evans was punched and kicked by a frenzied mob. They ran to the plane in fear.

‘He had a very, very bad experience in Manila and it remained unforgettable for George,’ says Boyd.

‘He was a very slight man, very light, and the fear of being vulnerable to fans, and crazy people, remained with him.’

David Acomba, who filmed Harrison’s 1974 solo tour, recalls that, even a decade after Beatlemania, ‘George was constantly worried about being shot’.

His sense of physical danger grew when they arrived in the U.S. a month after Manila. In the wake of Lennon’s remarks that The Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’, their records were banned and publicly burned.

‘They’ve got to buy them before they can burn them,’ Harrison noted, but his laughter was hollow.

Each day brought death threats. At the LA Dodgers stadium on August 28 the crowd broke through police lines and tried to rush across the field to the stage. On stage, Harrison shouted, ‘What’s happening?’

Nobody seemed able to provide an answer. The following day the band played their last-ever show, Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

Flying down to Los Angeles that night, Harrison said, ‘Well, that’s it, I’m not a Beatle any more.’

He was wrong … but also right. It took Harrison a few more years and much heartache before he finally quit the band, but from the late summer of 1966 his passions increasingly lay elsewhere.

Exactly two weeks after returning to Britain from the final U.S. tour date, on September 14 he and Boyd flew from Heathrow to Mumbai to embark on a two-month trip around India.

And everything changed for ever.

Harrison’s penchant for ‘borrowing’ from other songs came home to roost on 1971 solo hit My Sweet Lord – a court case later ruled he had plagiarised the melody from The Chiffons’ 1962 song He’s So Fine.

It was not an isolated case. The first line of Something was lifted directly from James Taylor’s Something In The Way She Moves. And on Harrison’s second solo album, Electronic Sound, the entire second side was taken, without permission, from a performance by Moog pioneer Bernie Krause.

‘I had no control,’ says Krause. ‘I didn’t know it was recorded, I didn’t want it out, and I felt very badly that he did that. He just said, “Trust me, I’m a Beatle.” ’

Apple signing Lon Van Eaton recalls the Beatle used the melody of his song Without The Lord for Miss O’Dell.

‘George said, “Oh, I nicked part of your song and put it in one of my songs.” I was like, “Oh, OK!” I was way beyond the idea of owning anything, but it was my melody he put on Miss O’Dell.’

[weslgarlic]

[Nutrocker]

Twelve years on, I STILL miss George Harrison. Probably my favourite Beatle overall.

George was a voice of reason in an increasingly unreasonable world.

[Adrian Ernesto Cepeda]

Here's my latest Don'tForgetTheSongs-365 post, Has anyone else noticed… George Harrison’s “Old Brown Shoe” is a clever homage to Bob Dylan ‘s “Highway 61?”

[Nutrocker]

Has anyone else noticed… George Harrison’s “Old Brown Shoe” is a clever homage to Bob Dylan ‘s “Highway 61?”

I've always held the opinion that it's more inspired by the Basement Tapes when it comes to Dylan influence...George was also VERY influenced by The Band in 1969, so "Old Brown Shoe" sorta comes across as a nice Beatles-does-The Band hybrid. I can easily hear Dylan singing it. Check George's lead guitar licks on "Dig A Pony" as well...very Robbie Robertsonesque (think "To Kingdom Come" or "Caledonia Mission")