George Harrison: Living In The Material World

Nobody can question Martin Scorsese’s body of work, but there is growing evidence that his documentary work-specifically the films devoted to his generation’s pipers-is growing increasingly celebratory and decreasingly informative.

The word “forgettable” did not apply to a Scorsese film, but that is a good adjective for his last effort, Shine A Light, a late career concert documentary on The Rolling Stones. Shine A Light is not a very good indicator of how good the Stones were as a live unit, and it does not show them as anything but aging dinosaurs whose better days were well behind them.

He returns with Living In The Material World, nearly four hours of archival material pieced together to give us insight on this complex artist. The effort is deserved, as Harrison has probably been the most private of the members of The Beatles, with even his autobiography I Me Mine reading as a cherry-picked collection of memories that provide a basic overview of his life while not seeming overly concerned with digging too deep into touchy subjects.

Living In The Material World is no exception. Whether it is Scorsese’s own strategy or producer/spouse Olivia Harrison’s instructions to avoid controversial topics, the movie serves as a basic introduction to George while passing over his musical output with a vague eye.

You hear very little on the conflict between George and the rest of the Beatles, other than the common knowledge that his allotment of one song an album was beginning to be questioned.

Conversely, so little time is spent on his solo work the fact that after Harrison’s only post-Beatle masterpiece All Things Must Pass that there is little evidence to suggest that he had much to offer the music market after that record anyway.

Could it be that the dominance of Lennon/McCartney creativity during the Beatles prompted Harrison to work that much harder at his own craft and without it, he’d gotten lazy?

While I don’t expect a documentary to completely rail on the subject-particularly when the family is participating in its development-I do expect that it should be a fair representation of the subject.

Let’s be honest: I’m hard pressed to come up with an album’s worth of good George Harrison songs after All Things Must Pass and, to that point, even Scorsese agrees based on the song material he includes on this documentary. There is very little post-All Things Must Pass music underneath the endless praising and personal antidotes.

Even during the film’s first half, so much time is spent on explaining Stu Sutcliff’s role in the Beatle’s early development that you wonder, “Who is this documentary about?”

Added to this, the film spends an inordinate amount of time on John Lennon that you begin to wonder if Lennon’s own criticism of I Me Mine right before his murder made an impact on George’s life, to the point where the film goes out of its way on making sure John gets the proper credit.

And all of this makes you wonder if we really need four hours to tell the story of George Harrison.

Is, perhaps, the reason we knew so little about “the quiet Beatle” is because his first role was his finest? His comfort level and talents were best matched as the silent counter-balance to John and Paul and, without them, he began to notice the limitations of his own talents?

We’ll never know, particularly if Living In The Material World claims to be the definitive overview of George Harrison.

There’s a sticky feeling to it too, as we learn why Harrison felt such a connection to the Hindu religion, but we get little insight to the suggestion that Harrison was far from being the idealistic beacon that the film likes to hint at.

His friendship with Eric Clapton is given ample airtime, but very little is spent on the dynamic of Clapton’s approach to George’s first wife, Pattie, other than to describe the infidelity as nothing more than an off-shoot of the “freedom” within swinging London.

There is a bit of candid information at the end of Living In The Material World, when the severities of Harrison’s wounds resulting from the attack made on his life when an intruder stabbed him on New Year’s Eve, 1999.

Apparently, George was close to death after the attack and he is extremely lucky that his wife Olivia was there to beat the shit out of the assailant with a nearby fireplace poker.

All of this came after Harrison was undergoing cancer treatment, and there is a bit of suggestion that the attack also contributed to George’s health deteriorating, just before another cancerous growth was discovered.

The growth led to the Harrison camp getting involved with Dr Gil Lederman and his controversial cancer treatments in Staten Island. While there, Lederman managed to break the traditional doctor/patient role when the “good doctor” took Harrison’s frail hand to initiate a barely conscious autograph.

I use this story from the last days of Harrison’s life as an example. This may not have been the most glowing story of George’s life, but it was part of it and it serves as a perfect example of why Harrison shied away from the limelight that his career created. Even while he was dying, Harrison was forced to deal with fame when his primary focus should have been with his health.

It was a well-known story, but Scorsese leaves it for us to discover. And it makes us consider “How many other stories did Martin Scorsese leave out for the sake of making nice with the Harrison estate or for the sake of making his subject matter more like a deity?”

George Harrison - Somewhere In England

During the 70’s, I was transfixed with anything Beatles related. That meant I was forced to consider any number of Beatles solo project, or any item that was touched by a Beatle at one point.

It was too expensive to taste every item, but a boy could dream.

A boy could also walk away devastated by the murder of John Lennon and view McCartney’s off-the-cuff remarks about his former bandmate’s death as callous, completely negating any of his post-McCartney II work on the grounds of something that I had no real frame of reference on.

His death also had me consider two records by former Beatles as a matter of loyalty. And while I could only afford one of them, George Harrison’s Somewhere In England, I also had Ringo’s Stop And Smell The Roses on my radar. Both, from what I understood, had at least some reference to their former friend and this was an appropriate way for me to memorialize my favorite Beatle.

I went with Harrison because the last thing I’d heard from him-“Crackerbox Palace”-I rather enjoyed. Surely, Somewhere In England-a phrase coined when looking for comment from Harrison after Lennon’s death-would contain a worthy amount of good material.

After dropping the necessary amount on the full-length, it appeared that I was wrong.
Not only did it feature the needlessly sappy “All Those Years Ago,” it featured about nine other also-rans that cushioned the album’s only hit, all of them pointing to the fact that George’s heart just didn’t seem to be in record making any more, and dare I say it, song making.

Right out of the gate, Harrison laments how people want to hear Beatlesque material, when the reality was much different. We only wanted to hear good Harrison material. “Blood From A Clone” name-checks Frank Zappa about a decade too late while deriding current trends (“And not New Wave”/They don’t play that crap”) for no apparent reason other than to come across as a grouchy old man who can only find inspiration by bitching about others.

Even that aforementioned hit is standard-issue Harrison, complete with his weepy slide and the sound of settling for an earlier time, that really wasn’t all those years ago when you think about it. With only a decade removed from his fab past, a storyline he’d repeat again with the even shittier “When We Was Fab,” Harrison finds comfort in coming off like a middle-age crisis, rattling off easy observations about his Beatle brother instead of tapping into any semblance of emotion about the incident.

The lack of emotional quality is unsettling; a ghost writer could have written “All Those Years Ago” for all you can tell, and the rest of Somewhere In England points that tragedy may have been the only reason for issuing the album to begin with.

George Harrison - Wonderwall Music

If you’ve ever joked about the Oasis song “Wonderwall” with that rhetorical question “What’s a ‘wonderwall’ anyway?”, you’ve proven that you’re not really a Beatles fan. And as every Oasis fan knows how they’re obsessively indebted to the Beatles, a true Beatles fan know that “Wonderwall” stands for Wonderwall Music, as in the very first Beatle solo album from George and is the very first release on the band’s imprint, Apple Records.
To be fair, this is fairly obscure trivia as Wonderwall Music is essentially a film score for Wonderwall the movie, a score in which George doesn’t even play a note. It was released 40 years ago today, a time when Harrison was pretty obsessive about Indian music. To be fair, he did compose the score, and while I’ve never actually seen how the score holds up against the actual movie, it’s about as exciting as you can imagine when listening to a movie score without the actual visuals on top of the notes.
While far from being required listening, Wonderwall Music is an interesting foray into avant-garde instrumental music that provides no hint of Harrison’s pop side or underrated guitar work. Aside from your own soundtrack for a psychedelic induced comedown, there is very little here in terms of repeated listening pleasure or exemplarary musicianship.
It’s a curious side note, most notable for its place in Beatle history and the bands that use Beatle trivia for their own creative expression.

Happy Birthday-George Harrison

George Harrison’s birthday today reminds me of a few things. First of all, it reminds me that I really need to pick up my two favorite Harrison solo albums (All Things Must Pass and Spirits In The Material World). It also reminds me of a Beatles tribute band that I saw in Beloit, Wisconsin one summer. They were surprisingly good, performing two sets that evening: one featuring the “fab” version circa ’63-’65 and the other featuring the “artsy” version circa’66-’68.
The guy that played George had unbelievably large teeth, which seemed to become more prominent after ingesting a couple of white Russians and MS Contin tablets. I was forced to retreat back to the hotel room and smoke pot to get the image removed from my head.
Getting back to the Spirits In The Material World album: the gatefold vinyl version featured a very colorful picture of Krishna. He looked very feminine and his skin was a deeper shade of blue as compared to other images. He was decked out in an almost warrior motif and was playing a flute upon a white stallion. Consider that I am basing this off a memory from nearly thirty years ago, so forgive me if this is all incorrect. I haven’t actually listened to that album in that amount of time either, so it could be a complete piece of shit.
In the eyes of an 8 year old, this was a very powerful image, and I asked my Father more pointed questions about the blue dude and what he represents. Since my old man wasn’t well versed in Hinduism, the questions like “What special powers does Krishna have?” and “How did he turn blue?” went unanswered.
They still are, come to think of it, but I did come to discover that his name does (roughly) translate as “attractive” and, indeed, the guy in the gatefold of Harrison’s Material World album was pretty hot looking.
I hope that the fact that I thought Krishna was attractive to me at the age of eight doesn’t offend anyone.
If it does, well then, blame George Harrison.
Like I said, I haven’t spun a Harrison solo album in some time now, so I’d probably start (and end with) those two aforementioned albums that I used to enjoy as a kid.
His other efforts are questionable to me: I did get a few singles in lieu of actual albums (I was a kid with a very fixed income, you understand) and the last true l.p. of George’s that I actually got would have been Somewhere In England, which was incredibly lame.
And then there’s the entire late-80’s comeback albums which were riddled with Jeff Lynne’s overproduction and then there was the embarrassing “feud” with Oasis in the mid-90’s where George weighed in on his opinions of the Gallagher brothers for no apparent reason.
I expect better from a Beatle, particularly a cool one like George.
Now, such matters seem a little trivial, particularly after a retarded murder attempt followed by a battle with cancer, a battle that he would subsequently lose.
George would have turned 65 today.

Stopping By George's Place

During the wee hours on this day in 1999, Michael Abram, a 33-year-old Liverpudlian, breached the security of George Harrison’s Oxfordshire mansion and stabbed him several times in the chest. Both Harrison’s wife Olivia and his son Dhani helped subdue the attacker by hitting him over the head with a lamp and detaining him until police arrive. George suffered from a collapsed lung but didn’t lose his sense of humor, commenting that Abram “wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys.”
But wait, there’s more.
Just a week prior to this incident, Cristin Keleher broke into Harrison’s Maui home. She was discovered by Harrison’s sister-in-law, eating a frozen pizza, drinking root beer, and making long distant phone calls on the home’s telephone.
While Abram was found not guilty by reason of insanity, Keleher was charged with burglary and theft. It was, after all, a DiGiorno pizza that she lifted.
But seriously, what is it about The Beatles and crazy people? What prompts people to seek out and, in some cases, harm the members of this fairly decent pop band? Can’t they target the band’s coattail riders for bringing second-rate facsimiles to the world of music? Couldn’t they focus their attention on the members of the Dave Clark Five so we can stop all this nonsense about inducting them into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame?
While the end of ’99 might have been a shitty way to end the year for Harrison, I think it’s safe to assume that it wasn’t necessarily his worst year.