The OG Influencers - Part III

John, Paul, Ringo and George—just four guys

My perception of the men who comprised The Beatles may be shared by many. John and Paul so dominated the public persona of the group that they overshadowed the significance of George Harrison and Ringo Starr. It’s sort of like Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. Very few people come up to you and excitedly say, “Hey! Did you catch the Little Dipper last night?”

But when you dig deeper, the creative and cultural contributions made by both George and Ringo prove to be quite extraordinary. Each man has left his own mark on Liverpool and beyond.

George Harrison

Often described as “the quiet Beatle,” George Harrison was born to Harold and Louise Harrison at home at 12 Arnold Grove in Wavertree, Liverpool, on February 25, 1943. He was one of four children.

Harold was a bus driver who made his way up the ranks of the company to be able to provide a lower-middle class life for his family. Although Louise might have worked on occasion, her main focus was raising the children with an overriding emphasis on their happiness. For George, this meant music and she was very supportive of him in that endeavor.

Louise loved music herself and was purported to have a loud singing voice which penetrated the windows and walls of their home to spill out into the neighborhood. It is thought that when she was pregnant with George, she would listen to Radio India which played Hindustani classical music using instruments such as the sitar and hand drums known as tablas. She thought this type of peaceful sound would calm the baby in her womb. How prophetic that would prove to be in his later life.

The house on Arnold Grove was quite rudimentary with an outdoor toilet and only a single coal fire for heat. It had four rooms for the six Harrisons. When someone took a bath, a tin tub was dragged into the living room.

(The house today is currently occupied but you can see the Blue Medallion commemorating the fact that George Harrison was born there.)

In 1949, the family moved to 25 Upton Green in Speke. After starting his education at Dovedale Primary School, George passed the eleven-plus exam and was admitted to Liverpool Institute. On the bus to school one day, George happened to meet Paul McCartney who was a fellow student just a year older. The two of them gravitated to each other because of their love for music and they became friends.

George had a fascination for guitars and when he was fourteen, a friend of his father’s offered to sell him one at the hefty price of 3.10 pounds—the equivalent of 110 pounds today. Always wanting to see her son happy, Louise paid for the guitar.

Along with his brother Peter and a friend named Arthur Kelly, George formed a skiffle group called The Rebels. It was about this same time that another skiffle group known as The Quarrymen was gaining traction in Liverpool. Paul McCartney was a member of that group and when an opening for lead guitar occurred, he encouraged George to audition for the group’s founder John Lennon.

Even though his rendition of Guitar Shuffle Boogie impressed Lennon, he thought George was too young to join the band since he had just turned fifteen. But McCartney persisted. George performed a second time for Lennon on the top of a Liverpool double-decker bus playing the lead guitar part for Bill Justis’ Raunchy. Over time, he socialized with the group and filled in on guitar when needed. Finally, he wormed his way into The Quarrymen and became a member.

His age did cause a problem though in Germany, when the group, now called The Beatles, was invited to play in Hamburg. George was deported because he was too young to perform in nightclubs.

And so, like the other Beatles, a young George Harrison found himself stepping on a fast-moving train towards a destiny none of them could anticipate. The tentacles of his contribution to the group grew deep even if relatively unnoticed until later. With his penchant for and interest in alternative music styles, he became sort of a scout for the group to uncover trends that they could use in developing their own repertoire. By the release of the Rubber Soul album in 1965, he had begun to guide The Beatles into folk rock because of his interest in artists like Bob Dylan and The Byrds.

But the most significant shift came from his personal embrace of Hinduism and meditation. He began experimenting with Indian instrumentation, playing the sitar on Norwegian Wood and tambura (a long-necked, plucked, four-stringed instrument) on Tomorrow Never Knows. The song Love You To represented the group’s first genuine foray into Indian music with both the sitar and tabla used as instruments.

Even though John and Paul are credited as the most prolific songwriters of The Beatles, George can claim the prize for the most popular—Here Comes the Sun. Released on the Abbey Road album, it remains the favorite of all songs, eclipsing Let it Be, Come Together, and Hey Jude.

After he left The Beatles, Harrison had a very successful solo career. The constraints he felt while with the group were completely lifted and his creativity flowed. His album All Things Must Pass was released to great acclaim and included his number one single My Sweet Lord. He also performed with an American supergroup called the Traveling Wilburys consisting of Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty.

George Harrison’s humanitarian footprint is immense and global. Perhaps the most well-known project was In 1971, when he responded to a request by Indian musician Ravi Shankar to help coordinate a charity event. The Concert for Bangladesh, which took place on August 1 in Madison Square Gardens, was an effort to raise money to aid starving refugees during the Bangladesh Libertation War. Besides Harrison, the performers included the likes of Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Leon Russell. This concert was the precursor to LiveAid in 1985 and raised more than $240,000. On October 13, 2009, the first George Harrison Humanitarian Award went to Ravi Shankar for his efforts in saving the lives of children.

The George Harrison Humanitarian Fund for UNICEF was formed to support programs that help children caught in humanitarian emergencies, such as the Romanian Angel Appeal which provided aid to thousands of Romanian orphans after the fall of communism.

On December 30, 1999, George and his wife Olivia were attacked in their home, Friar Park, by a 34-year-old paranoid schizophrenic named Michael Abram. He stabbed George more than 40 times before Olivia incapacitated him by striking him repeatedly with a fireplace poker. Harrison survived that attack and later quoted Adi Shankara, an Indian spiritual guide about the incident. “Life is fragile like a raindrop on a lotus leaf. And you’ better believe it.”

It is well documented that Harrison admired Indian culture, religion and mysticism. Perhaps the music his mother played for him while in the womb persuaded him thusly. He experimented with LSD and this served as a catalyst for his early pursuit of Hinduism. Ultimately, after some bad experiences, he stopped using acid and became a devout follower of Hare Krishna.

Regarding other faiths, he once remarked, “All religions are branches of one big tree. It doesn’t matter what you call Him just as long as you call.”

In trying to explain his own personal attachment to Krishna, he wrote:

Krishna (a major deity in Hinduism) actually was in a body as a person…What makes it complicated is, if he’d God, what’s he doing fighting on a battlefield? It took me ages to try to figure that out, and again it was Yogananda’s (an Indian and American guru) spiritual interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita (Hindu scripture dated to the second or first century BC) that made me realize what it was. Our idea of Krishna and Arjuna (maternal cousin to Krishna) on the battlefield in the chariot. So this is the point—that we’re in these bodies, which is like a kind of chariot, and we’re going through this incarnation, this life, which is kind of a battlefield. The senses of the body…are the horses pulling the chariot, and we have to get control over the chariot by getting control over the reins. And Arjuna in the end says, “Please Krishna, you drive the chariot” because unless we bring Christ or Krishna or Buddha or whichever our spiritual guides—we’re going to crash the chariot, and we’re going to turn over, and we’re going to get killed on the battlefield. That’s why we say ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna,” asking Krishna to come and take over the chariot.

George Harrison died on November 29, 2001, of throat cancer. As customary to Hinduism, his ashes were scattered over the Ganges River in India.

(I must sincerely apologize. This has been a very poor attempt to capture and consolidate the life of a man who ran under the radar for me all these years. Yes, he definitely was “the quiet Beatle,” but there is nothing quiet about the his impact.)