Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison - Softcover

Greene, Joshua M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0470127805 ISBN 13: 9780470127803

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 2008

Synopsis

"A fascinating read."–Associated Press

Joshua Greene, who studied meditation with the legendary Beatle George Harrison, draws on personal remembrances, recorded conversations, and firsthand accounts to create a moving portrait of Harrison’s spiritual life, his profound contribution to the Beatles’ music, and previously unpublished anecdotes about his time with music legends Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, and others.

"Many well–known artists have touched people’s hearts with their music, but few have ever succeeded in touching people’s souls. That was George’s gift, and his story is described here with affection and taste. A wonderful book."–Mia Farrow

Joshua M. Greene (Long Island, NY) is the author of two acclaimed previous nonfiction books and the producer of numerous award–winning films. His articles have been published internationally, and his books on the Holocaust were adapted for broadcast on PBS and the Discovery Channel.

About this title

About the Author

Joshua M. Greene teaches in the religion department of Hofstra University. He is the author of two acclaimed previous nonfiction books and the producer of numerous award–winning films. His articles have appeared in print internationally, and his books on the Holocaust were adapted for broadcast on PBS and the Discovery Channel.

From the Back Cover

"Many well–known artists have touched people′s hearts with their music, but few have ever succeeded in touching people′s souls. That was George′s gift, and his story is described here with affection and taste. A wonderful book."
Mia Farrow

"There is a palpable excitement to this book that made me feel I was there, with George, on his journey. . . . Extraordinary."
Martin Rutte, coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work

"The depth of insight into Harrison′s inner life is great."
Yoga Journal

Here Comes the Sun tells the story of George Harrison′s musical and spiritual journey with more detail and immediacy than in any other book about Harrison or the Beatles. Like his fellow Beatles, Harrison escaped the streets of working–class Liverpool, survived a tough musical apprenticeship in underground clubs, and became one of the most famous and successful musical artists in history. Before long, though, disillusioned with both the price and rewards of celebrity, he began the journey that would transform his music and redefine the rest of his life. Joshua Greene, who studied meditation with the legendary Beatle, draws on personal remembrances, recorded conversations, and firsthand accounts to create a moving portrait of Harrison′s spiritual life and his profound musical vision. This is a fresh and highly rewarding book for Beatles fans as well as for any reader interested in the spiritual path.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Here Comes the Sun

The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George HarrisonBy Joshua M. Greene

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2006 Joshua M. Greene
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-12780-3

Chapter One

Beginnings

Before there was anything there was the One. When the universe came into being, The One became many. -Rig-Veda

Years later, looking back, George Harrison found it strange that his soul entered his mother's womb in Liverpool in 1943 amid the sounds of battle-air raid sirens, German bomb attacks, English Spitfires shrieking by overhead racing to meet enemy planes-and wondered how he came to be in that family, in that house, at that time.

The final months of World War II were days of scarcity and rationing, and people of every class were scraping by. Harold Harrison's bus-driver salary barely covered basics, so when his wife, Louise, was pregnant with their first child, Harold and his brother-in-law Johnny built her a radio. They twisted wires and connected tubes and screwed the whole concoction into a wooden enclosure. After giving up her job at a local greengrocer's, Louise spent much of her time listening. She twisted the wooden dial to broadcasts of Irish folk songs, English dancehall tunes, and music of foreign lands, wearing down the batteries until Harold had to leave them at a nearby electrical shop to be recharged. Louise gave birth to a daughter, whom they named after her. Three years later came Harold Jr., and then their second son, Peter. During her fourth and last pregnancy-with George-Louise's favorite program was a weekly broadcast called Radio India. Every Sunday she tuned in to mystical sounds evoked by sitars and tablas, hoping that the exotic music would bring peace and calm to the baby in her womb.

George Harrison was born on February 25, 1943, at 12:10 A.M. in his family's house in a working-class section of Liverpool called Wavertree. By age three he had already developed the large ears, thick eyebrows, and lopsided smile that would be signature features throughout his life. "A tiny, squalling, miniature replica of myself," Harold proclaimed proudly, not foreseeing all the ways his youngest would break the mold. Harold was a man of his generation, a father for whom there was a right way and a wrong way to all things and who was determined to see his daughter and sons grow to adulthood as respected and productive members of their community. Louise, a careful housekeeper, was unstintingly considerate of everyone's feelings and dedicated to providing as sane a home for her children as their modest circumstances would allow. Behind their house she planted an apple tree and tall purple delphinium and fragrant lavender bushes. She kept a henhouse and cooked and cleaned and dedicated herself to the enterprise of raising healthy, happy offspring.

"Even though there wasn't much money," George's sister, Louise, recalled, "Mum made sure we knew we weren't peasants, that we came from educated stock and had great potential in life. She taught us to think, to question things, to always be kind, never kowtow to big shots or lord over the lowly. We were never to cringe in fear but neither were we to become bullies toward anyone. And we took care of one another. If there was only one apple, we'd each get a quarter."

Not many homes had central heating in postwar Britain, so George's mother bathed him in a battered zinc tub filled with water heated on the stove. Scrubbed and dressed, he would entertain a constant traffic of family and friends with songs and skits. Like many Liverpudlians, Louise came from a large Irish family; when the Harrisons gathered for parties they crowded around Harold's wind-up gramophone and let loose with full-throated renditions of old favorites. One of George's earliest memories was standing on a leather stool and singing folksinger Josh White's "One Meatball" to his family's great delight.

"He had these animal puppets," his sister, Louise, said, "and he'd do skits with them for us. He was funny and outgoing and the family doted on him. He had fun growing up and was always the center of attention." Inside their little house, childhood was a pleasant time.

Outside, life was not as happy. German bombs had left Liverpool in ruins, and the city struggled under the weight of its own debris. George and his friends played in the remains of buildings and shops, rummaged through wreckage, dared one another to jump from demolished roofs, and manufactured bows and arrows from bits of broken wood and flattened bottle caps. Dodging cars and trucks was a popular game, although it often left slower kids with broken legs or worse. "It was rough then," remembered Bill Harry, who grew up near George and later founded Mersey Beat magazine. "There were gangs-the Chain Gang, the Peanut Gang. On your way to school, they'd stop you and search your pockets for money. I remember one guy throwing me to the ground while three others kicked the hell out of me. They'd smash bottles and stick them in people's faces. The violence was extreme because kids imagined themselves stuck there for the rest of their lives and felt hopeless." George kept his defenses up. In Dovedale Junior School he practiced running fast and kicking a soccer ball hard. In those days, solving problems lacked subtlety, and a quick punch was the most expedient way of dealing with bullies.

In 1949, after being on a waiting list for several years, the Harrisons moved to a larger house in Speke, a state-subsidized development forty-five minutes by bus from central Liverpool. When six-year-old George walked out of his new house and looked up, he saw planes arriving at Liverpool Airport to the south, descending with a drone through skies tinted dark gray by smoke from a nearby industrial zone.

To the north, cars kept up a constant hum on the A561 highway. To get away, George would hop on his brother Peter's bike and pedal off. There were places a young boy could bike to, such as Carr Mill Dam, big as a lake with grassy slopes, where the sky overhead regained some of its natural blue. He watched long-tailed ducks land with unceremonious belly flops on the placid water and tracked white-fronted geese as they glided by in search of food. At other times he would walk to Halewood, near the spot where his school bus stopped, to skim rocks across a pond that sprouted sticklebacks like wayward tufts of hair. Occasionally Harold bundled his wife and children off to a little rented cottage in the countryside, where George ran after bugs and forest animals, picked wildflowers, and luxuriated in open spaces while Harold and Louise supervised.

"He had a lot to thank his parents for," George's sister-in-law Irene said years later, considering how carefully they protected him. "They worried constantly." In their eyes, their youngest was a trusting, soft-natured child who needed looking after.

As a boy, George had dreams that frightened him. The dreams started with a sensation of being very small. The sensation grew more and more intense, and things around him went faster and faster until he awoke, scared. It was an experience that followed him into adulthood. During recording sessions at Abbey Road Studios, when no one was around, he would use the sound booth as a place to meditate, and the sensation would return. In boyhood he shook away such uncomfortable thoughts by hopping on his bike and riding off through the farmlands of the Cheshire plain to the east or along the mud cliffs that stretched out along the Mersey River. Back in nature, he felt good again. He loved plants. With his keen powers of observation, he might have become a botanist if school hadn't been so boring.

More interesting to him were fast cars, which also promised escape from the debris of Liverpool. On weekends, as a kid he would take a box camera to racetracks and snap photos, and if he found a manufacturer's plate welded to any of the cars, he would send off a letter asking for brochures and pictures.

But more than cars, more than biking away from the mud and rubble, more than anything else, George wanted to make music. Arriving back home from junior school, he'd crank up the gramophone and sing along to country songs by Jimmie Rodgers, urban blues tunes by Big Bill Broonzy, ballads by country-and-western singer Slim Whitman, and a wide assortment of English music-hall numbers. "It's hard to realize that there are kids like I was," he said, "where the only thing in their lives is to get home and play their favorite records." He warbled lyrics to songs about broken hearts and lonely nights and waiting for trains that never came. He sang silly tunes with names such as "I'm a Pink Toothbrush, You're a Blue Toothbrush" and yodeled along with Hank Williams on "Blue Yodel 94" until the musical stew grew so mouthwatering that he couldn't be without it for long.

When George was ten, a classmate offered to sell him a beginner's guitar for three pounds, ten shillings. It was a lot of money in those days, but George's mother bought it for him. His father had a friend who ran a pub and played guitar, and he showed George how to finger chords to tunes from the twenties and thirties such as "Dinah" and "Whispering." George tried the new chords out for his mother, twisting the guitar pegs until each string came as close to true as he could manage, positioning his fingers to best effect. The instrument's cheap wooden neck bent, and his fingers bled from pushing down on the strings.

"I'll never learn this," he said.

"You will, son," Louise encouraged. "Just keep at it." She sat up with him until he quit, teary-eyed, at two o'clock in the morning. He looked at the toy instrument and chafed.

"You don't understand about guitars, do you, Mum," he said.

"No," she admitted, "but if you stick to it I'm sure you'll make it." Louise remembered all the things she had wanted as a girl, but with so many children needing attention, her parents hadn't encouraged her. "I'll help you buy a new guitar," she told her youngest.

As a young man, before joining the Liverpool bus company, Harold Harrison had trained to be a bursar for the Cunard Steamship Lines. Then he saw how much more money stewards earned working in first class and managed to get himself transferred. He knew the value of a solid job and, despite having offered some initial encouragement, balked at his son's growing interest in music.

The other Harrison children were practical about their careers. Their daughter attended teachers' training college. Harry and Peter completed full apprenticeships, and by 1955 Harry was a mechanic, while Peter did panel beating and welding. If all else failed, Harold reasoned, maybe George could become an electrician and open a repair shop with his brothers. His Christmas gifts to twelve-year-old George included a set of electrical tools. The war had taken its toll, and screwdrivers were what a sane man gave his youngest son, something dependable.

George had no taste for manual labor, but he did benefit from his father's ability to reason problems out to their solution. Popular myth has painted George as a bus driver's son, but Harold was more than just a driver-he was in charge of scheduling all the buses in Liverpool: nearly six thousand buses and eighty different routes through town. "He scheduled them all so that connections were made in the most efficient manner," daughter Louise said. "Not many people understand how brilliant he was."

As for religion, George had as little interest in it as he did in manual labor. His dad was a lapsed Anglican, while his mother maintained her Roman Catholic traditions and did what she could to instill a sense of faith in her children. Still, religion made no sense to George. "I was raised Catholic," he told photographer Murray Silver, "but even as a kid I couldn't understand the claim that Jesus was the only Son of God when, in fact, we all are."

Young George appreciated that Christ died for the sins of others but snickered at the irony of seeing pubs located across from every church in the city. How convenient, he thought. People can drink themselves under the table and then cross the street to make amends with a fiver on the collection plate. By the time of his first Holy Communion at age eleven, he had grown sufficiently disenchanted to skip Confirmation, deciding that he'd "confirm it later" for himself.

Despite his lack of interest in formal education, George was a bright child and the only one in his family to gain admission to Liverpool Institute, a local secondary school that catered to the city's academic elite, those who passed the Eleven Plus examination. Acceptance to the institute meant possibly gaining entrance to a university. Those who failed the entrance exam usually left school to look for an apprenticeship or earn money as laborers electrifying the railways between Liverpool and London. For George, starting at Liverpool Institute at age twelve was "when the darkness began." Even physically, the place was dark. Once it may have boasted an imposing Greek facade, carved balustrades, elegant wooden railings, and bright natural light, but years of neglect had robbed it of its grace. Chips of paint drooped from window ledges and clouds of dust blanketed corners and corridors. He felt that his new teachers, most of them aging war veterans or inexperienced college graduates, had nothing to teach him. They only wanted to turn students into "rows of little toffees" with their meaningless lessons in algebra and history. He would arrive at school in one of his brother Harry's hand-me-down sports jackets, pointy blue suede shoes, hair stacked and combed to perfection, take a seat in the rear, and begin doodling cello guitars with big "f" holes. Warnings from his teachers followed: start working or you'll be expelled. George replied with silence.

Arthur Evans, one of George's teachers, remembered, "Harrison was the greatest surprise to me of all during the Beatles' meteoric rise to fame. My memory of him was of a very quiet, if not even introverted little boy who would sit in the farthest corner and never say a word, or even look up."

Friends, though, saw him in a different light. "He had a wicked sense of humor," remembered schoolmate Rod Othen, "always in mischief-and he didn't suffer fools gladly." The headmaster's threats, Othen recalled, merely drove George farther away from any interest in studies and provoked his nascent sense of righteous anger. "George was antibullying. There was a kid in school who smelled so bad that the master's punishment for anyone who disobeyed was to make the offender sit next to him. George would voluntarily take the chair next to the smelly kid. He befriended him."

The institute's reputation as one of Liverpool's finer schools did nothing to diminish George's disgust at being there, and he failed one class after another. Often he would sneak off to spend his days at the movies-another place of escape that would later become important in his life. "I cannot tell you what his work is like," wrote the headmaster, "because he has not done any." Eventually, having received one too many miserable report cards, he dropped out of school completely.

"Hadn't you better get a job or something?" his father hinted again and again, until George finally interviewed with the Youth Employment Centre and took a position as apprentice electrician at a shop called Blackler's for one pound, fifty pence per week. At Blackler's he barely did his work, preferring darts in the basement while waiting for the day to end so he could race home to play his guitar.

Young George was frequently ill, and his poor health provided him with plenty of sick days and consequent practice time. He suffered from tonsillitis and at thirteen developed nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys that sent him to the hospital for six weeks.

He hated the hospital. Cockroaches crawled across the floor and up onto his sheets while he slept, and the doctors were not the best: good ones left Liverpool in search of better pay.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Here Comes the Sunby Joshua M. Greene Copyright © 2006 by Joshua M. Greene. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0470127805
• ISBN 13: 9780470127803
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320