Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison by Joshua M. Greene

Author:Joshua M. Greene
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Autobiography, Non-Fiction, Popular Culture, Spirituality, Music, Biography
ISBN: 9780553817966
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2006-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

Nineteen sixty-nine was the year that dreams of a peaceful Aquarian Age died a hard death. It was a year of extreme protests and deadly violence, with revolutionaries such as Cuba’s Che Guevara and France’s Danny the Red calling for armed overthrow of governments.

George called their brand of revolution superficial, a futile effort “to change the outward physical structure, when really that automatically changes if the internal structure is straight.” Had his generation learned nothing from history? What the world needed was not political revolution but spiritual revolution. It wasn’t governments that needed toppling, it was our own greed and anger and illusion.

“Christ said, ‘Put your own house in order,’” he told the International Times that year. “If everybody just fixes themselves up first instead of trying to fix everybody else up like the Lone Ranger, then there isn’t any problem.”

Putting the Beatles’ house in order, though, was more of an ordeal than George wished to undertake. The group now flatly refused to work together, a state of affairs that was reflected in a promotion for George’s song “Something”—an unusual film clip produced by Neil Aspinall, formerly the Beatles’ road manager and now head of their Apple Corp. enterprise. Each member of the Beatles was filmed walking through lush country settings with his respective wife, creating a poetic visual background to George’s hit love song. Those familiar with how the film was produced knew its ironic undertone. Not once did any two of the group appear together. The paean to love was constructed in an edit room from footage of four men who could no longer stand one another’s company.

The company of devotees remained a pleasure for George, and he enjoyed regaling them with stories from his Beatles years. To Gurudas he recounted his visit to Haight-Ashbury two years before, bobbing his head up and down, imitating the hippies who had surrounded him. “Hey, man, want a joint, man?” he mimicked. “Let me lay this peyote on you, man. I got this record, man. This is my girlfriend, man.”

George recounted another Beatles-era story, this one about a gig in Texas. “We flew into Houston, and somehow the fans broke through the security gates and were scampering all over the airfield. I remember looking out of the plane window—and there was a head, upside down, staring back at me. They had climbed up on top of this huge jet plane and were holding one another by the feet, just to get a look. They could have gotten themselves killed.”

Reports from devotees living at John and Yoko’s estate included few such friendly exchanges with their hosts. John seemed mostly indifferent to his robed houseguests, although the vegetarian cooking and daily chanting had their effects on him.

One morning John came into the kitchen where a devotee was working, sat down at an upright piano, and entertained his guest by playing “Hare Krishna Mantra” in one musical idiom after another: bluegrass, classical, rock and roll. The music swelled and John’s voice sailed until Yoko, contending with a difficult pregnancy, appeared in the doorway, complaining of a headache.

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