George Harrison by Philip Norman

Author:Philip Norman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2023-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

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He refused to give up on Jackie Lomax after just one single and in October, accompanied by Pattie, he took Lomax to Los Angeles to make an album using the elite group of session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew. Afterwards, he accepted an invitation to stay with Bob Dylan in upstate New York that would turn out to have spared him from major dramas around Apple and John and Yoko.

Since Dylan had introduced the Beatles to pot in 1964, his equally prolific output had acted as both a spur and a threat, to John particularly. George was a less obvious disciple but Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde was the only Western pop album he took with him to Rishikesh and his ‘Long Long Long’ showed an obvious debt to Dylan’s ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’.

In 1966 Dylan had suffered severe injuries from a motorcycle crash that took him off the commercial market for two years. At the time of George’s visit, he’d just completed a Country-influenced album, Nashville Skyline, on which his former mocking, sneering folkie voice changed to a lower, fruitier one more suited to the genre, and was now contemplating a return to live performance. ‘He’d obviously just bought a new pair of jeans,’ the sharp-eyed Pattie noted, ‘because the sales ticket from the shop was still stapled to a back pocket.’

Dylan was by no means an expansive host, as George would recall: ‘He seemed very nervous and I was a little uncomfortable [until] on about the third day we got the guitars out… I was saying to him “write me some words” and thinking of all this “Johnnie’s in the basement, mixing up the medicine” type of thing and he was saying “Show me some chords, how do you get those tunes?” ’

A photograph was taken of them together on a couch, in wide-brimmed Stetson hats that both still wore around the house, collaborating on a song that would be called ‘I’d Have You Anytime’. George was even allowed to keep Dylan’s lyric sheet, not touch-typed as usual but in a precise, European-looking script.

In the neighbouring hamlet of West Saugerties lived the five musicians who’d steadfastly backed Dylan through his turbulent transition from folk to rock and called themselves simply The Band. They’d just released their debut album, Music From Big Pink, a celebration of America’s diverse folk and blues heritage that had the itchy-footed Eric Clapton already pining to join up with them.

George was amazed to find himself admired by these multi-instrumental talents, lead guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson, bass-player Rick Danko, drummer Levon Helm and keyboards players Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson, for the musicianship that had recently been so little valued in the Beatles. Despite their devotion to Americana, they had a European sensibility, for all of them except Helm were Canadian and Robertson had a Parisian wife. ‘They all loved George and he adored them,’ Pattie remembers, ‘because in their different ways they were all equally adorable.’

Thanksgiving fell during the Harrisons’ stay

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