The “Economy Class Beatle” – George Harrison.
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| The Quiet Beatle – Feb. 25, 1942 – Nov. 29, 2001 |
Nine Years Missed. On November 29, 2001, George Harrison, the man who lived as the “quiet Beatle” died just as quietly at 58 of metastatic lung cancer. His last words may well have been what’s been reported but not verified, “Love one another,” and, true or not, I like believing it of him.
With his comrade Beatles in 1964, he arrived in America in 1964. Ed Sullivan show. On those Sunday nights I sat as close to a television screen as ever I have since; I wanted to experience this as completely as I might. No color images then. So, I sat with my nose a few inches away. I would not miss a thing that night. Their music fueled my dreams for the next decade and beyond, although then, at my first t.v. mediated encounter with them, I could not have predicted that it would be George Harrison who I would slowly come to revere and whose loss I would feel more deeply than John Lennon’s.
My idea in “My Sweet Lord,” because it sounded like a “pop song,” was to sneak up on them a bit. The point was to have the people not offended by “Hallelujah,” and by the time it gets to “Hare Krishna,” they’re already hooked, and their foot’s tapping, and they’re already singing along “Hallelujah,” to kind of lull them into a sense of false security. And then suddenly it turns into “Hare Krishna,” and they will all be singing that before they know what’s happened, and they will think, “Hey, I thought I wasn’t supposed to like Hare Krishna!” Interview with Mukunda Goswami (4 September 1982)
