George Harrison's musical genius

Beatle scholar Rip Rense has an interesting interview on his site with Simon Leng, author of a recent book about the musical accomplishments of the great George Harrison.

***

Simon Leng is the world's leading authority on the music of George Harrison, author of WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS: The Music of George Harrison. He is an ardent student and admirer of Harrison's work as a guitarist and songwriter, from the earliest recordings to the yet-unreleased final songs. His previous biography, Soul Sacrifice, spotlighted Carlos Santana. The Rip Post interviewed Mr. Leng, who is also a guitarist, while he was on the road, doing humanitarian work in Africa. He discussed Harrison's utterly distinctive guitar work, his ying-yang attitude toward fame, his immersion in Indian classical music structure, his humility, and much more. . .

Rip Post: You are the only author who has looked at George Harrison largely from the standpoint of his musicianship. There are many studies of Lennon & McCartney’s musical talent, but yours is the lone example on George. Why do you think this is?

Simon Leng: Well, for better or worse, in the general eye of the media and public, Lennon & McCartney are the beginning, middle and end of The Beatles. My angle is not to say that those two have been unfairly praised, because they are great artists and deserve their fame, it’s just a gentle nudge to suggest that the “third man” was a great musician and artist too!

Rip Post: Tell me a bit about your background and how you came to be so intensely interested in all of Harrison’s work.

Leng:: There isn’t much to report really…. I come from a musical family and learnt the trumpet at school like many other folk did. My father played classical music a lot in the house, played the piano and wrote some music too. Then, like millions before me, I discovered The Beatles and became a fan. At the same time I took up the guitar and so became interested in the guitar parts on the records. I distinctly remember the day Harrison’s music hit me. I had read in “the lore” about “My Sweet Lord”, and went to get a copy in the days when record stores still stocked back catalogue singles. This was around 1976. When I heard the song its impact on me was instant and seismic. I related to it instantly and was uplifted by it. I also remember loving the slide guitar solos and thinking it was a unique sound. From there I got into “33&1/3, but the clincher was “Living In The Material World”, which remains my favourite Harrison album – to me that album has a certain “magic” that even “All Things Must Pass” does not.

My father was English and my mother Portuguese, and so I was raised as a Catholic. As a result I grew up with plenty of Irish people, and spent time in Liverpool – I was taught by the rightly infamous Christian Brothers who had a sister school there. Looking back, I think this all fits with an interest in Harrison.

Rip Post: What were some of the surprises you found while researching and writing the book?
How highly respected he was by his musical peers and how intensely loyal people felt towards him as a friend. Oh, and how many positive reviews there actually were of the Dark Horse tour in 1974! Did you ever see George perform, or interview him? Who are some of the people you interviewed for the book?

Leng: I didn’t ever meet George, but I did see the one and only solo concert he gave in England in spring 1992 at the Albert Hall. The event had a magical, almost surreal quality to it – it was hard to believe that it was happening. And then as he played one brilliant composition after another, and laid down some great guitar on tunes like “Something” and “Cheer Down”, it hit me again that the man was incredibly talented. And, you know, that concert was a huge event – the crowd was apoplectic with joy and George was genuinely moved by the reception he received. I will never forget that show.
I was lucky enough to interview some very interesting people for the book; I really enjoyed talking to the late Doris Troy and I think this was her final interview. I also spoke to David Bromberg, who is a key bridge between George and Bob Dylan – David is somewhat reticent about giving interviews, so I was lucky to get the opportunity to speak to him.

And then from the very early days I spoke to Tony Sheridan who I think gives quite unbiased insights into the politics and dynamics of the group in the Hamburg years, and, tells us much about George’s key role in the band. I found it fascinating to hear Tony’s overview of the band as this was the nascent situation of the group, which coloured the way it developed as they became famous. Klaus Voormann was also a key interview as he was so close to George for so long – he offers many wonderful insights into the 1968-69 period, the making of the early solo albums and the experience of The Concert for Bangla Desh.

Two other figures I would draw out as being important are John Barham and Bob Purvis. John is a fascinating and hugely talented musician, with great erudition in the fields of classical and Indian music. He met George through Ravi Shankar in 1966 and became a kind of “birth partner” to George as he started his journey into classical Indian music and philosophy. He worked very closely with George on “Wonderwall” and then went on to create the wonderful orchestrations for “All Things must Pass” and “Living In The Material World”. There was a tremendous musical and spiritual empathy between George and John Barham - I think the music they created confirms this. Just listen to the flow between the orchestra and the guitar on the first version of “Isn’t It A Pity”. For me, the insights John gives about George’s music in the book are priceless, and it made me think they should be recorded for posterity as it were.

Bob Purvis is also a very interesting guy, who is a little scarred by the music business, and was also reticent to be quoted in the first person, although the Splinter section is based on the interview I did with him. I think that the Splinter section is a pivotal part of the book as it gives great insight into how George worked as a producer, a skill for which he is not widely lauded. All we need to do now is to get that first excellent Splinter album released again!

Rip Post: Harrison’s work is unmistakable. You never take a George song for a work by anyone else, even if heard in Muzak (gasp.) What is it about Harrison as a musician that you find so compelling? Both as a guitarist and songwriter?

Leng: It’s all a matter of taste of course, but for me there is a compelling mixture of serenity and passion in his music, and a deep level of expressiveness that doesn’t necessarily arise from technical virtuosity, but “from the soul”. George was a uniquely”soulful” musician, and certainly the only one of The Beatles who could be described in that way.

He also had a unique harmonic sense which derived partly from his erudition in the field of Indian music. Let’s be in no doubt that George was a proficient practitioner in the theory of Indian music, and this was reflected in the way he used certain chord voicings (I’m thinking in particular of diminished chords here), and melodies that to western ears skirt towards dissonance. In fact they are reflecting of the “microtones” of Indian music scales – a good example of this is “Blue Jay Way”, which was directly based on an Indian raga, and is a very advanced example of cross-cultural musical synthesis.

It’s interesting to note that it seems that George had an immediate and almost innate understanding and empathy with Indian music. That’s an interesting happening for a guy from Liverpool.

As a guitarist the words that spring to mind again are “unique” and “soulful”. He had a unique musicality, and the way in which he incorporated Indian inflections into his slide guitar style was unprecedented. I say this because he did not do it as if he were a “cultural tourist”, just learning to play a few phrases by ear and replicating them. Rather, he understood the phrasing, rhythmic and expressive nuances of Indian music in great detail and made them his own.

The problem of recognition of these skills might be down to “currency” if you will. We tend to measure and value things in terms of paper qualifications deriving from examinations, and great technical proficiency. George was never a showboating technical guitarist in the Jeff Beck mould, but that’s fine isn’t it? Beck is great and how he plays fits perfectly with his musical mission – George was also great, but in a different way, and his style was perfect for his musical idiom. I guess the point here is that we don’t all have to be the same, or aspire to the same talents because that is the norm propagated by mainstream media. To suggest that George was a lesser guitarist as some have because he didn’t rip through scales like a jazz guitarist is specious. I mean, if George was meant to be a jazz guitarist, he would have been! In George’s case, his understanding and exposition of Indian music flowed from his innate musicality and ability to communicate mood and emotional timbre to the listener. So, George’s “currency” was slightly at odds with the general flow and therefore overlooked. This book is about addressing that imbalance.

Rip Post: His history as a guitarist is so interesting. He was considered the most dextrous, I believe, of the three Beatles guitarists in the early days. There was some hype floating around in the early ‘60’s about how he was a “guitar genius,” as I recall. How did he learn to play, and how good was he in the early ‘60’s, compared to John and Paul?

Leng: Well, Tony Sheridan has a lot to say on this in the book. It seems that Harrison was the most dedicated and gifted guitarist of the band, and that he had a constant passion for learning the instrument and new musical ideas. His view was that John Lennon was not a very good guitar player at that time, and that Paul McCartney did not have that love for the instrument that George did. I don’t think Tony Sheridan has any axe to grind (as it were), so we can be reasonable confident that this is close to the reality of the situation.

But going way back, Harrison’s first inspirations on the guitar were Hank Williams, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly and Scotty Moore and none of these guys played long blues solos. They tended to play the part to suit the song, which is the modus Harrison adopted and explains why he became the guitar player he did.

Rip Post: Please comment on what is probably Harrison’s least applauded talent: his singing. Please comment. Also, can you give examples from the early years to the late solo years of songs that really showcase his skills here?

Leng: I think it is fair to say that Harrison was no great singer in a technical sense. On the other hand, as a harmony singer, he could be regarded as one of the greats. The evidence is on all the albums.
His voice was never as powerful as John or Paul’s. But, the point is, and David Bromberg says it in the book, he could sing the song. His voice was absolutely the perfect instrument to deliver a song like “Long Long Long” for instance, and it is precisely the softness of his voice that makes it work so well. And on the excellent live version of “Bangla Desh” the passion and commitment in his singing is palpable. Even a much-maligned song like “This Guitar” has a very fine vocal performance, and the standard of singing on the George Harrison album for instance is very high.

Also, in the very early days Harrison was no mean rock’n’roll singer; check out the versions of “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Glad All Over” on Live At The BBC. It’s worth remembering that in the pre-fame years The Beatle virtually operated with Harrison as one of three lead singers.

Rip Post: Why did longtime Beatles engineer (and sometimes de facto producer) Geoff Emerick all-but-dismiss George as a Beatles soloist before his inspired solo on “Something?” It’s true that, as Emerick says, you can hear young George “fumbling” in live performances, almost as if he doesn’t know how to fill up all that “blank space.” Paul played a number of solos on Beatles recordings, reportedly because George could not come up with anything fast enough.

Leng: Well, he probably said it because it is true, but my view on that would be “so what?” Perhaps the true value is in the finished product, does it really make a material difference how quickly the solo was created? Or if it was improvised or not? I would want to beware of mistaking the wood for the trees here. If a musician delivers a performance that affects the listener that is the important part, and not so much how it was created or how quickly.

Certainly Paul McCartney had a quicker musical mind than George and that’s great, but, again, I can’t help but feel that we would be better celebrating the complementary differences between musicians, or anybody else for that matter, rather than insisting that only one model has value.

And, as long as we are comparing the two styles, I would just suggest that people reflect on how many instantly memorable guitar breaks George came up with that they can sing as if they were songs in their own right. And, then ask the same of Paul’s solos. For instance, which is more musically memorable – George’s solo on “Nowhere Man”, or Paul’s on “Another Girl”?

Rip Post: Yet students of the group can hear some terrific live solos from George even in the very early days, and his Perkins-esque twanging on “Can’t Buy Me Love” is no more or less considered classic stuff---McCartney had his band reproduce it note-for-note on recent tours. So why was his soloing in the Beatles period inconsistent?

I think it comes down to cyclical changes, confidence and the pecking order of the band. When The Beatles first hit it big George was at the forefront of lead guitarists for that time – take With The Beatles as an example. How many other guitarists at that time could have played the variety of solos George did on that album i.e. “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Til There Was You” and “All My Loving”? So, he was at the forefront – but, by 1965 the white blues soloists like Eric Clapton had started to emerge and a more virtuoso style came into vogue. As George did not come from a blues-based tradition he was not immediately in that groove of longer improvised solos. So, given that he was a somewhat diffident character, and that Paul was quicker at picking up that style, his confidence took a knock. But, as we have seen, by 1969 he was playing that style if he wanted to.

But then again, I come back to the main point – it’s one thing to have all the flashy technique in the world, but what’s the point of it if you have nothing to say musically? And let’s be clear about this, aside form those solos on With The Beatles, George played some wonderfully musical and inventive solos on early to mid-period Beatles records – to pick out a few: “I Call Your Name”, “Nowhere Man”, “Baby’s In Black”, “And Your Bird Can Sing” (which almost has elements of Bach counterpoint in it) and, as you say, “Can’t Buy Me Love”.

It’s also worth remembering that amongst musicians and other guitarists George is widely respected, and possibly more so than he is by the media in general.

Rip Post: It’s my contention that none of the Beatles had reached their maturity as musicians when the group broke up, that they would have gone on to greater virtuosity and sophistication. Ringo’s drumming had reached a peak in 1969 and ’70 (that it would never approach again), while the other three went on to increased musical skills and virtuosity---but none more than George. His signature slide guitar sound is not to be found on a single Beatles record; it debuted on “All Things Must Pass.” Do you agree? Please talk about how and why George finally found his solo guitar “voice,” and how Indian music brought this about.

Leng: I think you are right. George reached an important peak as a finger guitar player around 1969 – the evidence is all over “Let It Be”, “Abbey Road” and “Old Brown Shoe”. By this period he’d assimilated those elements of the blues sound he wanted, and was playing solid-body guitars through better amplification. His sound had fundamentally changed, but his aim was still unerringly musical. This style developed throughout his solo career, and although he played mostly slide from 1970 to his death, he did record some powerful non-slide solos, one fine example being on the song “Somebody’s City” from the first Splinter album, and another would be “Pure Smokey”. And then by the time her recorded “P2 Vatican Blues” you can hear that he was playing fine blues solos. It’s also perhaps worth mentioning that he also played some beautiful acoustic guitar solos, I’m thinking of “Learning How To Love You” and “Dark Sweet Lady” in particular.

Meanwhile, he discovered slide guitar through a mixture of Delaney Bramlett and Dave Mason around the time of the Delaney and Bonnie tour, and I think he felt emancipated by it. At that level I think it freed him from the “pressure” of not being a gun slinging hot licks guy, but it later became his unique voice, which is where the Indian influence comes in. There are certain ornamentations used in classical Indian string instruments that are very close to the slide guitar technique. And certain Indian instruments are actually played using a sort of slide, the one I’m thinking of is the Veena.

So, George knew Indian instruments and musical theory inside out, and was a competent sitar player who had the technique to play the ornamentations – you can hear this on his solo passage on “Within You Without You”, where he plays “authentic” sitar. So, given all this you can see the logical net result was his slide guitar style, which was the perfect vehicle for him to express his cross-cultural musical ideas. It became an utterly unique musical voice, which thousands of record producers have striven to get other guitarists to reproduce without success. The apogee of this style is the priceless “Marwa Blues”.

Rip Post: Give me an overview of George as a songwriter. . .You are very high on his skills as a writer and composer. . .Name five of his most important songs from his solo catalogue---still not well known to the general public. . .

Leng: I would regard him as a “natural” rather than a classical songwriter. I think he worked on instinct and his main instinct was to go for melody as his anchor. So, there are swathes of beautiful melodies in all his work.

Given that he was a guitarist his method for writing songs was largely to develop interesting chord sequences and then eke out a melody from the notes within the chords. Interestingly, you can hear this happening on the demo version of “Mystical One” released on the “Dark Horse Years” package.
As a lyricist he also dealt in his vernacular which didn’t endear him to some critics who tended to approach rock music as an ersatz literature course. Nevertheless, on the Brainwashed album there is some fine poetry – “Pisces Fish” for instance.
5 songs - “Your Love Is Forever”; “Learning How To Love You”;”Never Get Over You”; “Marwa Blues”;

Rip Post: It seems that the vexing thing about George was his conflicting feelings about fame and ego. Here he was absolutely exasperated not to be writing more songs for the Beatles, in the later years, then broke out with enormous success and fame in the early ‘70’s. And yet he was always much happier not being a leader, but rather being a sideman in various other projects. One of the very surprising things in your book is to discover how often George happily played sideman to lesser, even incidental artists, like Larry Hosford. Who?

Leng: This comes down to friendship. One of the themes that kept emerging from the interviews I did for the book was that George formed lasting and strong friendships. He was a great friend to many musicians and it seems that he would do almost anything for a friend. Therefore, in the case of Larry Hosford, that session was done for his friends Leon Russell and Dino Airali who were both professionally connected to Larry.

Rip Post: Another sometimes maddening part of that dichotomy: When George played live, whether in the Concert for Bangladesh, or the terrible ’74 tour, or the tour with Clapton in Japan, he almost always delegated his solos to other players. NOBODY wanted to hear other people play those parts. NOBODY. Why did he do this?

Leng: First of all I would humbly like to suggest that the ’74 tour was not terrible, but actually produced plenty of good music ;o )

(Rip Post note: Agreed---the '74 tour was not terrible, musically. It was a terrible event, in that the press was unkind and Harrison had lost his voice for almost the entire tour.)

But, you are right that he often deferred playing his solos to others on stage. I think the equation is simple – in the book Tony Sheridan describes George as “the egoless Beatle”, and I think that could be extended to the “egoless guitarist”. What George was primarily interested in was the overall package – if that meant someone else playing the lead guitar, then he didn’t care, because his ego was not wrapped up in whether he played it or not.

All the same, he played a lovely solo on “Something” at the Concert for Bangla Desh, and some great slide on the “Live In Japan” tour. And on many of the tapes I have heard from 1974 he plays some burning solos in duet with Robben Ford on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. He got a standing ovation for it at Madison Square Garden.

Rip Post: He once said something like, “not all songs have to be written.” While this is true, it seems to me that he took it too far. I often wish he had recorded and written more. I realize he didn’t feel the need---and that the thousands of trees he planted by hand on his estate was probably more important to him than recording---but do you feel he backed off too much from writing and recording?

Leng: Well, I think it is worse than that because the material is actually there. He actually never stopped writing and recording – it was just that he could not be bothered to deal with the music business to get them released. I think Joni Mitchell is in much the same frame of mind these days.

Rip Post: You say in the book that it was the press, specifically Rolling Stone, that ruined Harrison’s performing career and drove him into semi-seclusion for the rest of his life. And something must be blamed for the abysmal “Extra Texture” album, as I can’t imagine George being very proud of that thing. Please explain.

Leng: Well, it is a fact that George took very personally the coverage of the 1974 tour in Rolling Stone. Some say that he never forgave them. And as the book documents, with the invaluable help of Patti Murawski and Kristen Tash from The Harrison Alliance magazine, there were plenty of extremely positive reviews of the tour.

And I think there is a cultural thing here too. With the exception of John Lennon, all of the Beatles came from working class backgrounds in tough neighbourhoods of Liverpool. With the passage of time and the sheen of fame, it is easy to forget that these were pretty tough guys from a tough place, where disputes were often settled with a fight. If you recall Harrison used to tell how he was “hit” by a teacher once – his father’s response was to go to the school and “stick one” on the teacher. So, to some extent Harrison’s response to the reviews was to fight back.

As for “ExtraTexture”, it was a contractual obligation album…….so….

Rip Post: “Brainwashed,” a brilliant record---a real tour-de-force---was touted as his final album. Yet there are many songs that remain unreleased. The late Timothy White reported a total of about 37 songs that George told him he had finished---or nearly finished. That would leave about 24 unreleased George songs, by my reckoning. Is this true? What are Olivia and Dhani Harrison’s plans regarding this music?

With those other fellows, 1967, for the first worldwide television broadcast.

Leng: I would be prepared to bet that there are more than 24 unreleased songs – the best hope we have is that Olivia and Dhani go ahead and release them on an Anthology project.

Rip Post: George actually instigated the Beatles “virtual reunion” using John Lennon demo tapes. At one point in the sessions, Ringo remarked that they might do a whole album together. What were George’s feelings during those sessions, and to what extent did he pull the plug on them?

With George there was always a feeling that it was a bit of a chore, and the difficult professional relationship between him and Paul McCartney was always in the background. If the performances he produced on guitar and vocals are anything to go by he was inspired during the sessions, but I think it is well known that he brought proceedings to a halt due to the apocryphal “musical differences” with Paul during the attempted recording of a third song.

Rip Post: Back to his soloing. . .There are a lot of guitarists, and a lot of guitarists who play beautiful slide. But a George Harrison slide guitar part, from “My Sweet Lord” all the way to one of his last, the incredibly beautiful passage on Ringo’s “King of Broken Hearts,” a Harrison guitar solo is unmistakable, inimitable. You can even tell when someone is trying to imitate it in other songs (“America’s” “Sister Golden Hair,” for instance.) What makes his sound so unusual?

Leng: It’s his touch, the vibrato, the Indian inflections, the choice of notes, the way he “plays the silence”, but above all his soul.

Rip Post: Another unduly overlooked part of his career was The Traveling Wilburys. Every time I read something about their music in a fan publication, it’s almost as if they are writing about The Beatles! This is ridiculous, as these guys got together to knock out some good songs that were unpretentious and fun to play. Here George tried to invent a kind of spoof “super-group,” and the music turned out to be pretty super---for its melodiousness, wit, and energy (not bad for a bunch of old guys.) What were George’s feelings about the group, and did he plan to tour with them?

Leng: As ever with George I think that there was yin-yang at work here. At the start he had a great time working with his friends and having a knock-about good time. However, you can hear on the second album that Harrison had taken the lead in producing the record (along with Jeff Lynne) and there is just a sense that it had become hard work and therefore a chore. I never heard any talk of a tour; I can just imagine the legal hurdles they would have needed to clear for that to happen. And that would have put George off from the start. But, maybe someone out there knows something different.

Rip Post: Harrison’s religiosity is too often taken for proselytizing, in my view. It really was a very broad view that drew from Hinduism, but also from Buddhism and Christianity. When he said “God,” he did not mean a guy in nice white robes and beard peeking through the clouds. Can you comment on his spirituality, and how it dominated his life---for good or ill?

Leng: For me it is important to focus on the terms used to describe this area. I don’t think Harrison was religious, but he was deeply spiritual and I think the evidence is that he was highly developed in that regard and had many genuine spiritual experiences. “Religious” implies organisations, bishops, ministers, priests, control of the masses (no pun intended!) and the whole “civil service” side of it. Harrison was definitely not that and “Awaiting On You All” tells us that clearly.

I would imagine that if a person is lucky enough to gain fundamental spiritual insights it would be a challenge to keep it to himself. But, ultimately, the majority of Harrison’s work is his life’s travelogue set to music, so the spiritual aspect is bound to figure strongly because that is where he was. For instance, I think it is just as valid for Harrison to sing about his spiritual experiences as it was for John Lennon to sing about his love for Yoko Ono.

Rip Post: Of all the Beatles solo work, I think Harrison’s is the strongest. Lennon didn’t live long enough to find his strengths as a solo artist, despite a couple of very fine albums---plus he retired for about five years. McCartney is the most prolific, but as a result it often happens that he falls into the “two or three good songs per album” category. Harrison had some real clunker albums, but his solo career is bracketed by excellence. McCartney as a solo artist cannot touch George as a lyricist. How would you stack up their respective solo work?

Leng: I have to say that McCartney’s solo work has never really grabbed me, so I don’t have much to say about it, although I agree that it is very inconsistent. It’s just a matter of taste and to my taste music working on a purely “entertainment” level is of less interest than the more emotionally powerful and revealing work that George produced. As for John Lennon I enjoyed many of his albums and they are of a generally high standard, but I think that his best work was during the Beatle years. And it’s also very noticeable how much of a positive difference Harrison’s lead guitar presence lends to the Imagine album.

In that regard I think the key difference is that only George did his best work after The Beatles, and I certainly think that his is the most consistently strong set of solo work, but I would say that wouldn’t I?

For my money the weakest Harrison album is “Somewhere In England”, although, paradoxically, if it had been released as originally intended it would have been far stronger. Other than that “Extra Texture” is patchy but still has some fine songs on it (“The Answer’s At The End” and “Tired of Midnight Blue” spring to mind). The rest are good to very good and some brilliant albums, which is a high strike rate.