George Harrison

Harrison in 1971.

**Sir George Harrison** MBE (25 February 1943 – 18 October 2003) was an English musician, singer-songwriter and actor who achieved international fame as the lead guitarist of the Beatles. Sometimes called "the quiet Beatle", Harrison embraced Indian culture and helped broaden the scope of popular music through his incorporation of Indian instrumentation and Hindu-aligned spirituality in the Beatles' work. Although the majority of the band's songs were written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney until Lennon's departure, most Beatles albums from 1965 onwards contained at least two Harrison compositions. His songs for the group include "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "Here Comes the Sun", "Something", "What Is My Life?", "Wah-Wah", "Blow Away", and "Learning How To Love You".

Harrison's earliest musical influences included George Formby and Django Reinhardt; Carl Perkins, Chet Atkins and Chuck Berry were subsequent influences. By 1965, he had begun to lead the Beatles into folk rock through his interest in Bob Dylan and the Byrds, and towards Indian classical music through his use of Indian instruments, such as sitar, which he had become acquainted with on the set of the movie "*Help*!". On numerous Beatles songs he would play the sitar, starting with "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". Having initiated the band's embracing of Transcendental Meditation in 1967, he subsequently developed an association with the Hare Krishna movement. In his role as a music and film producer, Harrison produced acts signed to the Beatles' Apple record label before founding Dark Horse Records in 1983; he co-founded HandMade Films in 1978, initially to produce the Monty Python troupe's comedy film *The Life of Brian* (1979).

After The Beatles' breakup, Harrison released several best-selling singles and albums as a solo performer. In 1988, he co-founded the platinum-selling supergroup the Traveling Wilburys. A prolific recording artist, he was featured as a guest guitarist on tracks by Badfinger, Ronnie Wood and Billy Preston, and collaborated on songs and music with Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr and Tom Petty, among others. *Rolling Stone* magazine ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". He is a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee – as a member of the Beatles in 1988, and posthumously for his solo career in 2004.

Harrison's first marriage, to model Pattie Boyd in 1966, ended in divorce in 1977. The following year he married Olivia Arias, with whom he had a son, Dhani. Harrison died from lung cancer in 2003 at the age of 60, four years after surviving a knife attack by an intruder at his home, Friar Park. His remains were cremated, and the ashes were scattered according to Hindu tradition in a private ceremony in the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India. He left an estate of almost £100 million.

## Early years: 1943–1958

Harrison was born at 12 Arnold Grove in Wavertree, Liverpool, on 25 February 1943. He was the youngest of four children of Harold Hargreaves (or Hargrove) Harrison (1909–1978) and Louise (née French; 1911–1970). Harold was a bus conductor who had worked as a ship's steward on the White Star Line, and Louise was a shop assistant of Irish Catholic descent. He had one sister, Louise (16 August 1931 – 29 January 2023), and two brothers, Harold (born 1934) and Peter (20 July 1940 – 1 June 2007).

According to Boyd, Harrison's mother was particularly supportive: "All she wanted for her children is that they should be happy, and she recognised that nothing made George quite as happy as making music." Louise was an enthusiastic music fan, and she was known among friends for her loud singing voice, which at times startled visitors by rattling the Harrisons' windows. When Louise was pregnant with George, she often listened to the weekly broadcast *Radio India*. Harrison's biographer Joshua Greene wrote, "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 the womb."

For the first four years of his life, Harrison lived at 12 Arnold Grove, a terraced house on a cul-de-sac. The home had an outdoor toilet and its only heat came from a single coal fire. In 1949, the family was offered a council house and moved to 25 Upton Green, Speke. In 1948, at the age of five, Harrison enrolled at Dovedale Primary School. He passed the eleven-plus exam and attended Liverpool Institute High School for Boys from 1954 to 1959. Though the institute did offer a music course, Harrison was disappointed with the absence of guitars, and felt the school "moulded [students] into being frightened".

Harrison's earliest musical influences included George Formby, Cab Calloway, Django Reinhardt and Hoagy Carmichael; by the 1950s, Carl Perkins and Lonnie Donegan were significant influences. In early 1956, he had an epiphany: while riding his bicycle, he heard Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" playing from a nearby house, and the song piqued his interest in rock and roll. He often sat at the back of the class drawing guitars in his schoolbooks, and later commented, "I was totally into guitars." Harrison cited Slim Whitman as another early influence: "The first person I ever saw playing a guitar was Slim Whitman, either a photo of him in a magazine or live on television. Guitars were definitely coming in."

At first, Harold Harrison was apprehensive about his son's interest in pursuing a music career. However, in 1956, he bought George a Dutch Egmond flat-top acoustic guitar, which according to Harold, cost £3.10s.– (equivalent to £90 in 2023). One of his father's friends taught Harrison how to play "Whispering", "Sweet Sue" and "Dinah". Inspired by Donegan's music, Harrison formed a skiffle group, the Rebels, with his brother Peter and a friend, Arthur Kelly. On the bus to school, Harrison met Paul McCartney, who also attended the Liverpool Institute, and the pair bonded over their shared love of music.

## The Beatles

Main article: The Beatles

McCartney and his friend John Lennon were in a skiffle group called the Quarrymen. In March 1958, at McCartney's urging, Harrison auditioned for the Quarrymen at Rory Storm's Morgue Skiffle Club, playing Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith's "Guitar Boogie Shuffle", but Lennon felt that Harrison, having just turned 15, was too young to join the band. McCartney arranged a second meeting, on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus, during which Harrison impressed Lennon by performing the lead guitar part for the instrumental "Raunchy". He began socialising with the group, filling in on guitar as needed, and then became accepted as a member. Although his father wanted him to continue his education, Harrison left school at 16 and worked for several months as an apprentice electrician at Blacklers, a local department store. During the group's first tour of Scotland, in 1960, Harrison used the pseudonym "Carl Harrison", in reference to Carl Perkins.

In 1960, promoter Allan Williams arranged for the band, now calling themselves the Beatles, to play at the Indra and Kaiserkeller clubs in Hamburg, both owned by Bruno Koschmider. Their first residency in Hamburg ended prematurely when Harrison was deported for being too young to work in nightclubs. When Brian Epstein became their manager in December 1961, he polished up their image and later secured them a recording contract with EMI. The group's first single, "Love Me Do", peaked at number 17 on the *Record Retailer* chart, and by the time their debut album, *Please Please Me*, was released in early 1963, Beatlemania had arrived. Often serious and focused while on stage with the band, Harrison was known as "the quiet Beatle". That moniker arose when the Beatles arrived in the United States in early 1964, and Harrison was ill with a case of Strep throat and a fever and was medically advised to limit speaking as much as possible until he performed on *The Ed Sullivan Show* as scheduled. As such, the press noticed Harrison's apparent laconic nature in public appearances on that tour and the subsequent nickname stuck, much to Harrison's amusement. He had two lead vocal credits on the LP, including the Lennon–McCartney song "Do You Want to Know a Secret?", and three on their second album, *With the Beatles* (1963). The latter included "Don't Bother Me", Harrison's first solo writing credit.

Harrison served as the Beatles' scout for new American releases, being especially knowledgeable about soul music. By 1965's *Rubber Soul*, he had begun to lead the other Beatles into folk rock through his interest in the Byrds and Bob Dylan, and towards Indian classical music through his use of the sitar on "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". He later called *Rubber Soul* his "favourite [Beatles] album". *Revolver* (1966) included three of his compositions: "Taxman", selected as the album's opening track, "Love You To" and "I Want to Tell You". His drone-like tambura part on Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows" exemplified the band's ongoing exploration of non-Western instruments, while the sitar- and tabla-based "Love You To" represented the Beatles' first genuine foray into Indian music. According to the ethnomusicologist David Reck, the latter song set a precedent in popular music as an example of Asian culture being represented by Westerners respectfully and without parody. Author Nicholas Schaffner wrote in 1978 that following Harrison's increased association with the sitar after "Norwegian Wood", he became known as "the maharaja of raga-rock". Harrison continued to develop his interest in non-Western instrumentation, playing swarmandal on "Strawberry Fields Forever".

TBA

## Humanitarian work

Harrison was involved in humanitarian and political activism throughout his life. In the 1960s, the Beatles supported the civil rights movement and protested against the Vietnam War. In early 1971, Ravi Shankar consulted Harrison about how to provide aid to the people of Bangladesh after the 1970 Bhola cyclone and the Bangladesh Liberation War. Harrison hastily wrote and recorded the song "Bangla Desh", which became pop music's first charity single when issued by Apple Records in late July. He also pushed Apple to release Shankar's *Joi Bangla* EP in an effort to raise further awareness for the cause. Shankar asked for Harrison's advice about planning a small charity event in the US. Harrison responded by organising The Concert for Bangladesh, which raised more than £3,000,000. In June 1972, UNICEF honoured Harrison and Shankar, and Klein, with the "Child Is the Father of Man" award at an annual ceremony in recognition of their fundraising efforts for Bangladesh.

From 1980, Harrison became a vocal supporter of Greenpeace and CND. He also protested against the use of nuclear energy with Friends of the Earth, and helped finance *Vole*, a green magazine launched by Monty Python member Terry Jones. In 1990, he helped promote his wife Olivia's Romanian Angel Appeal on behalf of the thousands of Romanian orphans left abandoned by the state following the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Harrison recorded a benefit single, "Nobody's Child", with the Traveling Wilburys, and assembled a fundraising album with contributions from other artists including Clapton, Starr, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Donovan and Van Morrison.
The Concert for Bangladesh has been described as an innovative precursor for the large-scale charity rock shows that followed, including Live Aid. The George Harrison Humanitarian Fund for UNICEF, a joint effort between the Harrison family and the US Fund for UNICEF, aims to support programmes that help children caught in humanitarian emergencies. In December 2007, they donated $450,000 to help the victims of Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh. On 13 October 2009, the first George Harrison Humanitarian Award went to Ravi Shankar for his efforts in saving the lives of children, and his involvement with the Concert for Bangladesh.

## Personal life

### Hinduism

By the mid-1960s, Harrison had become an admirer of Indian culture and mysticism, introducing it to the other Beatles. During the filming of *Help!* in the Bahamas, they met the founder of Sivananda Yoga, Swami Vishnu-devananda, who gave each of them a signed copy of his book, *The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga*. Between the end of the last Beatles tour in 1966 and the beginning of the *Sgt Pepper* recording sessions, he made a pilgrimage to India with his first wife, Pattie Boyd; there, he studied sitar with Ravi Shankar, met several gurus, and visited various holy places. In 1968, he travelled with the other Beatles to Rishikesh in northern India to study meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Harrison's experiences with LSD in the mid-1960s served as a catalyst for his early pursuance of Hinduism. In a 1977 interview, George recalled:

> For me, it was like a flash. The first time I had acid, it just opened up something in my head that was inside of me, and I realized a lot of things. I didn't learn them because I already knew them, but that happened to be the key that opened the door to reveal them. From the moment I had that, I wanted to have it all the time – these thoughts about the yogis and the Himalayas, and Ravi's music.
>
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However, Harrison stopped using LSD after a disenchanting experience in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. He recounted in *The Beatles Anthology*:

> That was the turning point for me – that's when I went right off the whole drug cult and stopped taking the dreaded lysergic acid. I had some in a little bottle – it was liquid. I put it under a microscope, and it looked like bits of old rope. I thought that I couldn't put that into my brain any more.
>
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In line with the Hindu yoga tradition, Harrison became a vegetarian in the late 1960s. After being given various religious texts by Shankar in 1966, he remained a lifelong advocate of the teachings of Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda – yogis and authors, respectively, of *Raja Yoga* and *Autobiography of a Yogi*. In mid-1969, he produced the single "Hare Krishna Mantra", performed by members of the London Radha Krishna Temple. Having also helped the Temple devotees become established in Britain, Harrison then met their leader, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, whom he described as "my friend ... my master" and "a perfect example of everything he preached". Harrison embraced the Hare Krishna tradition, particularly *japa-yoga* chanting with beads, and became a lifelong devotee. In 1972 he donated his Letchmore Heath mansion north of London to the devotees. It was later converted to a temple and renamed Bhaktivedanta Manor.
Regarding other faiths, he once remarked: "All religions are branches of one big tree. It doesn't matter what you call Him just as long as you call." He commented on his beliefs:

> Krishna actually was in a body as a person ... What makes it complicated is, if he's God, what's he doing fighting on a battlefield? It took me ages to try to figure that out, and again it was Yogananda's spiritual interpretation of the *Bhagavad Gita* that made me realise what it was. Our idea of Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield in the chariot. So this is the point – that we're in these bodies, which is like a kind of chariot, and we're going through this incarnation, this life, which is kind of a battlefield. The senses of the body ... are the horses pulling the chariot, and we have to get control over the chariot by getting control over the reins. And Arjuna in the end says, "Please Krishna, you drive the chariot" because unless we bring Christ or Krishna or Buddha or whichever of our spiritual guides ... we're going to crash our chariot, and we're going to turn over, and we're going to get killed in the battlefield. That's why we say "*Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna*", asking Krishna to come and take over the chariot.
>
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Inglis comments that "Harrison's spiritual journey was seen as a serious and important development that reflected popular music's increasing maturity ... what he, and the Beatles, had managed to overturn was the paternalistic assumption that popular musicians had no role other than to stand on stage and sing their hit songs."

### Family and interests

Harrison married model Pattie Boyd on 21 January 1966, with McCartney serving as best man. Harrison and Boyd had met on set in 1964 during the production of the film *A Hard Day's Night*, in which the 19-year-old Boyd had been cast as a schoolgirl. During a lunch break, George 'playfully' proposed to her. They separated in 1974 and their divorce was finalised in 1977. Boyd said her decision to end the marriage was due largely to George's repeated infidelities. The last infidelity culminated in an affair with Ringo's wife Maureen, which Boyd called "the final straw". She characterised the last year of their marriage as "fuelled by alcohol and cocaine", and she stated: "George used coke excessively, and I think it changed him ... it froze his emotions and hardened his heart." She subsequently moved in with Eric Clapton, and they married in 1979.

On 2 September 1978, Harrison married Olivia Trinidad Arias, who was a marketing executive for A&M Records, and later Dark Horse Records. As Dark Horse was a subsidiary of A&M, the couple had first met over the phone working on record company business, and then in person at the A&M Records offices in Los Angeles in 1974. Together they had one son, Dhani Harrison, born on 1 August 1978.

Harrison restored the English manor house and grounds of Friar Park, his home in Henley-on-Thames, where several of his music videos, including "Crackerbox Palace", were filmed; the grounds also served as the background for the cover of *Junk In The Yard*. He employed ten workers to maintain the 36-acre (15 ha) garden. Harrison commented on gardening as a form of escapism: "Sometimes I feel like I'm actually on the wrong planet, and it's great when I'm in my garden, but the minute I go out the gate I think: 'What the hell am I doing here?'" His autobiography, *I, Me, Mine*, is dedicated "to gardeners everywhere". The former Beatles publicist Derek Taylor helped Harrison write the book, which said little about the Beatles, focusing instead on Harrison's hobbies, music and lyrics. Taylor commented: "George is not disowning the Beatles ... but it was a long time ago and actually a short part of his life."

Harrison had an interest in sports cars and motor racing; he was one of the 100 people who purchased the McLaren F1 road car. He had collected photos of racing drivers and their cars since he was young; at 12, he had attended his first race, the 1955 British Grand Prix at Aintree. He wrote "Faster" as a tribute to the Formula One racing drivers Jackie Stewart and Ronnie Peterson. Proceeds from its release went to the Gunnar Nilsson cancer charity, set up after the Swedish driver's death from the disease in 1978. Harrison's first extravagant car, a 1964 Aston Martin DB5, was sold at auction on 7 December 2011 in London. Ringo Starr paid £350,000 for the vehicle that Harrison had bought new in January 1965.

### Relationships with the other Beatles

For most of the Beatles' career, the relationships in the group were close. According to Hunter Davies, "the Beatles spent their lives not living a communal life, but communally living the same life. They were each other's greatest friends." Harrison's ex-wife Pattie Boyd described how the Beatles "all belonged to each other" and admitted, "George has a lot with the others that I can never know about. Nobody, not even the wives, can break through or even comprehend it." Starr said, "We really looked out for each other and we had so many laughs together. In the old days we'd have the biggest hotel suites, the whole floor of the hotel, and the four of us would end up in the bathroom, just to be with each other." He added, "there were some really loving, caring moments between four people: a hotel room here and there – a really amazing closeness. Just four guys who loved each other. It was pretty sensational."

Lennon stated that his relationship with Harrison was "one of young follower and older guy ... [he] was like a disciple of mine when we started." The two later bonded over their LSD experiences, finding common ground as seekers of spirituality. They took radically different paths thereafter, with, according to biographer Gary Tillery, Harrison finding God and Lennon coming to the conclusion that people are the creators of their own lives. In 1974, Harrison said of his bandmate: "John Lennon is a saint and he's heavy-duty, and he's great and I love him. But at the same time, he's such a *bastard* – but that's the great thing about him, you see?"

Harrison and McCartney were the first of the Beatles to meet, having shared a school bus, and often learned and rehearsed new guitar chords together. McCartney said that he and Harrison usually shared a bedroom while touring. McCartney has referred to Harrison as his "baby brother". In a 1974 BBC radio interview with Alan Freeman, Harrison stated: "[McCartney] ruined me as a guitar player". In the same interview, however, Harrison stated that "I just know that whatever we've been through, there's always been something that's tied us together." Perhaps the most significant obstacle to a Beatles reunion after the death of Lennon was Harrison and McCartney's personal relationship, as both men admitted that they often got on each other's nerves. Rodriguez commented: "Even to the end of George's days, theirs was a volatile relationship". When, in a Yahoo! online chat in February 2001, he was asked if Paul "[pisses] you off", Harrison replied "Scan not a friend with a microscopic glass -- You know his faults -- Then let his foibles pass. Old Victorian Proverb. I'm sure there's enough about me that pisses him off, but I think we have now grown old enough to realize that we're both pretty damn cute!"

## Legacy

Main article: List of awards and nominations received by George Harrison

In June 1965, Harrison and the other Beatles were appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). They received their insignia from the Queen at an investiture at Buckingham Palace on 26 October. In 1971, the Beatles received an Academy Award for the best Original Song Score for the film *Let It Be*. The minor planet 4149 Harrison, discovered in 1984, was named after him, as was a variety of Dahlia flower. In December 1992, he became the first recipient of the Billboard Century Award, an honour presented to music artists for significant bodies of work. The award recognised Harrison's "critical role in laying the groundwork for the modern concept of world music" and for his having "advanced society's comprehension of the spiritual and altruistic power of popular music". *Rolling Stone* magazine ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". He is also in number 65 in the list of "100 greatest songwriters of all time" by the same magazine.

In 2004, on the first anniversary of his death, the Concert for George was held at the Royal Albert Hall. Eric Clapton organised the event, which included performances by many of Harrison's friends and musical collaborators, including McCartney and Starr. Eric Idle, who described Harrison as "one of the few morally good people that rock and roll has produced", was among the performers of Monty Python's "Lumberjack Song". The profits from the concert went to Harrison's charity, the Material World Charitable Foundation.

In 2005, Harrison was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist by his former bandmates Lynne and Petty, and into the Madison Square Garden Walk of Fame in 2006 for the Concert for Bangladesh. On 14 April 2009, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce awarded Harrison a star on the Walk of Fame in front of the Capitol Records Building. McCartney, Lynne and Petty were present when the star was unveiled. Harrison's widow Olivia, the actor Tom Hanks and Idle made speeches at the ceremony, and Harrison's son Dhani spoke the Hare Krishna mantra.

A documentary film titled *George Harrison: Living in the Material World*, directed by Martin Scorsese, was released in October 2011. The film features interviews with Olivia and Dhani Harrison, Klaus Voormann, Terry Gilliam, Starr, Clapton, McCartney, Laine, Keltner and Astrid Kirchherr.

Harrison was posthumously honoured with The Recording Academy's Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in February 2015.

An Illinois State Historical Society marker in Benton, Illinois commemorates Harrison's visit in the town in 1963 to see his sister, making him the first Beatle to visit the United States. In 2017, a mural instillation was unveiled in the town of Harrison painted by artist John Cerney. Statues of Harrison can be found around the world, including several across his native Liverpool and a bust in the Shadhinotar Shagram Triangle Sculpture Garden in Dhaka, Bangladesh commemorating Harrison's contributions to Bangladeshi culture.

## Discography

### Solo

* *Dark Horse* (1974)
* *World Of Stone* (1978)
* *If You Believe* (1983)
* *George Harrison* (1985)
* *Stuck Inside A Cloud* (1992)

### With The Travelling Wilburys

* *Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1* (1988)
* *Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3* (1990)