The touching story of how Dhani Harrison helped to finish his father’s posthumous ‘Brainwashed’
By the early 2000s, George Harrison had started to run out of time on this Earth.
He had already dealt with the violent stabbing incident from a deranged man on his property, but after working on his album for the better part of a decade, he realised that his cancer was bound to get the better of him half the time. There was no choice but to keep working for as long as he had, but even when things looked dismal, he could always find a way to keep things in the family whenever he got behind the board.
That’s not to say that Harrison was completely absent for his final album, Brainwashed. The whole concept of the record existed in his head for years before he eventually called upon Jeff Lynne to help him see it through. It was going to be a hard task, but getting Dhani Harrison on board to help with the project almost made too much sense.
Aside from being his partner in crime as far back as the Traveling Wilburys, Dhani had become a fairly impressive lead guitarist in the meantime, and in the footage from Living in the Material World, you can see him laying down the same kind of licks that wouldn’t have felt out of place on a standard Harrison solo record. But when it came time for everything to wrap up, Dhani remembered that his old man knew he could get it done with Lynne.
When inducting ELO into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Dhani even mentioned Lynne’s help during the final years of his father’s life, saying, “In one of the final conversations I had with my dad, we were trying to complete his final record, and we ran out of time. He told me to take the master and once again seek out that space wizard Jeff, and he would know what to do.” Lynne may have had his own secret language with Harrison half the time, but Dhani would come to know Brainwashed as something more than a standard record.
Despite Harrison not being there in his physical form anymore, Dhani could sense his old man still hanging around every minute of the recording process, saying, “It was a very emotional process to go so soon after he passed and I feel that the energy was really with us. Jeff is so gracious and such a lovely guy. Whenever we got something that hit, it was like, ‘Wow, that’s definitely going in.’ Just from the conversations I had with my dad and the music we were making toward the end, it was really great of Jeff to let me in on that, and it gave me so much confidence.”
And Dhani even hid a few Easter eggs amongst the record as well. There’s already the cheeky bit at the top of the record with Harrison asking to hear a bit more guitar, but outside of his voice, songs like ‘Stuck Inside A Cloud’ was strategically placed as the seventh track into the record because Dhani knew it was his dad’s favourite number.
The record is a good time to listen to, but when it packs an emotional punch it hits HARD. Anyone even mildly interested in Harrison’s guitar work has a good chance of shedding a tear during the instrumental ‘Marwa Blues’, but the real magic comes in the final moments of the album, with the title track giving way to low drone as Harrison and his son sing in unison one final prayer to help carry him into the afterlife.
So while Brainwashed might not be the best Harrison album for anyone expecting to hear nothing but hits, it was never designed to be that kind of record. Dhani wanted to make the kind of record that not only had great tunes but also did justice to who his father was as an artist, and throughout every single track, he managed to create the kind of record that serves as a fantastic musical epitaph the same way that The Dock of the Bay did for Otis Redding years before and Blackstar did for David Bowie years later.
