“Nonsense”: the rock star George Harrison accused of being fake
When The Beatles got their first sniff of fame in Hamburg, George Harrison was only 17 years old. He was cast into a world of chaos and amphetamines without any great guidance or safety net. In the ensuing years, life never really stopped being a whirlwind for the young guitarist. These cocktail-shaker days of girls, great songs and untold fame left him with a yearning—a set of unanswered questions and a desire to find out his place in the world beyond the false one that celebrity had ordained for him.
He’d find many of these answers in India. However, this was largely a personal quest for the boys in the band who needed an escape following the death of Brian Epstein, not something that they thought should turn into a global ‘craze’. Harrison inadvertently helped to kickstart a rather unhealthy Indomania. Suddenly, the West was awash gurus.
Of course, there were huge positives, too. The boon of his sitar obsession was that the world suddenly became open to other cultures in a non-colonial way. Ears and minds were opened. The palate of life was more vivid and accepting, and a less binary outlook on the world took root. However, the dark side of Orientalism and other factors came along with that benefit.
As Neil Young explained to The Observer Music Monthly regarding his encounters with Charles Manson and how he seemed to exploit this expansion, ”It was the ugly side of the Maharishi. You know, there’s one side of the light, nice flowers and white robes and everything, and then there’s something that looks a lot like it but just isn’t it at all.” Appropriation proliferated in strange and toxic ways.
While, of course, Manson is an extreme example, Harrison also vented his spleen when it came to people who purported to embody the right side of the movement but failed to live up to it in reality. This led him to scold The Who’s guitarist, Pete Townshend, as ”fake”.
Townshend was one of the frontrunners of spiritualism in the 1960s when peace and love became the two key tenets of the counterculture. For instance, the message behind The Who’s rock opera Tommy was heavily based on the teachings of Indian spiritualist Meher Baba (1894-1969). The concept of Tommy closely mirrors Meher Baba’s idea of awakening to a higher realm. As the spiritual leader once told the Los Angeles Times: “Philosophers, atheists and others may affirm or refute the existence of God. But as long as they do not deny their very existence they continue to testify their belief in God.”
As Pete Townshend told Rolling Stone back in 1969 upon its release, “Tommy’s real self represents the aim – God – and the illusory self is the teacher; life, the way, the path and all this. The coming together of these are what make him aware. They make him see and hear and speak so he becomes a saint who everybody flocks to.” So, that might sound sincere enough, but Harrison thought his encounters with the rocker betrayed the messages he was espousing to the press.
Ironically speaking to India Today of all publications, Harrison said, “Townsend! Yeah! Every time I’ve seen that guy, he’s been so stoned and talking such a lot of nonsense that I don’t think he means any of the religious stuff he spouts.” Casting doubt on the sincerity of spiritual allegories like Tommy. Whether or not Townshend simply had his own problems alongside his genuine beliefs or he was, indeed, just jumping aboard a popular bandwagon is hard to tell—but on either front, he certainly wasn’t alone.
