The story of how George Harrison first met Ravi Shankar
George Harrison made his first major transition within The Beatles in 1965. Up to that time, Harrison had been a rockabilly-influenced lead guitar player and little more. He was usually given a single lead vocal turn on stage or on the band’s records, and his songwriting skills hadn’t quite matured enough to compete with John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Harrison needed an identity or, at the very least, a varied skillset. While The Beatles filmed their second feature film, Help!, Harrison found it in an Indian restaurant.
“We were waiting to shoot the scene in the restaurant when the guy gets thrown in the soup and there were a few Indian musicians playing in the background,” Harrison told Billboard in 1992. “I remember picking up the sitar and trying to hold it and thinking, ‘This is a funny sound.’” Harrison had a basic understanding of the instrument, largely thanks to a figure who would become one of his most important collaborators and teachers, Ravi Shankar.
“It was an incidental thing, but somewhere down the line I began to hear Ravi Shankar’s name,” Harrison continued. “The third time I heard it, I thought, ‘This is an odd coincidence.’ And then I talked with David Crosby of The Byrds and he mentioned the name. I went and bought a Ravi record; I put it on and it hit a certain spot in me that I can’t explain, but it seemed very familiar to me. The only way I could describe it was: my intellect didn’t know what was going on and yet this other part of me identified with it. It just called on me … a few months elapsed and then I met this guy from the Asian Music Circle organisation who said, ‘Oh, Ravi Shankar’s gonna come to my house for dinner. Do you want to come too?’”
Harrison later told a similar version of the story for the Anthology book. In this version, though, Harrison was well past his initial dalliances with the sitar and was even planning a trip to India before meeting Shankar face to face for the first time.
“I went to India in September 1966. When I had first come across a record of Ravi Shankar’s I had a feeling that, somewhere, I was going to meet him,” Harrison explained in Anthology. “It happened that I met him in London in June, at the house of Ayana Deva Angadi, founder of the Asian Music Circle. An Indian man had called me up and said that Ravi was going to be there.”
“The press had been trying to put me and him together since I used the sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood’,” Harrison recalled. “They started thinking: ‘A photo opportunity – a Beatle with an Indian.’ So they kept trying to put us together, and I said ‘no’, because I knew I’d meet him under the proper circumstances, which I did. He also came round to my house, and I had a couple of lessons from him on how to sit and hold the sitar.”
For his part, Shankar knew that Harrison’s intentions were pure from their very first meeting. “From the moment we met, George was asking questions, and I felt he was genuinely interested in Indian music and religion,” Shankar later observed. “He appeared to be a sweet, straightforward young man. I said I had been told he had used the sitar, although I had not heard the song ‘Norwegian Wood’. He seemed quite embarrassed, and it transpired that he had only had a few sittings with an Indian chap who was in London to see how the instrument should be held and to learn the basics of playing. ‘Norwegian Wood’ was supposedly causing so much brouhaha, but when I eventually heard the song I thought it was a strange sound that had been produced on the sitar.”
By 1967, Harrison was devoting himself to becoming a full-time student of Shankar’s. Harrison usually only played guitar during Beatles sessions at this time, and his devotion to both Shankar and the sitar was growing stronger. However, when Shankar put more pressure on Harrison to devote himself fully to the instrument, Harrison began to have doubts regarding his abilities. Instead of committing completely to Indian music, Harrison decided to return to pop, but his relationship with Shankar would continue for the rest of his life.
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