Inside the 1974 tour that almost gave George Harrison a nervous breakdown
Given that his shyness earned him the nickname of the ‘Quiet Beatle’, it would make sense that George Harrison would be the most reserved member of the mercurial Liverpool band when it came to performing in a live capacity.
Of course, shyness when it comes to interacting with others doesn’t always mean that there’s a reserved attitude towards showing off, but in Harrison’s case, he definitely found it hard to translate his nervous energy into what was required of him to be able to impress audiences on a tour of grand proportions.
The Beatles were certainly put through the wringer in the early to mid-1960s, where their constant and rigorous touring schedule eventually led them to pull the show off the road entirely and focus on being a studio band for the final four years of their time together. With the amount of stress that his prior experience had brought up, it wouldn’t have been at all surprising had Harrison been reluctant to ever embark on a solo tour, or for him to want to take a longer break to recover from the trauma of these previous tests of his endurance.
What’s more, he’d need to figure out a way to approach the live aspect of his career without his old bandmates there for support, and while his 1971 Concert for Bangladesh went well, when it came to embarking on a full tour in 1974, he evidently couldn’t have been more ill-prepared for what he’d have to deal with.
Things went awry quickly on his trip across North America, and his decision to move further away from his previous life in order to focus more on his newfound spiritual connections didn’t seem to go down well with audiences that wanted his first post-Beatles tour to deliver in a similar vein to what they were used to. Accompanied by Indian raga rock pioneer Ravi Shankar, it was evident that the Dark Horse Tour was going to be anything but Harrison paying lip service to his fans, and the self-indulgent aspects of the show were the first obstacle that got in his way.
Prior to the tour, Harrison had gradually been losing his voice due to over-exertion, and performing night after night certainly didn’t do him any favours in terms of recovering. This croakiness led to the tour receiving the more mocking moniker of the Dark Hoarse Tour, and Harrison’s disappointment with being unable to perform to the best of his abilities led him down an even darker path.
Things would only get worse when he tried to combat his fears, frustrations and exhaustion by developing a dependence on cocaine, which not only exacerbated his vocal struggles but also began to significantly damage his declining mental state. Drug-induced comedowns caused him to lash out at his bandmates and crew, and the lukewarm to negative reception from crowds didn’t help, with him occasionally turning his frustrations on them.
Harrison’s 1974 tour proved to be an unmitigated disaster that left Harrison a shell of a man, similar to how he and the other Beatles had felt when they came off the road in 1966. “When I got off the plane, and back home, I went into the garden and I was so relieved,” Harrison would later declare in his autobiography. “That was the nearest I got to a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t even go into the house. I was a bit wound up.”
Rather unsurprisingly, he didn’t embark on another tour for 17 years, and despite choosing to hit the road with sometimes friend/sometimes nemesis, Eric Clapton in 1991, there was one thing that Harrison had evidently vowed to never do again as a result of his two horrific prior experiences; the shows would not hit America ever again.
