George Harrison, Indian music, and the genre that John Lennon fell back in love with
Trying to gauge what John Lennon was interested in throughout his career was never going to be easy.
Lennon was always changing at a rapid rate throughout every single year, and even though he could still write phenomenal songs, it’s no wonder that he ended up gravitating towards artists that could be musical chameleons half the time, like Bob Dylan and David Bowie. He was interested in artists who could do many different things, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t go back to the genres that he loved as a kid.
Because no matter how much Lennon loved to change, rock and roll would always be his saving grace. It was the genre that gave him purpose in life when he first started performing and met Paul McCartney for the first time, and even if his heroes like Elvis Presley were becoming a bit too overblown for his taste from time to time, that wasn’t going to diminish the love he had for tunes like ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’.
But even during The Beatles’ tenure, you could hear Lennon changing in real time on every one of their records. One minute, he would be making folksy music in the vein of Dylan, and the next, he would be testing the boundaries of what recorded music could do on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Every one of his bandmates was willing to do the same thing, but George Harrison was smitten the first time he heard Indian music for the first time.
There was something familiar about that music that resonated with him on a deeper level, and it didn’t take long for him to start throwing it into his own music. Lennon may have been the chief writer of the song that debuted the sitar to Western culture, ‘Norwegian Wood’, but while he could appreciate tunes like ‘Within You Without You’, it had to get tiresome hearing Harrison going way too far down the rabbit hole every time came up with a new song.
When Harrison visited Lennon shortly before his death, he remembered him being a lot more upbeat about the Eastern side of music theory, saying, “I was in New York at his house, at the Dakota’s (building). He was nice, just sort of running around the house making dinner. He was actually playing a lot of Indian music, which surprised me, because he always used to be a little bit (annoyed) when I was playing it. So he had hundreds of cassettes of all kinds of stuff. He grew into it.”
At the same time, it’s not like Harrison was going to become some holy guru whenever he started his solo career. He knew that he was never going to be the greatest sitar player in the world, so it was up to him to start incorporating his own ideas into his songs, which gave birth to him using the slide guitar for the first time and making his instrument sing in a way no one else could.
And it’s not like Lennon didn’t realise what Harrison had on his hands here. Even though Harrison was a guest musician whenever he laid down the solos on Imagine, he could never have made the kinds of solos that he did without listening to how people like Ravi Shankar expressed themselves, whether that was him making the massive harmonies on ‘My Sweet Lord’ or the masterpiece ‘Something’.
It was going to take a lot for Lennon to start getting nostalgic about his past, but the fact that he was able to come around on Indian music may have meant that he was warming up to the idea of embracing the kind of music he made with the Fab Four. Whether or not that would have led to an actual reunion is up to interpretation, but it’s nice enough to know that Lennon was on good terms with his mates by the time he passed away.
