The music George Harrison called the “greatest in existence”
Every great artist knows how to change with the times. It’s easy to find a certain creative lane and stay in it for the rest of your career, but it’s only a matter of time before it becomes last fashionable and you have to move on to something a little bit more en vogue with what the charts want. No artist is safe from having more than a few drastic changes in their career, but when George Harrison latched onto the right idea, it didn’t take him long to become a fan for the rest of his life.
Out of all of The Beatles, though, Harrison was always the most singular voice in the group. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney blossomed into independent creative forces in their solo careers, Harrison was always on his own when working in the group, so when he finally did manage to get out of the Fab Four’s shadow on All Things Must Pass, he seemed to arrive fully formed already.
And listening through his debut solo record, it’s a smorgasbord of everything that makes him tick from a musical perspective. Although there were any great albums that Harrison made after his debut, this was the best of everything he could, whether that was making something folksy on ‘Behind That Locked Door’, a massive production like ‘Let It Down’ or ‘My Sweet Lord’, or kicking back with a simple pop song on ‘Awaiting On You All’.
Compared to what he had done in his old band, one genre was conspicuously absent from his first record. Despite being an avid fan of people like Ravi Shankar, there was not as much Eastern instrumentation to be found on the record in the same way that he had done on ‘The Inner Light’ or ‘Within You Without You’. But it wasn’t out of Harrison falling out of love with Eastern music; it was out of reverence.
He knew that he would never be half as good as the greatest sitarists he had ever seen, so the next best thing was to try to find his voice on the slide guitar instead. Even if he traded his Eastern scales in for a new approach to his instrument, he knew that nothing was beating that music in his mind.
Carl Perkins and Little Richard still held a special place in his heart, but he knew that those Eastern hymns that made him tune with his own spirituality would never leave his heart, saying, “I think there is spiritual music. This is why I’m so hung up on Indian music and from the day I got into it till the day I die I still believe it’s the greatest music ever on our level of existence. It’s really so, so subtle and that’s the whole thing. This level of consciousness now that we’re on is the gross level, which is the opposite to the subtle level.”
And considering the spiritual aspect of the music, it made sense why Harrison wouldn’t fully embrace that music again until later in his life. Across the album Brainwashed, he knew that he would soon be dying, so hearing him recite his final prayer at the end of the album in harmony with his son was a message to the fans that he had finally found the inner peace that he had sought all his life.
While Harrison did develop the reputation of the Beatle, which changed the most shortly after their breakup, it wasn’t a case of him consciously trying to go against the grain. He had his separate agenda that was completely independent from the mainstream, and even if it wasn’t for everybody, he knew that he would be much more content making music that he loved rather than the cookie-cutter approach to singles.
