“It’s serious business”: The musician George Harrison called his greatest teacher
Being one of the most popular artists in the world didn’t necessarily mean being good at one’s craft for George Harrison.
He was happy to have joined The Beatles at the right time, but while the screaming girls may have been exciting for a few years, there came a point where he wanted nothing more than to fade into the background and play music with his friends. And while many people would have been content to retire after going through a massive decade of the best music ever made, Harrison wasn’t about to start slowing down once he had hit the ground running.
He had been kept under wraps for so many years, and when All Things Must Pass came out, it was like he had finally arrived as one of the biggest pop artists of all time. He didn’t intend to make the greatest album of all time, but given how much good material he had been hiding for so long, it’s a wonder why John Lennon and Paul McCartney decided not to give songs like ‘All Things Must Pass’ the time of day when they started working on records like what would become Let It Be.
But Harrison’s songs were also far more intricate than what you would have expected out of his friends. None of the chord progressions that he ever played was considered normal, and even if he had a great way of weaving his lines throughout every song, it was all done in the service of making music that could touch someone on a deeper level. And while Lennon and McCartney were great guides for his music, the spiritual aspect wasn’t something that could really be taught in pop music.
Any artist will tell you that the makings of a great song is something that you feel in your heart a lot more than your mind, and Harrison found that calling when he went outside of the pop charts. Bob Dylan was the kind of person who felt was the perfect example of someone wearing their beliefs on their sleeve, but when listening to music from the Eastern part of the world, he felt a sea change in the way he approached music.
Everyone wanting to be taken seriously took their cues from Dylan, but Harrison found a deep connection with what people like Ravi Shankar were doing. He didn’t know the first thing about playing the sitar when he first started listening to that music, but when he started taking lessons with Shankar, he started to realise that these teachings were about more than putting his hands in the right place.
These were life lessons that could be applied to every single part of his life, saying, “It’s serious business if you’re really going to learn it properly. If you have the ability to learn it properly, you have to have the teacher that can properly give it to you in that quantity and Ravi certainly is [that].” But their relationship went beyond the confines of being simply musical colleagues.
A lot of what Shankar was doing felt like a guide to how Harrison should look at his religious teachings, and when looking through a lot of his greatest pop albums, he still held onto those same values. While it’s easy to call Harrison preachy for dealing with religion in his songs, his goal was always about spreading the word and telling everyone that they can experience life in a much different way than the usual philosophies that have been pounded into their heads for so many years.
Shankar might have been the first one to teach Harrison of salvation through music, but ‘The Quiet One’ had some of his most profound moments when combining both of his loves under one roof thanks to his teacher. ‘Brainwashed’ was one of the boldest ways anyone has closed the book on their career, but even if Harrison goes from a typical pop tune to a religious chant towards the end of the song, it was all one in the same to him.
