The one thing George Harrison wanted to be remembered for
It’s virtually impossible for anyone listening to pop music to forget what The Beatles brought to music.
In under a decade, the Fab Four went from being one of the greatest pop acts the world had ever seen to the most brilliant musical innovators on the planet before finally deciding to go their separate ways. That’s not something that the rest of the world was going to let fall by the wayside, but George Harrison had a much different relationship with the concept of his musical legacy than the others.
Because when looking at the rest of the band, they all had unique characteristics than the average veteran rock and roll star. John Lennon seemed to look back on his Beatles days with equal amounts of disgust and annoyance, depending on which day you caught him, and while Paul McCartney was more than happy to keep the band’s memory going throughout his career, it’s not like he was trying to get everyone back in the same room when he started hitting the stadium circuit with Wings.
There was a lot more for them to do in their solo careers, but Harrison seemed to have a big problem with that second word: Career. He had seen his whole time as a Beatle as an opportunity for him to have some fun playing with his friends, and even if he had to go out on his own and get his songs out there, it was never about him being a frontman. He wanted to fade into the background, but the world had other plans once he released a record as gargantuan as All Things Must Pass.
In the pantheon of greatest Beatles solo albums, Harrison’s magnum opus is by far the finest of the former Fabs, but even then, he was never looking to build a career off of it. He had his fun playing with Ravi Shankar, and while he did get a good thrashing from the critics when working on albums like Dark Horse, the best records he ever made were often the ones that didn’t feel like he was being forced to release them at gunpoint.
Everything from 33 and ⅓ to all of the Traveling Wilburys albums were an absolute joy for him to make, but his status as a songwriter was something he tried to shy away from. He never wanted to be out front like that, and with bandmates like Lennon and McCartney, he was never going to be voted the greatest songwriter in the room. And by the time he passed away, he felt that side of himself had come and gone.
Years after his glory years and God knows how many perfect songs, Harrison’s wife Olivia said that he felt that music came secondary to what he wanted his legacy to be, saying, “[He] meant things to people. He knew it helped people in their lives — people wrote to him, they told him. And he said, ‘Even if it’s one person, even if it helps somebody, then that’s great.’ But he wasn’t concerned about how he would be remembered. Not that he didn’t want to be remembered, but he didn’t expect to be. He wanted to be remembered as a gardener who wrote one of two good tunes.”
If there’s anything that Harrison is being remembered for now, though, it’s his honesty in his art. There’s a lot of great songs that are pretty much unobjectionable in his catalogue, and while he does have a few tracks that are painful to listen to in some capacity, they don’t take away from the vast catalogue that he had and his ability to teach people how to be a good person amid rock and roll stardom, such as paving the way for Live Aid with the Concert for Bangladesh.
But his outlook as a gardener made a lot more sense considering how far he had moved away from his status as a Beatle. That was one part of his life, and while he can look back on a few of those moments with a sense of nostalgia, the end of his life as a gardener showed him to be at peace with his legacy, even if he still had to deal with a few harrowing moments along the way.
