“You might as well do it big”: The album that inspired George Harrison to curate the Concert for Bangladesh
Upon their breakup, the four members of The Beatles had very little unexplored territory. They’d nearly achieved everything there was to be achieved in the studio, and the fact that they had to retire from their life careers due to the stress of the hysteria is a clear indication of how they conquered that.
But when you operate at the creative frequency at which The Beatles did, the chapter that follows a breakup is seen as an open road upon which a breadth of endeavours can travel on. And perhaps that was no more pertinent than in the case of George Harrison. The middle child of The Beatles, whose outrageous talents were perennially in the shadow of his one-of-a-kind counterparts, the shackles had finally been let loose in the early 1970s, and it was time for him to make his own history.
His curiosity about South Asian sensibilities had been rumbling for several years at this point, and he had injected much of what he had learned from Ravi Shankar on songs like ‘Norweigan Wood’. His relationship with Shankar was at the very crux of Harrison’s personal development from 1966 onwards, and so when conflict broke out in 1971 between India and Pakistan, Harrison felt it was his duty to respond in a way he knew best. The guitarist organised two shows under the banner Concert for Bangladesh, which took place on Sunday, August 1st, 1971, at the prestigious Madison Square Garden, New York.
“It must have been in 1971 when I was in Los Angeles doing the Raga soundtrack album,” Harrison explained. “Ravi was talking to me and telling me how he wanted to do a concert, but bigger than he normally did, so that he could raise maybe 25,000 dollars for the starving in Bangladesh”.
“He asked if I could think of some way of helping, say, for instance, for me to come on and introduce it or maybe bring in Peter Sellers… something to help, anyway,” he added. “Then he started to give me cuttings from magazines and newspapers, articles on the war and the poverty and I began to learn what it was about, and I though ‘well, maybe I should help him do it’.”
Not satisfied with staging a modest show in aid of the conflict, Harrison knew this was an opportunity to use his influence and make a substantial ripple of change. It was a groundbreaking move for humanitarianism that set out a stall for art and charity to collaborate with events such as Live Aid.
“The Beatles had been trained to the view that if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it big and why not make a million dollars,” Harrison said. And do it big they did, with a string of high-profile stars performing on the day and a quarter of a million dollars being raised for the cause. In 1992, Harrison reflected on the achievement, stating, “The money we raised was secondary. The main thing was, we spread the word and helped get the war ended … What we did show was that musicians and people are more humane than politicians.”
