A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me who my favourite Beatle was. The answer is, and always has been, George Harrison. My friend scoffed at me and asked me to tell him why. The simple answer is because he wrote Here Comes the Sun which is my favourite song of all time. But the long, and unexplainable, answer is because for some reason, George Harrison makes me feel safe.
I went to see George Harrison: Living in the Material World this afternoon/evening with my dad. The Martin Scorsese documentary about “The Quiet Beatle” is something I have been looking forward to for a very long time because I haven’t revisited my love for George in a long time. That’s not to say my love for George, and The Beatles, has faded in any way, but instead I have been discovering other musical and artistic inspirations for a while. The Beatles were my first musical love, and as young girls do, I picked one of them as my favourite. Paul seemed a bit too goody-two-shoes for the 12 year old me to chose, John frightened me with his bombastic-ness and Ringo was the narrator of Thomas the Tank Engine so it couldn’t be him! That left George- the quiet one, the one whose eyes always seemed so serious in the photographs in the Beatle books I acquired during my adolescence, the one whose smile made me know what laughing was supposed to look like.
As I grew up with the Beatles (with my best friend along for the ride) George’s musical offering to the group was always my favourite. As a ‘grown-up’ I can recognise my fear of John Lennon and his music as a lack of understanding. Even now there is a slight hesitance when I think about him, but I know as I get older the more I will want to understand and the more I want to appreciate. Paul’s music is and was lovely. But I think he’s a fairly straight-forward embodiment of the word lovely. I appreciate him for what he is, but I never felt like there was anything to ‘discover’ in his music. And as for poor Ringo, well, he’s Ringo isn’t he? But with George there was always a story underneath the music and the lyrics, and I wanted to know the story so desperately.
Scorsese’s film helped me understand certain aspects of George’s life that I only had a vague consciousness of. I’m particularly happy about is the excitement I now have of diving into Eric Clapton’s music- something I have never had any desire to do before. The film helped me remember all those moments of hearing songs like “Isn’t It a Pity” for the first time. When you feel like the blood is dripping out of your very body with every strum of the guitar you hear and every word physically hits you and by the end of the song you’re utterly exhausted. And the beauty of the fact that with an artist like George, there’s not just one song like that- it’s almost all of them.
It’s hard to pinpoint the specific reason(s) why I feel this way about a person I will never meet. And I know I’m not the first person to feel this way about an artist/musician/poet/etc but sitting in that dark theatre listening to George Harrison’s music up ridiculously loud and watching his beautiful smiling face made my heart sing.
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