The Beatles’ dark horse lives on

George Harrison put his money where his heart was, and the results — the Concert for Bangladesh, HandMade Films — seemed to flourish in a way the Beatles’ ill-fated Apple company never could.

Half a century after hitting America on Ed Sullivan’s live TV show, the Beatles are still hot cultural property. Cirque du Soleil regularly sells out Vegas performances of Love. Rereleased box sets of the Fab Four’s catalogue move like hotcakes. Authorized photographers now stop traffic on Abbey Road so fans can get a paid-for photo op. Everybody has something to say about this Beatles Silver Anniversary, but one of the more moving tributes comes in Martin Scorsese’s documentary from 2012, George Harrison: Living in the Material World.

It’s a lengthy (208 minutes) rumination on George’s spiritual journey, from the youngest Beatle, with quiffed hair and lousy academic grades, to the worldwide champion of Ravi Shankar, Hare Krishna and transcendental meditation.

It’s worth remembering that, although Paul and John were considered the avant-garde members of the group, Harrison was one of the first to do solo music (the raga-heavy “Wonderwall Music” and the synth-scored “Electronic Sound”), as well as the first to embrace and explore Indian methods of composition and playing. (Within You and Without You from “Sgt. Pepper” being the first full flowering.) Far from being a “fad,” George’s embrace of non-western spirituality deeply changed him, according to Scorsese’s documentary, which gains much from the use of family home movies and rarely-seen photos, plus letters read aloud by son Dhani Harrison. The other Beatles may have quickly tired of chanting mantras and were loath to surrender their material possessions, but George had an epiphanic moment, during one LSD-soaked visit to Haight-Ashbury: he felt the whole hippie scene consisted of “bums,” eager for chemical kicks. They were not truly searching for meaning in life. 
So he stopped taking “the dreaded Lysergic” and went further in his own search, learning from Indian masters like Shankar, who taught that music was the purest way of delivering emotion through sounds that “vibrated” with the soul.

Harrison recalls chanting for several days straight. (No wonder, perhaps, he lost his singing voice in the mid-‘70s.) Also interviewed are Harrison’s Beatle mates Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, plus Monty Python members Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, Eric Clapton (who famously wooed away Harrison’s wife Patti with the song Layla), Klaus Voormann, Tom Petty, racecar driver Jackie Stewart and many others. 

Scorsese sought permission from Harrison’s widow Olivia to make his documentary, and it’s similar in approach to his Bob Dylan film, No Direction Home: the film consists of two parts, roughly breaking down at the point where George chooses spirituality over a lifetime with the Beatles. Unlike the Dylan doc — which had a clear division point, the moment when the former folk singer decided to turn away from fan clamor and embrace his own plugged-in music — Living in the Material World sketches out a thesis, without a single dramatic, “electric” moment. It doesn’t suffer from this, because Harrison’s journey is interesting in its own right. (There are some stretches of home video that a less-reverential director might have edited out.) The benefit of Scorsese’s approach is that you gain a more meditative sense of his subject: Dylan’s frame of mind, Harrison’s spiritual quest.

Evidence of that quest comes in the guitarist staging what became a precursor to Live Aid and other star-studded charity concerts: the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh aimed to raise relief funds for typhoon and military atrocity victims there. Similar generosity came when Monty Python lost funding for their second feature, Life of Brian; Harrison stepped up, mortgaging his home to raise $4 million to make the film, and it led to a creative and lucrative producing partnership (HandMade Films) that resulted in Time Bandits, Mona Lisa, Withnail and I and other British art films.

In short, Harrison put his money where his heart was, and the results seemed to flourish in a way the Beatles’ ill-fated Apple company never could.

Of course, that same generosity of spirit also led Harrison to “hand over” wife Patti Boyd to pining bluesman Eric Clapton, who had written Layla for her. Priceless to watch is Clapton rationalizing his “Lancelot”-like quest for another man’s wife: “You’ve got to understand, it was the time of free love, we shared everything back then… George basically said, ‘She’s yours, you can have her’… And, at the time, he seemed to have more wisdom than the rest of us.”

His friends are emotional about Harrison’s battle with cancer, which he lost finally in 2001. McCartney also recalls his mate George was a “red-blooded male,” despite all the spiritualism, and that may be code for he liked to fool around. Others point out he was a man of “extremes”: he eschewed material things, yet wrote Taxman and bought a Switzerland home close to his death as a tax dodge. He was apt to give away a pile of ukuleles to Tom Petty (he apparently had a trunk full of them during a ukulele phase). And he was the Beatle, according to Starr, who blanketed the EMI studio with flowers to welcome the drummer back after his brief separation from the band.

McCartney, never one to part lightly with a writing credit, points out that a song like And I Love Her wouldn’t exist in the same way without George’s in-studio input. The memorable acoustic riff that opens the tune? “George came up with that… and that’s half the song!”

From the early stages of the Beatles, Harrison adapted his role to his songwriting mentors, supplying just the right guitar riff or measured accompaniment to John and Paul’s compositions. (Sometimes, his input was rejected, such as the time Paul had to tell George not to play guitar licks after every line of Hey Jude.) Meanwhile, George stockpiled dozens of songs — tunes that never made it to Beatle albums — and released the mammoth triple album “All Things Must Pass” in 1970. It was the ultimate expression of a dark horse ready to kick his way out of the gate.

Perhaps the most shocking moment in Living in the Material World comes when George and wife Olivia found themselves fighting off an intruder in their home in 1999 — almost like the material world taking its brutal, random revenge. Harrison was stabbed several times, but the experience, far from making him cynical or spiritually doubtful, led the former Beatle to embrace his final two years with fresh purpose: he shone on, even as the media engaged in a ghoulish death watch over his final cancer battle.