He'd been up till four that morning, in fact, agonizing about what to tell the press. He was clearly upset with the tour; he had a sheaf of notes on his desk covering the shows in Vancouver, Seattle, and now, last night, in San Francisco. But he should be talking to George, not the press, he said, and so far he'd only spoken with Tom Scott, Harrison's saxophonist and musical sounding board, and Denis O'Brien, Harrison's business manager. Ordinarily, explained Graham, he talked freely with Harrison, "except on things artistic." He wasn't sure he should step out of line, as technical producer of the tour, and criticize the artistic and musical structure of the show.
So specific thoughts were off the record. But if he was going to talk at all, it had to be straight. "I could say to you, `We're working on things,' you know. 'George is in great spirits!' It's like the football team that's lost forty-three games in a row, and you say, `How do you feel, coach?' `Well, my spirits are up and we're still in there!"' Graham smiled vaguely at the metaphor. "But we all know that the plays ain't working, and we're looking for a new quarterback."
He recalled the return of Dylan and the reunion of CSNY. Their audiences. Graham has a sense for audiences. `At the beginning of each show, I think the public has the same feeling-yes, that wonderful aura. I think with Bob Dylan the public loved what they got. With CSNY they got three-and-a half hours of music and were pretty well satisfied. With George Harrison, they would definitely have wanted more of George Harrison.
"That's my criticism of George, out of deep respect for his great talent and great ability. I think what the public leaves with is a continuing respect and reverence for what he has done, and a..." Here Graham chose his words carefully. "...perhaps a feeling of bittersweetness about not having gotten just a bit closer to what their expectations were. I don't know. They didn't get to go back in the time machine enough."
On the Dylan tour, Graham, the backstage showman, had lit up a fancy Cuban cigar for every show well done. I asked him whether he'd smoked any so far on this tour.
His eyebrows perked up. `Ah, but that's the point. There's no cigars!"
I REALIZE THE B E A T L E S did fill a space in the sixties, and all the people who the Beatles meant something to have grown up. It's like with anything. You grow up with it and you get attached to it. That's one of the problems in our lives. becoming too attached to things. But I understand the Beatles in many ways did nice things, and it's appreciated, the people still like them. The problem comes when they want to live in the past, and they want to hold onto something and are afraid of change.
-George Harrison at his Los Angeles press conference, October 2 3rd, 19 74
THE LAST TIME I SAW GEORGE H A R R I SON in the flesh as a Beatle, he was a standout. The group was on a stage covering second base at Candlestick Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, the night of August 29th, 1966. San Francisco was the last stop of a nineteen-city American tour. JPG&R, all in lacy white shirts and mod green jackets that matched the outfield grass, had strolled out of the first-base dugout, waving casually at a mad crowd of twenty-six thousand, and laughed through eleven songs in thirty minutes flat.
And I remember how George stood out from the other three that evening. He wore white socks.
As things turned out, the Candlestick Park show was the last concert the Beatles ever did. "We got in a rut," Harrison told Hunter Davies, the biographer, years later. "It was just a bloody big row. Nobody could hear. We got worse as musicians, playing the same old junk every day. There was no satisfaction at all."
The next month, George and his wife, Patti, were off to India. Having idly picked up a strange, twin-bowled instrument called a sitar on the set of Help!, he was interested in studying under the great Indian composer and sitarist, Ravi Shankar.
It was five more years before Harrison returned to the stage, at the behest of Shankar and for the benefit of the people of Bangladesh, East Pakistan. He was the host, dressed all in white, gathering friends like Billy Preston, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, and Bob Dylan around him.
And it was there, at Madison Square Garden, that Harrison tasted the desire to tour again. "He was definitely inspired after Bangladesh," said Billy Preston. "He wanted to do it again, right away. But it took some time. Bangladesh was an exceptional show because everybody was there. He had to do a lot of thinking on this one, because he had to get out there and be the one."
There were other delays for Harrison: the fusses over the profits from the Bangladesh benefit and album; the McCartney-sue-me, we-sue-Allen Klein blues; various sessions with friends like Harry Nilsson, Preston, and Starr; the Living in the Material World album and the creation of Dark Horse Records. One of Dark Horse's first releases was Shankar Family and Friends, which featured Shankar conducting a fifteenpiece Indian orchestra, sometimes joined by rock and jazz instruments. Ravi Shankar, it turned out, was a major reason for Harrison's return to the stage.
"I have always been very eager to bring out such a number of good musicians from India," said Shankar, who has composed music for small orchestras for some thirty years. "George heard a few tapes I had of things with groups and he was impressed and was telling me for almost seven years that I should bring something like this over. And I said, `Well, you must also take part in it.' And it's only last year we became more confident."
Last February Harrison visited Shankar in India to plan the tour. In the spring he began to gather his backup. First he chose Tom Scott, saxophone player behind Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Billy Preston, and John Lennon, and in front of his own band, the L.A. Express. Having studied Indian music at UCLA with a Shankar disciple, Harihar Rao, Scott was invited to play on the Shankar Family album last year.
When his L.A. Express accompanied Joni Mitchell to London this spring, Harrison called and asked him to join the tour.
George then picked drummer Andy Newmark, formerly with Sly Stone, and bassist Willie Weeks. Newmark and Weeks had played with Ronnie Wood (of the Faces) on his solo album, as had Harrison.
Finally, Harrison chose second guitarist Robben Ford, from the Express, Billy Preston and percussionist Emil Richards, another Harihar Rao student who worked on Ravi's LP. Meanwhile, Scott rounded out his horn section with Chuck Findley and Jim Horn. Both men performed at the Bangladesh benefit.
In October Harrison arrived in Los Angeles to begin rehearsals and to finish his own album, Dark Horse, begun a year ago in London. He chose to squeeze both pro jects-plus a single, also called "Dark Horse"-into a three-week period. He promptly lost his voice, and, at a press conference on the eve of the tour, announced as much, adding, ho ho, that he might very well go out the first few shows and do instrumentals.
That might not have been a bad idea. Harrison did, in fact, start each show with his mouth shut, presenting himself as just one of nine band members, playing a wellarranged, tension-and-release number called "Hari Good Boy Express." But when, on the opening night in Vancouver, Harrison broke into "The Lord Loves the One," he sang off key, and the voice, in its first flight, instantly sounded tired. The performance earned minimal response, as people yielded easily to distraction, studying the "Dark Horse" banner unfurled high above the stage, or the hand-painted, rainbow-colored tour shirts worn by Willie Weeks and Jim Horn, or Harrison's hair-shag cut, medium long, blown dry-or his denim overalls and Hush Puppies.
(Billy Preston wound up covering for him, singing high parts of songs. Later, Preston said Harrison was resigned to the arrangement. "He feels a little bad about it, but there's nothin' he can do about it, he's been working so hard.")
In any event the first U.S. tour by a former Beatle was underway, "and for a long time." Jeani Read, pop critic for the Vancouver Province wrote later, "all I could think about was Dylan a few months ago, singing all his songs wrong for the people who wanted to hear them the way they were used to hearing them. Because Harrison sang most of his songs wrong, too. Except the painful difference was that Dylan was in complete control of what he was doing."
Wrote Don S
tanley, of the Vancouver Sun, "He attempted to storm through the material, a la Dylan's recent magnificent tour, and ended up agonizingly hoarse."
(Dylan attended the two concerts November 12th at the Forum in Los Angeles, and he visited with Harrison between shows. During the encore, he zipped out the back doors into the parking lot, accompanied by his wife and several friends. He stopped to say that, yes, he enjoyed the shows.)
Through Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Long Beach, and Los Angeles, Harrison sounded the same, and so did the reviews. In San Francisco, Phil Elwood of the Examiner: "Never a strong singer, but a moving one, Harrison found that he had virtually no voice left and had to croak his way through even the delicate `Something."'
By Los Angeles, at the first of three shows at the Forum, more than Harrison's voice seemed to be cracking. After an eight-second response-more a yawn than a hand for a new song called "Maya Love," Harrison told the house: "I don't know how it feels down there, but from up here, you seem pretty dead." Later, his voice breaking, he angrily lectured someone in the audience who'd screamed out a request for "Bangladesh":
"I have to rewrite the song. But don't just shout Bangladesh, give them something to help. You can chant Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, and maybe you'll feel better. But if you just shout Bangladesh, Bangladesh, Bangladesh, it's not going to help anybody."
Finally, after he'd cooled down a bit, Harrison apologized for the way things seemed to be going.
The next night, Harrison played two shows at the Forum with less-than-packed houses. Forum manager Jim Appell estimated the first crowd at 9,000, the second at 11,000. The Forum seats 18,000.
MOST O F THE PEOPLE who'd forked over $9.5 0 to see Beatle George expected a Beatle show, a rubber soul revue, a long and winding memory lane. Even if they'd kept up with Harrison these past few years and knew better, they still wanted a Beatle.
George, from the outset, refused. At rehearsals, during the first run-through, it took two hours and eighteen songs before George would do a Beatles song-"In My Life" from Rubber Soul. The way Tom Scott told it, Ravi Shankar had to go to Harrison to urge him to consider audience expectations, "and give the people a couple of old songs: it's okay."
"George says people expect him to be exactly what he was ten years ago," said Shankar. "That's the problem with all the artists, I suppose, Frank Sinatra or anyone popular for many years. People like to hear the old nostalgia."
"George," said Tom Scott, "is one of the few guys with the prestige and the resources to do something good and is willing to do it and put his neck on the line. By that I mean presenting a show with so much new material when people expect him to do a Beatles."
"Something good" meant Harrison's presentation of Shankar and his new music, and it meant his insisting on being just one of the guys on stage, playing humble host to the others, giving individual spots to Preston and Scott.
But it also meant a dismaying refusal to acknowledge his past, and the fact that if he hadn't been a Beatle, he might not be doing a $4 million tour inside of seven weeks. And Harrison went further. He tampered with the past. So you had Harrison singing, "Something in the way she moves it," turning the lover's tribute into a lecherous shout. And: "I look at you all/See the love there that's sleeping/While my guitar gently smiles." And, on a song written by John Lennon (who was the only former partner to send flowers to the opening show): "In my life...I love God more."
"George didn't want to do `Something' at all," said Billy Preston, describing the rehearsals. "I knew he was gonna have to do it, and he started rebelling against it by doing it a different way, rewriting the lyrics. But at least he's doing the song."
Harrison may have the right to change lyrics-his own, at least-but how would you like it if Frank Sinatra came out for a once-more-in-a-lifetime shot and sang, "I did it...His way"? Or if Dylan on his tour had proclaimed, "The answer, my friend, is coming from within/The answer is coming from within"? To a dedicated nostalgia freak, the slaughter of such secular cows can be pretty frustrating. Or pretty silly.
There were other problems: The shows suffered from sound mixes that buried many instruments, and from poor structuring. The Vancouver concert, for instance, included two appearances by Ravi Shankar's orchestra, which, for many in the audience, was at least one too many. Introducing "our little pal" Shankar and orchestra for their second set, Harrison seemed to note the lack of excitement in the air. He put in an urgent plug for Indian music: "I'd die for it," he said, and tapped his electric guitar"but not for this." After the opening night disaster, a lackluster hotel gathering turned into a series of meetings with Ravi, Tom Scott, Billy Preston, and Harrison. Shankar suggested a restructuring of the show. "It was just showbiz," said Scott. "No one wanted Ravi to come out to a hostile audience."
Even with Shankar condensed into one power-packed set, the rest of the concert left a lot of songs to be desired. Of a total twenty-three tunes in two-and-a-half hours, only eight were familiar Beatles or Harrison songs: "Something," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," "Sue Me, Sue You Blues," "For You Blue," "Give Me Love," "In My Life," "What Is Life," and "My Sweet Lord." From Seattle through Los Angeles, the shows generally went like this: "Hari Good Boy Express" (the instrumental), "Something," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Preston's "Will It Go 'Round in Circles," and "Sue Me, Sue You Blues." Then with less than half an hour gone, Harrison introduced Shankar and orchestra for seven straight numbers, followed by intermission. And in the second half, whatever hits there were had to be sorted from a puzzling pile. Harrison kicked off with "For You Blue" and "Give Me Love," which in several performances was the first song whose introduction was recognized by the audience. Then an instrumental, a directionless jam spawned during rehearsals at the A&M sound stage, called "Sound Stage of My Mind," followed by "In My Life," with strong brass where there used to be gentle guitar. Then a jazzy, jamlike number from Tom Scott called "Tomcat," "Maya Love," with guitar lines reminiscent of "Sue Me, Sue You Blues," and the most consistent high point of each concert: Billy Preston with his hits, "Nothing from Nothing" and "Outta-Space."
After "Dark Horse," Harrison announced his last number, "What Is Life," and returned for "My Sweet Lord," speeded up, unrecognizable except for the lyrics, and weighed down by exhortations from George to go to the god of your choice.
"KrishnalChrist/Krishnal Christ/Krishnal Christ," he chanted over and over, adding a mentin now and then for Buddha and Allah.
On paper, without mentioning the drive of Andy Newmark's drumming, the color of Emil Richards' percussion work, the solidity of Willie Weeks' bass, the vocal (and sweeping keyboard) help rendered by Billy Preston, the exuberant rock and blues guitar of Robben Ford, and the brilliant horn work of Tom Scott, the concert sounds pretty dreadful. But it wasn't quite that bad.
For one thing, before each show there was a mood of expectation. Everywhere, one could still detect faint traces of Beatlemania. A 20-year-old woman outside the Seattle Center Coliseum spotted Harrison arriving and ran into a crowd screeching, "I saw him! I saw his glasses! I saw his nose!" A younger woman, in a George Harrison T-shirt, cried uncontrollably in the front row in Vancouver. And, at the Oakland Coliseum, a crowd of four or five dozen fans stormed past a puny link of three security guards and rushed up to the stage to help George with his heavy load during "Give Me Love."
Also there was the appealing sincerity of George Harrison himself, blissed-out and beaming while committing all manner of ghastly, anti-show-business mistakes-overintroducing Ravi Shankar or Billy Preston, imploring the audience to "have a little patience" for the Indian music before they've even heard any.
Some critics called it "The Billy Preston Show," and they weren't far off. When Preston, in natty, sequined suit and mushroom-cloud Afro, began to move behind the instruments arrayed around him-a clavinet, a Hammond B-3 organ, ARP and string ensemble synthesizers and a Wurlitzer piano-all the pent-up hell of a boogie-hungry horde broke loose.
Preston gave the crowds what they couldn't get fro
m Harrison: hit rock and roll songs, done faithfully, in full voice. So it was Billy who got the audience up on its feet, up on the chairs. In San Francisco, it was Billy who at long last triggered a welcome surge toward the stage.
George, through all of this, looked grateful, pointing at Billy, shouting his name, while Preston pointed and shouted back: "George Harrison! Back on stage!"
In Vancouver most of the audience were polite for Ravi Shankar and his fifteenmember troupe. A little itchy, maybe, and possibly thinking they'd rather be scoring a hot dog or hearing more Harrison, but-polite. It was in Seattle that Shankar and his orchestra finally broke through. The song was "Dispute and Violence," introduced by Harrison with the note, "otherwise known as jazz."
Like many of Shankar's pieces, "Dispute and Violence" was a sometimes loose, sometimes tight fusion of various forms of Eastern and Western music-folk, classical, and spiritual Indian; rock, jazz, and even big-band swing. There was Indian scat-shouting, trilling and jabbering, representing dispute; squeaking reeds and flutes and a Don Ellis brass for measures of violence; and Andy Newmark's drums, Emil Richards' kitchenware percussion, and Alla Rakha's tabla setting a steady battle tempo. Shankar at the podium, arms flailing, index fingers dipping and pointing, took it all to a victorious, symphonic, last-stomp halt.
Two young men behind me jumped up to join in the resounding ovation. They would not stand up again until the end of Preston's two numbers. I asked them what they liked about "Dispute and Violence."
"It's the beat," said the first one. "I saw him a year ago, with just a small group, two or three, I wasn't expecting anything like this."
"It's beautiful," said the second. "You hear every different type of music there is in the world."
"If you were gonna talk to God," remarked the first, "that would be the way." The man said he was 19 and had come to hear Beatles songs.
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 32