In Other Words: George Harrison
The Quiet Beatle talks God, LSD and all those years ago
ANTHONY DECURTIS
This excerpt is from my interview that took place in 1987 for an issue of Rolling Stone commemorating the magazine's twentieth anniversary. I had interviewed Paul McCartney for the same issue the day before. Both those interviews appear at full length in a section of In Other Words titled "Meet the Beatles," which also includes a second interview with McCartney from 2001 and an interview with Phil Spector about producing Let It Be and solo albums by Harrison and John Lennon.
I arrived at Henley-on-Thames, where Harrison lived, by train on a Saturday afternoon in June. His wife Olivia had told me that someone would be picking me up, so I stood on the platform looking for my ride. When everyone else had left, I heard a voice behind me say, "You look like the only person here who might be from New York." I turned around and there, smiling, stood George Harrison.
Moments later, I was lying in the low passenger seat of his black Ferrari 275 GTB as he drove me to his Friar Park estate. As he drove, he glanced over at me. "So, I understand you spoke to Paul yesterday. How is he doing?" So this is what's become of the Beatles, I thought, George Harrison has to ask me how Paul McCartney is doing.
As we drove through the gates at Friar Park, Harrison's spectacular mansion came into view through the trees, looking like something out of a fairytale. As I gaped, Harrison pulled up at one of the guesthouses, which is where we would do our interview. He and I then sat down at a wooden table in the dining room, smoked cigarettes, and talked for two hours, as the late afternoon sky clouded over.
Was there a specific moment when it became clear to you that people were looking at the Beatles as a way of making sense of their lives?
As we began having hits in England, the press were catching on to how we looked, which was changing the image of youth, I suppose. It just gathered momentum. For me, 1966 was the time when the whole world opened up and had a greater meaning. But that was a direct result of LSD.
How did taking LSD affect you?
It was like opening the door, really, and before, you didn't even know there was a door there. It just opened up this whole other consciousness, even if it was down to, like Aldous Huxley said, the wonderful folds in his gray flannel trousers. From that smaller concept to the fact that every blade of grass and every grain of sand is just throbbing and pulsating.
Did it make you feel that your life could be very different from what it was?
Yeah, but that too presented a problem as well, because then the feeling began in me of it's all well and good being popular and being in demand, but, you know, it's ridiculous, really. From then on, I didn't enjoy fame. That's when the novelty disappeared -- around 1966 -- and then it became hard work.
It seems as if that time was incredibly compressed. Did you feel that sense of compression?
That year -- you could say any year from, say, 1965 up to the Seventies -- it was, like, I can't believe we did so much, you know? But those years did seem to be a thousand years long. Time just got elongated. Sometimes I felt like I was a thousand years old.
Was it at that point that your identity as one of the Beatles began to get oppressive for you?
Yeah, absolutely. Again, with the realization that came about after the lysergic. It has a humbling power, that stuff. And the ego -- to be able to deal with these people thinking you were some wonderful thing -- it was difficult to come to terms with. I was feeling like nothing.
Was the decision to stop touring in 1966 part of your re-examining your lives as Beatles?
Well, I wanted to stop touring after about '65, actually, because I was getting very nervous. They kept planning these ticker-tape parades through San Francisco, and I was saying, "I absolutely don't want to do that." There was that movie The Manchurian Candidate [about a war hero who returns home programmed for political assassination]. I think in history you can see that when people get too big, something like that can very easily happen. Although at the time, it was prior to all this terrorism. We used to fly in and out of Beirut and all them places. You would never dream of going on tour now in some of the places we went. Especially with only two road managers: one guy to look after the equipment, which was three little amplifiers, three guitars and a set of drums; and one guy who looked after us and our suits.
Did your interest in transcendental meditation and other spiritual disciplines help you?
All the panic and the pressure? Yeah! Absolutely, I think. Although up until LSD, I never realized that there was anything beyond this state of consciousness. But all the pressure was such that, like the man said, "There must be some way out of here."
For me, it was definitely LSD. The first time I took it, it just blew everything away. I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience within twelve hours. It changed me, and there was no way back to what I was before.
From Anthony DeCurtis' collection of interviews, In Other Words.
