Why George Harrison was happier out of the spotlight
In “George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door,” author Graeme Thomson quotes singer Peter Frampton in 1971: “I said, ‘Can I put on some Beatles tracks and ask you about them?’ And [Harrison] said, ‘Sure.’ I’d put on ‘Paperback Writer’ and say, ‘I love the guitar part on that,’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s Paul.’ I was embarrassed. I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and he said, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’ He was very sweet about it, but it wasn’t until that particular moment that I realized he was stifled.”
In re-examining the Quiet One’s remarkable life, Thomson argues that George Harrison’s flashes of supreme musicianship were uneven and in line with his “comically contradictory” ways, such as the time he visited producer George Martin on his sickbed and presented him with a statuette of Ganesh to signify pleasure in the smallest of things — before roaring off in a McLaren F1 sports car capable of 230 mph.
“The routine paradoxes evident in most humans seemed in Harrison to be amplified,” Thomson writes. “Just as the success of the Beatles was itself riven by extremes.”
Source:New York Post
