John Lennon and Paul McCartney were so busy during 1970 sniping away at each other in public that they probably weren't looking over their shoulders. They should have been.
Having landed his first Beatles A-side with "Something", George Harrison had his creative juices flowing and, against all expectations, the great Fab Four solo onslaught was led by the quiet Beatle, who swept to No. 1 globally over Christmas with "My Sweet Lord" and the ambitious triple album set All Things Must Pass
The album was a grand gesture (grandiose even, with Phil Spector's Wagnerian production); more musicial and more satisfying than Lennon's Plastic Ono Band exercises or even Paul's pared-back, homemade McCartney. It righted a few wrongs, not least those long on the mind of an introspective, almost eternally frustrated and thwarted musician.
"Something" had been a gesture that came too late to save the Beatles. Since 1962 they had released 21 official British singles, all dutifully divvied up between "the firm", Lennon and McCartney, apart from two later Harrison-penned flip sides. Until "Something" sold 1 million in a week, only fans who dilligently read the fine print on labels would have known that Harrison even wrote songs. It was a damburst, to be sure.
Conventional wisdom has it that Yoko broke up the Beatles. In the stakes of preverse destruction one-upsmanship, McCartney would like you to think that he pulled the plug first. The reality is that Harrison hated being there long before the others tired of the treadmill. And with good reason.
Being a young god from Liverpool never sat all that easily with the youngest Beatle: the 10,000 strong horde at New York's Kennedy Airport in February 1964 was any likely lad's dream, but by the time they'd made it down to Australia four months later, elements of the frenzied devotion were becoming decidedly creepy.
In Adelaide, a sizeable chunk of the 350,000 people who constituted the biggest Beatle-besotted crowd ever assembled laid siege to the South Australia Hotel. Disc jockey Bob Franics recalls it as an almost surreal situation: "They'd get bored, walk out on the balcony for a wave, see the crowds, come back in and go 'What's all this about?' We'd laugh, listen to John tell jokes, drink and play around, but we never talked about what was outside the window. But George wasn't able to handle it like that, it seemed to upset him."
Kevin Ritchie, then an executive of EMI Records, has related finding "George wandering around the hotel feeling desparately homesick just after the press conference. He was feeling a little bit left out and overcome by the reception. He said he just wanted to go home." As the tour grind wore on, he kept wanting the same thing.
"He had been a Beatle ever since the age of 15," wrote biographer Philip Norman of the state of the union by 1966. "For the final year of touring, if not longer, George had actively hated his Beatle existence. On the outside it might appear pure gold; on the inside it bristled with snubs and slights - the heavy patience of George Martin in the studio; the stifling profusion of John and Paul's partnership, which allowed him, if he was lucky, one song per album; the realisation that in their eyes he was still what he had been in Liverpool, the kid just tagging along."
Harrison should have been a revered musician. All the lead players of the premier beat bands were guitar heroes - Brian Jones and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, Pete Townsend of the Who, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page of the Yardbirds. But when the media focus was directed towards the Beatles' musicality, it was McCartney's inventive bass playing that was more often than not singled out for attention. In fact, having honed a distinctive Carl Perkins-rockabilly styled approach and having extrapolated (like Jim McGuinn of the Byrds across the Atlantic) the impressive rock possibilities of Rickenbacker guitars, Harrison was very influential.
The term "between a rock band and a hard place" could have been coined to describe Harrison's position in the Beatles. It wasn't just competition with two inordinately talented songwriters that he had to contend with. It was, from a handicap of up to two years in age, competition with two phenomenally effective personalities - the wry, acerbic, cutting, commanding, worldly Lennon and the confident, personable, accomplished, driven, controlling McCartney.
Harrison never had Lennon's capacity to coat his wounds with a hard crust and scare away anything that threatened him with cruel putdowns, nor McCartney's capacity to charm anybody and everything into eventual submission. Quite simply, he felt things, and he was prepared to let those feelings show. Beatles publicist and Harrison's close friend and literary collaborator Derek Taylor explained in Harrison's autobiography I Me Mine: "I have been fettered by his sharp and unpredictable sense of embarrassment at reading something about himself which is, however slightly, wide of the mark, insofar as he understands himself."
I understood that comment a little better when I met Harrison in Sydney. When I had previously encountered Ringo Starr, the conversation inevitably turned to a book I had written, The Beatles Down Under. The eldest Beatle, clutching a bourbon and Coke, had laughed heartily at the instances of insanity (both band and fan) that had been related by accompanying journalists on the 1964 tour. By contrast, the youngest Beatle was frosty about the tales of excess; wounded that they should have been revealed. His own detailing of the Australian visit in I Me Mine had been perfunctory, not entirely accurate, and angry about perceived exploitation of the Beatles by commercial interests.
"Nor was his wealth a source of perfect pleasure," Norman observed in Shout!. "The words he wrote for "Taxman", and the voice in which he sang it, convey bitter personal resentment." Which is not to say that Harrison coudln't display a deft touch at unexpected moments. When, at the first Beatles recording session for EMI, the then imposing producer Martin said, "Listen to this tape playback and tell me if there's anything you don't like," it was Harrison who retorted dryly: "Well, I don't like your tie for a start."
For Harrison, the sitar became a salvation of sorts, a separate interest beyond the ken of his bandmates, which had arison on the Help! film set when he heard Indian musicians burlesquing a song. Just as he had devoted himself to mastering a three quid guitar as a Scouse youngster, he acquired a sitar, befriended Ravi Shankar and spent two months in India studying it under the master. Though he dismissed the sitar part on 1965's "Norwegian Wood" as "an accident", it did open a new musical vista for the Beatles sound, which was monitored, studied and dissected by everyone else in the world making contemporary music.
"Love You To" on Revolver was the first song he wrote for sitar. The pivotal Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album was sonically shaped by the intricate instrument. That year, 1967, Harrison's Eastern orientation had enormous impact on the sound and look of rock music and youth culture. Indeed, his lead was not only taken up outside the band but within. Soon all the Beatles, along with Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful and Donovan, were in the thrall of the Maharishi Yogi, and rock's elite, including the Beach Boys vocalist Mike Love, were trooping off to Indian ashrams for illumination.
It was short-lived infatuation. Lennon soon thought the Maharishi to be a charlatan and pilloried him in the song "Sexy Sadie". Starr didn't like the food and came back to England complaining that it had been like a bad Butlins holiday camp. Harrison, however, had found a new way, an Eastern way, for life. He was also disappointed by the Maharishi but for different reasons. "One problem, he thought," wrote Geoffrey Stokes 20 years ago, "was that the Maharishi's discipline was too easy, and in London, George submitted himself to the more rigorous programs of Krishna Consciousness. Without any deliberate intent he was taking the first step toward breaking up the Beatles."
"Until then, there had been - for each of them - nothing more important than the other three. But when George began following his own path towards enlightenment, he left his mates behind."
With the White Album in 1968, the Beatles left each other behind. After Brian Epstein's death, Beatles business was all about competing egos and individual agendas. At its worst, McCartney would come into the studio at night to re-record Starr's drum tracks; he would tell Harrison how to play his guitar parts. Even though in this climate he came up with the magnificent "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and co-wrote "Badge" for Cream, for the quiet Beatle it was often a case of a weary acquiescence and more mounting frustration. During the filming of Let It be it began to overflow.
When Harrison came back from the US after working with Clapton and Delaney & Bonnie, buoyed with confidence and new songs, he was immediately brought down to earth. "This co-operation [in the US] contrasted dramatically with the superior attitude which, for years, Paul had shown to me musically... I was in a very happy frame of mind, but I quickly discovered that I was up against the same old Paul."
The songs that came from the flowering became the core of All Things Must Pass and allowed Harrison, albeit momentarily, to move past his comrades in profile. With his Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden, which enticed Bob Dylan on stage, he was able to turn his Indian orientation into a global focus on famine and into a template for future rock compassion concerts - Live Aid, Farm Aid and the like.
It was, however, not to be a fortunate solo era. Musically, it must be said Harrison did not have the sure touch of his old comrades. He laboured away in the studio on behalf of Jackie Lomax and Doris Troy. There was a moderate, non-US hit for Billy Preston with "The Way God Planned It", but largely he displayed no real ability to rub his gloss off on to others.
When he established his own Dark Horse label, his duo discovery Splinter had a minor hit with "Costafine Town", but whoever heard of labelmates Attitudes, Stairsteps, Jiva or Keni Burke?
Taken away from the cut and thrust of music by interests in motor racing and gardening, Harrison seemed to have a surer commercial and even creative touch with his Handmade Films screen ventures, sometimes in league with old mates from Monty Python. With this endeavour he also seemed more confident and fulfilled.
Harrison continued to command the affection of a close circle of musicial friends and his most invogorating music came from his superstar association with Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne in the late 1980s with the Travelling Wilburys. Their efforts seemed so much more joyous, casual and unforced than much of his own efforts ("Got My Mind Set On You", "When We Was Fab" and "All Those Years Ago" apart).
"I'm a musician, I don't know why," he once told an interviewer with some emphasis.
He had been asked once at a Beatles press conference in the US what his personal goal was. "To do as well as I can at whatever I attempt. And some day to die with a peaceful mind."
"But you don't really expect that to happen for a long time yet, do you?" the interviewer responded.
Harrison shrugged. "When your number's up, it's up."
"So what do you consider the most important thing in life?" he was asked.
"Love."