Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison
Seth Rogovoy
Oxford university press, August 2024, $25
Although saddled with the reductive label “the Quiet Beatle,” George Harrison was anything but retiring. As musician and journalist Seth Rogovoy’s excellent Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison makes abundantly clear, Harrison’s artistry—as a Beatle, but even more so as an ex-Beatle—provided the world with much joyful noise. Decades later, his work still reverberates—in the air, on streaming services, and in collective memory. With engaging, conversational prose, Rogovoy reveals not only the stories behind iconic Harrison songs—”Taxman,” “Something,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “My Sweet Lord,” et al.—but also fascinating details of Harrison’s less-known, seminal post-Beatles production work.
It was Harrison who mounted the first-ever multi-artist benefit extravaganza, 1971’s Concert for Bangladesh, which featured his pals Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Ravi Shankar, and Leon Russell. This unprecedented event—two sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden, plus a hit soundtrack album and acclaimed documentary film—set the template for all such charity concerts to follow, from Live Aid to Farm Aid to the Concert for New York City. Prior to the Concert for Bangladesh, few if any rock stars thought to use their fame to do “good work” on such a scale.
In the `80s, Harrison’s production company HandMade Films essentially saved the struggling British film industry, financing hits like Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Time Bandits, Withnail & I, and Mona Lisa. And before “world music” had a name, Harrison was introducing Western audiences to the music—and by extension, the spirituality—of India, including modern-day mainstays like meditation and yoga. Rogovoy, a Hudson resident and Chronogram contributor, deftly squires us through all this varied terrain, from recording studios to stages to ashrams to film sets, and, inevitably, courtrooms, enlivening the characters with whom Harrison collaborated to realize his ever-unfolding, multifaceted artistic vision.
It all starts, of course, with the Big Bang that was the Beatles: 16-year-old phenom Paul introducing 14-year-old guitar whiz George to 17-year-old mischief maker John in 1958. (Ringo would join in ’62, just before liftoff.) Rogovoy excels at fleshing out these three distinct young Liverpudlians, all from humble beginnings, and bound by a shared, maniacal love of rock ‘n’ roll. No original songs yet, but lots of personality. Rogovoy reveals that, upon joining Lennon’s band, Harrison was tasked with teaching the punky front man how to properly tune his guitar.
Indeed, Harrison would be treated very much like the “little brother” Beatle, his songs routinely rejected in favor of Lennon/McCartney tunes, which Harrison’s stellar guitar work—the sonic glue in the Beatles’ sound—helped turn into hits. Harrison was rarely allowed more than a tune or two on Beatles albums, yet Rogovoy reveals how, all through the Fab Four’s reign, the frustrated guitarist’s creative engine churned clandestinely, his faith in his own songs undimmed. When at last his classic 1970 solo debut, All Things Must Pass, hit shelves, it became the first number one album by a former Beatle. Such was Harrison’s backlog of songs, his coming-out masterpiece would be a triple album, and would spawn two evergreen singles: “My Sweet Lord” and “What Is Life.”
More so than any of his bandmates, Harrison was outspokenly ambivalent about the Beatlemania madness. While some might see this as a kind of ingratitude, Rogovoy chillingly posits that such wariness was perhaps prescience, as both Harrison and Lennon would be attacked by crazed fans, Lennon fatally. While Harrison survived multiple stab wounds from an assailant in 1999, he never fully recovered, his weakened body succumbing to metastatic cancer in 2001.
During the 58 years George Harrison lived in what he called “the material world,” he cut a singular, winding path, and Rogovoy has expertly researched much of it, pulling quite a compelling tale from the shadows. The further he takes us from the drama of the Beatle years, the more George Harrison comes into focus as a visionary artist in his own right: a man who loved to pen a catchy song on which he could play slide guitar, but who also took great pleasure in sharing the light he’d found within himself and others. For those who want some reprieve from the darkness, Seth Rogovoy’s Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison brims with that light.
This article appears in November 2024.
