For me George’s most interesting music came in the late 80s when Jeff Lynne from ELO produced his platinum-selling album Cloud Nine. Equally good was their collaboration on the first Travelling Wilburys album with Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and the late Roy Orbison – a fine swansong for the Big O and still a landmark record.
Watching Scorsese’s film, Harrison was obviously a complex and private man. A huge charitable donor who loathed paying taxes, a peace-loving mystic who wasn’t above punching police and reporters.
If I Needed Someone and My Sweet Lord are all very well, but this is the song that still does it for me every time: the Quiet Beatle still at the height of his powers looking back to a “long time ago when we was fab”. It’s deft, funny, yearning and elegaic – with a lightness of touch that never takes itself too seriously.
From the splendid How To Be A Retronaut blog - slogan: “Ever get the feeling you’re living in the wrong time?”. This vintage Twitter snapshot comes from the post If There Had Always Been An Internet by Jesse Eisemann which also includes re-imaginings of Gmail, Facebook and a pirate torrent.
What made you decide to go the rock’n’roll route ?
Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I start drinking. The first thing I know, I’m in a card game. Then I’m in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13 year old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas “Before And After” ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chilli and hot dogs. Then this 13 year old girl from Phoenix comes in and burns the house down. The delivery boy – he ain’t so mild. He gives her the knife and the next thing I know is I’m in Omaha. It’s so cold there, by this time I’m robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburettor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at, but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that turns newspaper into lettuce. Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say ?
And that’s how you became a rock’n’roll singer ?
No, no – that’s how I got tuberculosis.
Happy 70th birthday Bob Dylan…
From an interview with Playboy magazine, quoted in the 1978 paperback Bob Dylan In His Own Words, ISBN-10: 0860015424 – still one of my most treasured possessions. Well that said, it currently sells for £0.01 secondhand on Amazon UK. Delivery costs £2.80 – what did you expect – but it’s still a bargain.
