George Harrison: Living in the Material World Page #5

'We were doing the summer season,

and I was sick in bed.

'Maybe that's why it turned out

Don't Bother Me.

'Yeah. It's not

a particularly good song,

'but it at least showed

me that, you know,

all I needed to do

was keep on writing

'and maybe some day I'd...

'write something good.

'I still feel, right at this point,

'I still keep thinking, "I wish

I could write something good."'

Since she's been gone

I want no-one to talk to me

It's not the same

but I'm to blame

It's plain to see

So go away, leave me alone,

don't bother me

I can't believe

that she would leave me on my own

It's just not right

when every night I'm all alone

I've got no time for you

right now, don't bother me

I know I'll never be the same

If I don't get her back again

Because I know she'll always be

The only girl for me.

When I saw

George and Pattie together,

the way they fit into The Beatles

thing, all of their domesticity

seemed to be like Camelot,

you know. It was like...

And I was the Lancelot, in a way.

I was kind of this lone wolf

without really any direction.

I saw The Beatles

play at the Hammersmith Odeon

when I was bottom

of the bill in The Yardbirds.

This band was like...

They were like a single person.

It was an odd phenomenon,

in fact, that they

seemed to move together

and think together.

It was almost

like a little family unit.

I was very, very suspicious

about what they were up to.

But when I saw them play, I mean,

I was overwhelmed by their gift.

Each one of them

seemed to be very

well-endowed with their

own musical capacity.

But the sad part was

that no-one listened to them,

and that their audience,

which they had cultivated,

I suppose,

they were 12-year-old girls.

He was clearly an innovator.

George, to me,

was taking certain elements

of R&B and rock and rockabilly

and creating something unique.

They were very

generous to everybody.

They took time to come

and talk to everybody.

I didn't feel threatened

at all, because I had quite a lot

of self-confidence going

in my concept of myself

as being this sort of

blues missionary, as it were.

And I wasn't looking

for any favours from anybody.

And George recognised

me as an equal, because

I had a level of

proficiency even then

that he saw as being

fairly unique too, you know.

George chose to move into

a house in Esher.

And Esher is maybe eight miles north

of where I was born.

And we became friends and

I would go and visit them there.

Something grew out of the music

and the kind of people we were.

I think we shared

a lot of tastes, too.

You know, superficial things -

cars or clothes, but...

And women, obviously.

But I think what George

might have liked about me

was the fact that I was

a kind of free agent.

And I think, if anything,

he may have already been

wondering about whether

he was in the right

place being in a group,

cos the group politic is a tricky

one. You know, there was a lot about

what he had going which I envied,

and there was a lot about

what I had going that he envied.

What did he have going

that you envied?

Well, I suppose, money, status.

You know, the classic things.

The Beatles, man, come on.

In the beginning, in the early days,

what was good about

being George's friend

was that it was kind of

like basking in the sunshine

of this immense creativity.

We'd like to carry on with a song

which is off our last LP.

The LP's called Rubber Soul,

and the song,

which is sung by

our guitarist George,

is called If I Needed Someone.

If I needed someone to love

You're the one

that I'd be thinking of

If I needed someone

If I had some more time to spend

I guess I'd be with

you, my friend

If I needed someone.

This is largely an appeal

to the feminine heart,

the heart of the young girl

who worships love

and the goddess of love

and the heroes of love.

And this plays

the dominant part in her life.

So the vast majority

of the fans are girls,

who come there to worship

at the shrine of the goddess

or the young god hero,

as they did in the ancient past.

I've seen this with

the most dramatic intensity

with The Beatles playing to 2,000

or 3,000 young girls in Manchester.

Apart from another journalist,

I was the only male in the audience.

And I've never experienced

anything like it myself.

If I were confronted

with 10,000 Loch Ness monsters,

I wouldn't be so impressed

by this whistling and wailing

and possession of the soul

of these young girls.

Would you say it's true that

the devotion your group attracts

is essentially religious in nature?

No.

In what way is it not? Well,

in what ways do you think it is?

The fervour, the excitement

that it inspires in young people.

Would you say football crowds

are any more religious,

or football fanatics have

any more religion in

them than Beatle fanatics?

I don't think so.

One value divides the generations

more sharply than any other...

religion. The gap is greatest

between college students

and their parents.

The question was whether belonging

to some organised religion

is important in a person's life.

Nine out of ten parents say it is.

Only four out of ten college

students say religion is important.

And the more radical

the youth, politically,

the more likely he is to reject the

religious values of adult society.

Still, the gap is there,

whatever the politics.

Well, some of the remarks

attributed to you

in some of the newspapers,

the press here,

concerning the remark you

made comparing the relative

popularity of The Beatles

with Jesus Christ,

and that The Beatles

were more popular -

created quite a controversy

and furore here.

Would you clarify the remark?

Well, I've clarified it

about 800 times.

I could have said TV,

or something else, you know.

And that's as clear as it can be.

There were other evidences that that

ol' time religion was under attack.

Evangelist Billy Graham

went to London,

hoping he could stop England

from swinging.

In the process, he was almost

engulfed by sin on a Soho street.

And I think a great deal of what

we see among young people today

is actually a spiritual search.

These young

people are searching for

a creed to believe in,

a song to sing

and a cause to follow.

Carve your number on my wall

And maybe you will

get a call from me

If I needed someone

Ah

Ah

Ah

Ah.

Before we sort of made it,

as they say,

money was part of the

goal, but it still

wasn't a sort of,

"Let's get some money."

But we sort of got...

We suddenly had

money, and then it

wasn't all that good.

By having the money, we found

that money wasn't the answer,

because we had lots

of material things

that people sort of spend

their whole life to try to get.

And we managed to get them

at quite an early age.

And it was good, really, because

we learned that that wasn't it.

We still lacked something. And that

something is the thing that religion

is trying to give to people.

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