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long-after-love · 3 years ago

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ON GEORGE – The youngest Beatle

(Originally written my Vietnamese for the local community, but I modified it a bit to post it here, since I love this essay so much... sorry for the self-indulgence)

First and foremost, I love the Beatles for their music. But there are also many other groups that I like because of their music, yet none ever had a permanent place in my heart like The Beatles does. I suppose I'm not really a music lover at heart, I don't care much about tastes, accolades, criticisms, records, and I'm not the type of person trying to express my personality through my taste in films, books or bands. If my love for Beatles could be divided into ten parts, three would be for the music, and seven would be for their history and anecdotes.

Ages ago, well, perhaps months ago, I received an anon ask about George that I couldn’t even recall at the moment. Must be something about George being unintellectual and a bit unaware of things. But I don’t think I was being overly critical of George – this is a John and Paul blog, but George was my first crush and when you think about your first crush, how you grew out of it and slowly learned how to fall in love again – you feel a bit embarrassing, but it is still something you hold dear, you just put it in a realistic light.

Now I think of George as the youngest, the cutes Beatle, though normally the moniker Cute Beatle belongs to Paul, I guess people were overly impressed with his doe eyes and rat bunny teeth. I couldn’t disagree with George’s _“Quiet One” _image more, George is anything but a supposedly spiritual, enlightened person. Recently, with the celebration of All Things Must Pass’s 50th anniversary, people have even more reasons to buy that image. But is that really the case?

My perception of George started to change when I came across an interview with John and Yoko in 1971 with Peter McCabe. I think most of you are familiar with this:

MCCABE: Let’s talk a bit about George. He’s perhaps the most enigmatic Beatle. Are you saying George is more conventional than he makes himself out to be?

JOHN: There’s no telling George. He always has a point of view about that wide, you know. [John places his hands a few inches apart.] You can’t tell him anything.

YOKO: George is sophisticated, fashionwise…

JOHN: He’s very trendy, and he has the right clothes, and all of that…

YOKO: But he’s not sophisticated, intellectually.

JOHN: No. He’s very narrow-minded and he doesn’t really have a broader view. Paul is far more aware than George. One time in the Apple office in Wigmore Street, I said something to George, and he said, “I’m as intelligent as you, you know.” This must have been resentment, but he could have left anytime if I was giving him a hard time.

MCCABE: What did you say?

JOHN: I didn’t answer. Of course, he’s got an inferiority complex working with Paul and me.

YOKO: In the case of Paul, it’s not that he’s not sophisticated. I’m sure that he’s intellectually sophisticated as well. It’s just that he’s aware, and yet he doesn’t want to know.

JOHN: Whereas George doesn’t really know what’s happening, you know.

— John Lennon and Yoko Ono, interview w/ Peter McCabe & Robert Schonfeld. (September, 1971)

For those who firmly believed in George's “Quiet One” image (where quietness is meant to show enlightened reticence), the above interview can make their blood boil, but in fact, if you read the Beatles biographies carefully, you have to realize that John and Yoko’s observance, albeit being absurdly blunt and mean-spirited, was true. George was a spiritual person from his late twenties to his death, but he was never enlightened type, the sage-like type. I always appreciate the innocent part of his nature more, even though he, at times, acted unseemly. There are many funny and endearing anecdotes surrounding George that prove it, told by family and close friends of the Beatles since the band was unknown. Here I only pointed out three of them.

The first story is the look on George's face. On the stage, George stood silently a bit behind John and Paul, rarely smiled. Since the Cavern days, girls had asked Louise Harrison, George's mother, why George wouldn't laugh. What Mrs. Louise revealed turned out to be nothing complicated: George was afraid of making mistakes (Davies, 2009). When people are concentrating, their facial expressions will naturally become serious. And thus, just as naturally, the unknowing seriousness gave George some mysterious air that subtly differed him from the fierce John and the bouncy Paul.

Second, I would like to quote from John and Cyn, as seen on some earlier post:

“When George was a kid, he used to follow me and my first girlfriend Cynthia. We would come out of the art school together and he’d be hovering around.Cyn and I would be going to a coffee shop or a movie and George would follow us down the street two hundred yards behind. Cyn would say, ‘Who is that guy? What does he want?’ And I’d say, 'He just wants to hang out. Should we take him with us?’ She’d say, 'Oh, OK, let’s take him to the bloody movies.’ So we’d allow him to come to the movies with us. That’s the sort of relationship it was.”

- John Lennon

“Hi John, Hi Cyn.’ He would hurriedly catch us up and then it would be, 'Where are you two off to? Can I come?’ Neither of us would have the heart to tell this thin gangly kid in school uniform to push off. Poor George! He hand’t really got to the stage of serious girlfriends yet and was totally unaware of what it was all about, Alfie! So we would spend the lost afternoon as a jolly threesome, wondering what on earth we were going to do with ourselves.”

- Cynthia Powell

In addition, Cynthia also told this story in her book, John (2005):

“It was appendicitis and I was stuck in hospital for two weeks. After a couple of days John came to visit me, dragging George with him. I had been so desperate to see him, and was so frustrated when I saw George, that I burst into tears. Shocked, John told George to hop it and held my hand for an hour to mollify me. After a while my mum arrived, and later took John and George back to our house for tea.”

Please note this little detail: John went to the hospital to see his sick girlfriend, but apparently George insisted to tag along. When John saw Cyn crying, he asked George to leave, George seemed to hang outside, waiting for John to finish his visit. This is very telling: how desperate George wanted to hang out with John then! With the part where Cynthia's mother invited both John and George home for tea, Mrs. Powell probably had been familiar with this little boy who followed John and Cyn all the time.

I would like to give another example with Astrid Kirchherr’s memory of George. It was 1960 – Astrid and Stuart Sutcliffe were in love, but this still didn't stop the naive little George just seventeen years old then, and Astrid was certainly moved by his sweetness, quoted from The Beatles (2009) by Hunter Davies:

“I got on like a house on fire with George. He'd never met anyone like me before and he showed it, so openly and sweetly. After all, he was only 17. There was me, the sort of intelligent girl he'd never come across before, with my own car, working as a photographer, and wearing leather jackets. It was natural he would be very interested in me. I never fancied him or anything like that. It wasn't that sort of thing. I was five years older, so it didn't matter being open. We got on great.”

You may argue: but it was just baby George! Oh, I couldn’t agree with that, my good friend. I think George’s attitude was always like that – he was the youngest child of his parents and the youngest boy of Beatles – he was immature, not very worldly and made questionable choices, especially in his effort to butter up John by recording HDYS: it wasn’t fruitful as it was self-defeating: John, all in all, just saw him as the kid that tagged along.

After the Beatles’ break up, George always seemed most annoyed with the Beatles, most frustrated about the past. But it seems that George only overreacted because he was tired and powerless against the morbid curiosity of the press and fans for decades. I think if George hated the Beatles or hated Paul as he made himself to be, then George would not have held Paul’s hand reminiscing about the past, nor chosen to die at Paul's house (I know Paul lent him the house, but George wasn’t too broke to rent a house near the treatment facility). Thus, with such an attitude, I couldn’t take him seriously as a spiritual person, but hell, wasn’t he a lovely man with all the flaws?

#george harrison #the beatles #john lennon #my take.txt

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