George Harrison

By Charles Bermant

(Originally Published: 09/17/1987, Toronto Globe and Mail, full transcript unpublished)

How did you pick this time to re-emerge?

I wanted to have a little break away from away it. I still continued writing and putting songs on tape I never really stopped doing that, I never put out a record, I had a chance to get away from it for a bit, then I felt much better about the idea of doing it, and then it was a question of finding someone I could work with. I'm the past. It's handy to have someone to bounce ideas off of, I really miss that part of being in a group, where you can come up with all of your own ideas, and you have other people's ideas and they all mix together and they become even a different idea. Here, the whole burden isn't on just myself. I decided it was time to make a new album, but this time I was going to make it with some other producer.

Are they intimidated by you?

No, I just don't really know that many record producers. So I thought who will be good? Someone I really admire and someone who would respect me and my past and not try to turn me into something I'm not. I thought of Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra, he'd be fun, If I only knew him...

You'd never met?

I'd never met him. He's a very private person, Jeff, he's one person who I don't think has done interviews or television, or anything, he's just very private. Anyway I got a message to him through Dave Edmunds, that I'd like to meet him. And I met Jeff, and over period of 18 months I got to know him and suggested that I'm going to make a record and just sounded him out. And he said he'd help, he never committed himself. So last November I finally said that's it, I'm going to make a record, at least get some musicians over, and so he said OK, and we worked from January, straight through until August.

But you used pretty much the same musicians.

When I think of who I want to play drums on a track I think of Jim Keltner, I know Jim so well, he's such a great drummer, and at the same time Ringo, because Ringo, I don't have to tell him what I want, he'll just listen to the tune and he'll play like Ringo. So same goes for guitar solos, that should be Eric on that one. So there's a lot of my same old friends. The added influence of Jeff helping to produce worked well indeed, has a good structural sense of songs, he's a composer and a guitarist himself, a lot of similarities.

Were you talking to other producers at the same time?

No, I was just trying to think of who if I had my choice of the people I could think of, and he was the one person I came up with.

You haven't been idle, musically. How did you pick these songs?

I had a lot of demos, I played them to Jeff, he picked them out. I asked him to write me a song too. Since I've been not making albums I've done a lot of other people's songs. Just as demos, some old tunes, I do a quick version. I like the idea of singing somebody else's songs.

Such as?

Dylan's 'Every Grain of Sand'. A great song, I did a version of that, a couple of other Dylan songs, writing other crazy songs. He wrote me a song, we wrote a couple together, and the song that they're putting out as a single is one that neither of us wrote, from the very early 1960s called 'I've Got My Mind Set on You'.

Which sounds like nothing you've ever done.

It's true, that came about because Jim Keltner just started playing that drum pattern and the song seemed to fit right on there. Does this bother you?

I'm just surprised you're still smoking.

Well, off and on. You know, something like this, it's, ah, on.

You've recently been a filmmaker, and now you're making your first video. What can we expect?

We haven't made the video, we're not making it until next Wednesday.

What do you have in mind?

We're still just talking about it, it's a bit early for that.

Next week?

That's it. It's silly, isn't it. We'll finalize what's going to happen. It's difficult to make a video that doesn't look like all of the other videos. Occasionally there's a really nice one. Like that Dire Straits or Peter Gabriel. But you can't say ‘oh I'm going to make one like Peter Gabriel' because he's already done that. This video isn't going to be me making a movie. Maybe later when we start doing different singles off of the album then maybe I'll work more along those lines. I've just finished the record, mixing it, all the art work and mastering it and then it's like "make a video... so this video. Gary Weis is making the video. I knew him from The Rutles." Gary has a real good sense of humor, he's done the Saturday Night Live stuff as well. It's how to present it so it's funny but at the same time the song isn't particularly a comedy song. Neither was 'You Can Call Me Al' but they gave it a comical flavor.

So you want to make people laugh.

Well. I'd like it to not look like the same old videos that just keep coming. At the same time, with the limited time span I'm pretty much in the hands of Gary. It's up to him to do it really good.

What makes you laugh?

A lot of things. I've always liked comedy, back when I was a kid I liked The Goon Show, I was a big fan of Peter Sellers, and later on I was a good friend of his. I liked Peter a lot. I loved Monty Python, I couldn't explain how much I liked it. The rut that television gets into, and people lives, Python just blew all that away by making fun of everything. Right down to the style of television we've been watching. The result is that I got to know some of them and we made The Life of Brian and Time Bandits and a couple of films with Michael Palin, so that kind of stuff makes me laugh.

The Rutles is probably the best Beatles movie.

I think so.

The Compleat Beatles was horrible.

The Compleat Beatles is like taking all the footage they can scrounge and then trying to do a serious thing. The great thing about The Rutles is that even though it was a parody it was the nicest thing about the Beatles. It was done with love, even though it was a send-up. And because of Eric Idle being a friend of mine, it gave him access to things that any other potential Beatle filmmaker wouldn't have. I showed him footage that was obscure, like when we first came into NYC, in the back of a limousine and Paul's listening to a radio and a guy is saying "the Beatles are going to be here at the station to read their poetry". And that isn't a famous bit of footage. So in The Rutles you see them, and he's listening to the radio, and the disk jockey‘and the Rutles are coming to talk about their trousers. And also, just the detail, where they got exactly what sort of suits we were wearing on that day, even at Shea Stadium, little marshal's badges, The Rutles even had the psychedelic guitars, it had a good eye for detail. At the same time, it sent up documentaries, the style and those boring questions that they ask.

If I had read every Beatles book and seen every documentary, in a general sense what would I have missed?

Do you want me to tell you something nobody else knows?

No.

A lot of the stuff in the books are wrong. A lot of them are written out of malice, or from people with axes to grind for one reason or another. And they've perverted certain things for their own gain. Not many are actually factual and honest. There is a saying in the old house that I have, it's in Latin, translated it says "those who tell all they have to tell, tells more than they know". So you probably know more about the Beatles, from reading those books, than there actually was.

What would those people who look so closely miss?

Well, there's that expression, you don't see the forest for the trees. Basically the Beatles phenomena was bigger than life. The reality was that we were just four people as much caught up in what was happening at that period of time as anybody else.

Have you listened to the Beatles CDs?

I did buy a CD player when they issued them, yeah. I listened to some of them. I still prefer the old versions, how I remember them on vinyl. There's a lot of stuff that you can hear now that's good. In some cases, there's a lot of stuff that you shouldn't hear so loudly, that's somehow come out in the mix. On Sgt. Pepper I keep hearing this horrible sounding tambourine that leaps out of the right speaker. It was obviously in the original mix, but it was never that loud.

There are still thirty or so songs not on CD. How would you make them available?

Well, it's none of our business anymore, when our contract expired we lost any control we had over the Beatles' product.

How would you like to see it done?

I suppose if you took all the songs you could put them order in sequence of years as they were recorded, then as the technology advanced and our technique progressed, then you'd hear them in proper order. Or, you could put all the singles on one, or the B-sides on another.

Does Michael Jackson own your songs as well?

He owns some of mine, up to the White Album.

How did 'Revolution' end up on a sneaker commercial?

From what I understand, they were just going to use the song, re-record it with Julian Lennon, but Yoko got really pissed off at that idea because I don't think she likes Julian, and she insisted that it be the Beatles version. She has no right to insist that because there's a conflict of interest, it's in the Beatles and Apple's interest not to have our records touted about on TV commercials, otherwise all the songs we made could be advertising everything from hot dogs to ladies' brassieres. We never took advertising. We could have done our Coca-Cola commercials, just like everybody else. We tried to have a little discretion, keep a little taste, that's what we felt. The four of us tried to keep our songs in running orders on the records, we tried to make good records, we tried to do something as quality, and something to be proud of. When it's out of our hands, it's like we're made into prostitutes.

Capitol's new tapes ruin the running order of your old albums.

This is the problem of not having any control anymore, It's unfortunate. We should have been able to retain the control. That's the way it all went.

Derek Taylor said you crave your own space and have a long memory.

Most people need your own space, I still have it, even though occasions like this when I do an album I come out and say hello to people. I couldn't live in a house full of journalist and have them ask me questions all the time, what was the other question?

Memory.

Ah, the memory. Sort of more in the past, a lot of brain cells are missing now. Sometimes you don't want to remember things, sometimes you can't and sometimes they just pop out there.

Is there any unreleased Beatles stuff aside from the Sessions album?

Not that I know of. When we made records, everything we made came out. The only things that didn't come out were things that weren't supposed to be recorded. Like if we were rehearsing and they were just rolling the tape. But people want to scrape the bottom of the barrel for anything.

What's next for you?

It'll be pretty much the same. My film company is jogging along, we have a lot of projects. It's the sort of company that doesn't seem to make a lot of blockbuster movies, they seem to be the sort of films that nobody else wants to make. But it still doesn't mean that they shouldn't be made. The only thing that I would like to accomplish is perfect peace in a spiritual sense to be able to consciously leave my body at will.