On 29 November 2001, 20 years ago, George Harrison, the third of the Beatles, the legendary guitarist of the band, died in Los Angeles. Brilliant son of proletarian Liverpool, he was born on 25 February 1943 in 12 Arnold Grove, Wavertree, in a typical red brick row house of the English worker class, where his father bus driver, mother grocery shop assistant and four children lived crammed in two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room too cold to be used half the year. A few square meters and even less heating with nights torn apart by German bombing on the port of Liverpool. From a Catholic family, Georgius was baptized in the nearby Our Lady of Good Help church in Chestnut Grove. In 1950 the large family was given a larger Liverpool Corporation Housing house at 29 Upton Street in the same neighborhood.
George Harrison a Rishikesh
He began his studies at Dovedale Road Primary School, where John Lennon was also enrolled, in class with Peter Harrison, George’s older brother. Later he enrolled at the Liverpool Institute where Paul McCartney was already studying. His father encouraged the young man’s passion for music and, despite the financial straits, bought him from a sailor in the port a used electric guitar, a Gretsch Duo Jet that George will keep until his death and will exhibit in 1987 on the cover of Cloud Nine, the 11th solo album recorded after the dissolution of the Beatles. He practices on this guitar until he becomes a phenomenon. And Paul McCartney notices him while he makes arrangements on a ramshackle bus that takes them on a school trip: Paul talks about it to John Lennon, it is the beginning of their partnership, the Beatles are born, the rest is legend. John and Paul lead the band, but George’s electric guitar creates new sonic expressions and rock phrases that contribute to the evolution of the Beatles in the early years of their history.
Rishikesh, Maharishi Ashram, graffiti (foto Marco Moretti)
In 1965 George is one of the most popular guitarists of the time, a point of reference in the world of rock & roll, the same year he meets David Crosby, the Californian musician and songwriter founder of the American rock band The Byrds and later of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Crosby introduces George Harrison to Indian music and to Ravi Shankar, the most famous sitar musician. In 1966 George meets Ravi Shankar in London, in September he leaves with his wife Pattie for India. Visit the Taj Mahal in Agra where Ravi Shankar gives him sitar lessons and introduces him to yoga. Kashmir where he sleeps in the houseboats of Srinagar “in the middle of the Himalayas” and smokes hashish. Finally Varanasi, the sacred city on the Ganges, during the Hindu festival of Ramila: here he meets the sadhus (itinerant ascetics) and – as he writes in his Anthology – he realizes how the scale of values, the answers to needs and the concepts of freedom and happiness are here diametrically opposed to those of Western societies. Allen Ginsberg’s Indian Diary Law. We are in the middle of the hippy period. Six weeks in India is a point of no return. George begins to play the sitar, the sarod (Indian lute) and the tampoura (a sort of seven-stringed Indian mandolin): he is fascinated by their unusual sounds, but above all he is kidnapped by Indian culture and spirituality, the study of Sanskrit and Hindu sacred texts become as important to him as music.
His mystical turn contaminates the Beatles who in February 1968 left together for India and reached Rishikesh, the sacred city where the Ganges emerges from the mountains forming the immense plain of the same name. In search of spiritual masters, the Fab Four spend a few weeks in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s transcendental meditation ashram. As illustrated by a documentary by the young Furio Colombo that can be seen on Rai Play. After the famous guru escapes to the United States to avoid arrest for tax evasion, the immense ashram is in ruins. Rishikesh has lost the mystical aura, every year in March it hosts the International Yoga Festival, an event that mixes Hindu nationalism (Prime Minister Modi has elevated this ancient discipline to a symbol of Indian identity) with the demand for new age tourism, of which Rishikesh has become a world capital. The government would like to restore the ashram to turn it into a yogi college. You can visit it to see a series of graffiti, many of which are dedicated to the Beatles.
For John, Paul and Ringo it was just an experience, but George’s life changed. Yoga and meditation became a daily ritual. And moved to the countryside, after the band disbanded in 1970, he bought Friar Park, a neo-Gothic Victorian mansion on a 25-hectare estate in Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire. Here in 1999 he was miraculously saved from an attempted murder by a madman who stabbed him ten times. But nothing could be done two years later against a tumor that killed him at the age of 58 while he was a guest in Ringo Starr’s mansion in Beverly Hills (Los Angeles). By his will, the body was cremated and the ashes, collected in a cardboard box, were brought to India and scattered in the sacred Ganges according to the Hindu tradition.
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