A friend wrote the following on Facebook recently: "It is important to understand that we are all playing in one place ... where each role is very important. And if you change a single role, the entire performance will need to be changed."
That passage has a great deal of meaning to me for a variety of reasons. It is, of course, important in any group endeavor that people understand that they often belong to something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
It's also true in relationships. If the dynamics of a relationship change too radically -- one way or the other -- it can often require a lot of work to absorb those changes without causing, as Obi Wan Kanobi might say, major disturbances in The Force.
So what does any of this have to do with music? I'll tell you. Today, George Harrison, had cancer not claimed him, would have been 69 years old. George was always the most intriguing of the four Beatles to me. He wasn't the face (that was Paul), or the brains (John), or the spirit (Ringo) maybe, but he was -- I think -- the soul of the group. And more important (to me, at least), he, of the four, was the most visible barometer of the band's journey through its different phases, and the ultimate changes in the group dynamics that led to its dissolution.
I saw that passage on Facebook and I didn't immediately think of George Harrison. I thought of the many friendships I've been in, and how easily things have changed in them when the dynamic got thrown off kilter by even the smallest of wrinkles. And it made me realize that in the end, whether we want to be or not, we are often what people perceive us to be. And when that perception changes, so, often, do the dynamic of the relationship.
Some friendships survive these changes ... others don't. And it's often up to the people involved to determine whether these friendships are important enough to evolve, or whether they're merely transitory events (sort like the reason/season/lifetime gauge).
There's a lot of different ways to go on dissecting "The Quiet Beatle." But what comes to mind today is how he grew both as a person and a songwriter, during the comparatively brief period the Beatles were together, and how that growth mirrored the changes that brought about the end of the group.
To understand this, you must know about the group's early days, where George was basically John Lennon and Paul McCartney's de facto little brother. That was his role. He was the tag-along, invited by Paul to audition for John. Legend has it he played one of the popular guitar instrumentals of the day (Raunchy) and that Lennon, suitably impressed, let him in.
He was in, but he was by no means an equal partner. He was sort of like the junior executive who got locked out of all the important meetings. And there was, at the time, nothing all that remarkable about him, other than that he could play guitar. Most people in the late fifties and early sixties just remember him as this nice, quiet kid whose parents tolerated rock 'n' roll, and who let John, Paul and whomever else practice at their house.
But that was the dynamic. Even after George started writing his own songs (he said he wrote "Don't Bother Me" because he was convinced that if John could write one, he could too) he was never to be confused with the real creative element of the band.
But something changed all that. And it began with George.
The point here is to keep with the first paragraph. Nobody (least of all me) is suggesting that George's forays into eastern mysticism or his increased yearning to be seen as an equal, as opposed to an adjunct, are necessarily bad. In the beginning, these yearnings gave the Beatles another dimension and truly set them apart from whatever else was happening at the time.
But, as the saying goes, the song remains the same. As the sixties progressed, it became impossible -- for this fan, anyway -- to view George Harrison as the guy in the middle. He quickly emerged as an individual, and perhaps that's because he was so far behind the other three in that regard through the early years.
Don't forget. When the Beatles came to America and performed on Ed Sullivan for the first time, George Harrison was two weeks short of his 21st birthday. Lennon was 23 and McCartney was 21. They had all this power, and all this fame, and they were kids.
Regardless of what or who they were behind closed doors, the Beatles quickly established public images that put Harrison squarely in the background. If you've ever watched a football game, you'll notice the backup quarterback stands on the sidelines in a baseball cap. That was George Harrison -- at least in the beginning.
He'd get a brief guitar solo in the middle of a song, he got to sing one per album, and if he was really good, Lennon and McCartney would let him record one of his own.
The problem was that as Harrison progressed through his 20s, and the Beatles careened through the sixties, George grew up. In the dynamic of the group, that probably wasn't supposed to happen. There wasn't enough room for three equals. In retrospect, it was probably a good thing Ringo was such an easy-going, simple, uncomplicated person or maybe the Beatles might have crashed and burned even sooner.
So there was George, as early as, perhaps, 1966 (Listen to "Think For Yourself" off Rubber Soul ... it's a fairly significant song), already growing beyond the parameters of the very narrow dynamic. He found the sitar, and Indian music, while the group filmed "Help" in 1965. You can see that from almost the very beginning, George was the Beatle least satisfied with the status quo.
And really, who would be satisfied at being cast as the tag-along all his life?
Nobody's suggesting that George Harrison single-handedly broke up the Beatles. Yoko Ono is generally given credit for that. And why? Because she also altered a very basic dynamic that held the group -- as tenuous as that hold was by 1968 -- together.
In fact, Yoko's alleged role in bringing the group down is so ingrained in our consciousness by now that whenever a strong female figure enters a famous man's life, she's referred to as a "Yoko Ono."
Mia Hamm, when she married Nomar Garciaparra of the Red Sox, was referred to by my sister as "Yoko Hamm." And these days, Giselle Bundchen gets the nod for the way she supposedly has neutered Tom Brady (though I don't see this one personally; Brady's doing just fine as far as I can see).
But the seeds that broke up the Beatles were planted well before John Lennon met Yoko Ono. She may have helped move the process along, but it was well under way.
As he got more prolific with his songwriting, George chafed being held back by the other two. If you watched the two-part HBO documentary on him, you'll know that he asked Eric Clapton to play on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" because he was upset that the other Beatles were treating the song too cavalierly.
George Harrison didn't break up the Beatles. But he began the long process of altering the experiment, as it were, and he did that simply by suggesting that he be treated as an equal within the group. Not a lot to ask.
It's been 10 years since he died. And while Paul McCartney has been knighted, and John Lennon has been practically canonized for being the spokesman of a generation (and I don't say that critically) I believe George Harrison emerged from the Beatles with a truer sense of himself than any of the other three. His wasn't a stress-free life by any means, and he could be, at times, quite the contrarian. But it seems, from hearing and reading about his post-Beatles days, that he stayed connected with his world, and the world around him, better than the others did.
Perhaps George said it best in the best song I think he's ever written, "All Things Must Pass."
"All things must pass/None of life's strings can last/So, I must be on my way/And face another day."
I always thought that at least part of that song was about the Beatles, and how they were wonderful for as long as they lasted ... but that they were also never meant to last forever.
And as an aside, that song was rejected by the group for the "Get Back" sessions that later became the "Let It Be" soundtrack album.
Now, some fans might object to this thesis, and it is -- of course -- their right to do that. But I think George Harrison was right. The Beatles came along at precisely the right time in U.S. history -- three months after the Kennedy assassination, when the country desperately needed something to smile about.
"Daylight is good at arriving at the right time/Its not always going to be this grey."
But they weren't the Rolling Stones nor were they U2. They were a supernova, with a unique and very, very fragile dynamic that was bound to change once the four members grew out of post-adolescence and started becoming men. It's just that the first one of the four to really do that was George Harrison, and, in so doing, made it possible for the rest of them -- particularly John Lennon -- to follow suit.
And that's why I think he was the soul of the group. He may have started the journey as the tag-along. But in many ways, he ended up being the leader in their emergence as mature men.
As I said, he was always the most intriguing of the four.
"It is important to understand that we are all playing in one place ... where each role is very important. And if you change a single role, the entire performance will need to be changed."
George was the first one to change his role. For a long time afterward, the Beatles continually tried to change the performance until, finally, the performance was permanently canceled.
As a fan, I miss what he could have contributed to this world had cancer not claimed him 10 years ago.
So, wherever you are, George, happy birthday.
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