George Harrison: Weak and Feeble at Start of Tour

 

George Harrison Weak and Feeble at the Start of Tour

By Jeani Read

November 4, 1974

The Province (Vancouver, British Columbia)

    It was George Harrison's concert, his first North American appearance since a concert for Bangladesh in 1971 and the debut of a seven week tour. 

    And for a long time, all I could think about was Dylan. Bob Dylan. A few months ago, making his first tour in what seemed like forever, singing all his songs wrong for the people who wanted to hear them the way they were used to hearing them.  Harrison sang most of his songs wrong, too, except the painful difference, and it was painful, was that Dylan was in complete control of what he was doing. It was an extraordinary experience in image, breaking a personal integrity, if you will. And George, well, George didn't seem as if he knew what he was doing at all. 

    The double image kept reoccurring, reinforcing at first by the fact that when Harrison stepped up to the mic to sing, His voice sounded curiously broken and Dylanesque. Except Dylan has always sounded like that, and now he was pushing it, fighting and almost venomous, powerful and acidic, and George was weak and feeble.

     Dylan, authoritative and uncompromising. Harrison, bobbing and smiling hopefully through gaunt cheeks. I'm back. Do you like me? Please? 

    Dylan surrounds himself with strong musicians, splitting the show with him and still incontestably dominant. Harrison does the same, but he is unable to dominate anything that happens and too often embarrassingly upstaged.

     On Saturday, the evening started, hopefully enough, with George and the band delivering an almost southern Allman-style instrumental while his Dark Horse record label logo unfurled on a huge screen above the stage. Two Indian characters representing universality lit up the side curtains, anticipating the imminent arrival of Harrison's spiritual and showbiz companion, Ravi Shankar.

     The previously silent, perhaps reverent, crowd packed into the Coliseum broke into a rewarding, sparkle, lit ovation, but the following three hours did little to inspire a similar response, rendering the audience, with rare exceptions, to a state of long suffering.  

    The band, three horns, drums, guitar, precussion, bass and Billy Preston on keyboards has impeachable track records. It featured such people as Tom Scott on sax and woodwinds, Andy Newmark on drums, Willie Weeks on bass, and Robben Ford on guitar. Their credits reach from Jimmy Dorsey and Buddy Rich to Sly Stone and Scott's own L.A. Express.

     But the sound was poorly balanced and erratic, and the band, through the first four selections that included a number from Harrison's own Material World album and his Beatles legendary "Something" never galvanized into a satisfactory working unit.  It was not until at least Billy Preston took over with a strutting version of "Will It Go Round in Circles."  Here, the saxes, trumpets, and rhythm section felt considerably more at home. At last, something to hang some meaty horn lines onto, something to lean and dig into, which they did, and that's pretty well how it went. 

    George kept on singing his sweet, mild tunes off key, pathetically struggling through his edgy range, offering some nicer guitar licks, but rarely any head turning great ones.  And Preston, who was out front and centered only twice more "Outta Space" and Nothing from Nothing", didn't even have to try to steal anything from the star. Just a couple of tightly punctuated organ hits, a shot or two, and it was stolen.

     Even Georgia's best shots, "Sue Me, Sue You,"" While My Guitar Gently Weeps","Give Me Love" were received with nothing like the kind of enthusiasm that Preston's efforts earned. You couldn't even get away with calling it good pacing. And then there were, of course, Ravi Shankar and his dozen plus family who occupied 45 minutes in the middle of the show in what was not so much a cultural exchange as a cultural gap, very nice innovations, and shortcut ragas, compositions based on various Indian folk tunes, an orchestra of instruments and voices hypnotic, changing textures, flexible, impossible rhythms. 

    Shankar first conducting and then playing the audience polite and surprisingly receptive, but the twain never managed to meet, except perhaps in a later moment, when, with both contingents on stage at the same time, they delivered an intriguing mix called "Dispute and Violence". Otherwise, George said,"as jazz."

    So after a night of musical raggedness, concerted physical leaps, and get it on soul training. Anti rock star Harrison closed with "My sweet Lord.", It is refreshing to find in a performance press biography, (although unfortunately fraught with suspicions of plastic virtue), that his personal ambitions now are to have no personal ambitions and that his professional ones are to do a worthwhile job and to leave it vaguely completed. But if you stick to that, you end up with a concert tap that feels even less than vaguely complete, And it is anything to pay $10 for.