Ex Beatle George was Delayed, but the Wait was Worth It

Ex-Beatle George was Delayed, but the Wait was Worth It

By Christine Brown

Detroit Free Press

December 5, 1974

    George Harrison was often called the silent Beatle, the man who stood off to one side and simply played dazzling guitar while John Lennon and Paul McCartney belted out their stuff, and Ringo Starr was cute on the drums.

    Now Harrison, like the other ex-Beatles, is quiet, no more.

    Stopping in Detroit on Wednesday in the middle of a 27-city tour, his first since a 1966 Beatles trip, Harrison and company kept 10,000 plus people fidgeting as they waited for his 5:30pm concert to begin, not knowing that they had not even left Chicago yet.  Tour people blamed mechanical problems for his arrival one and a half hours late.

    Harrison and his top-notch musicians ambled onto the stage shortly after 7pm to play a two-hour set that included everything from Billy Preston's "Nothing From Nothing" to some of Harrison's old Beatles tunes.

     The crowd forgot about the wait and was entranced by a skinny, blue-jean-clad man who represented a little piece of their history, if only because he helped dictate their hairstyle. 

    The Harrison concerts are an international musical smorgasbord featuring a mixture of Indian and jazz influences, a bit of the old Liverpool sound, and the Jazz—pop—rock of Preston and Tom Scott, who got the people to boogie even better than Harrison did. 

    Ravi Shankar, who brought Indian music and Krishna into Harrison's life, became ill Wednesday in Chicago, the tour spokesman said, but was expected to rejoin the tour in Montreal or Boston next week.     Shankar's 16 musicians, along with Harrison and his band, performed several well-received numbers, Jazzy things that seem to please even those who don't like their sitar straight.

     Harrison did two shows at Olympia stadium, and the late start, which pushed the second show start from 10 to 11:30pm, caused chaos on the snowy streets around the stadium as the first audience left around 10 o'clock and many who had tickets for the second show tried to scramble to what they thought was a 10pm concert. 

    Harrison said before this tour that if he flopped, he'd go back to London and hide out for several years. Although Detroiters didn't award him the constant maniacal screams that greeted the Beatles way back in '66. Their clamor for an encore after encore indicated they liked him solo in the Motor City.