Silent George Harrison Should Have Stayed Quiet

 

'Silent' George Harrison Should Have Stayed Quiet

By Jim Smith (who obviously dislikes George!)

The Hamilton Spectator

December 7, 1974

    10 years ago, George Harrison, as one of the Beatles, spent 40 minutes on the stage at  Maple Leaf Gardens while 19,000 kids drowned out all the music with screams. Last night, Harrison was back at the Gardens, the first of the Beatles to return as a solo artist for two virtually sold out performances, and for the most part, those kids of a decade ago had come to listen, which was George's major problem of the evening,

    Harrison spent a lot of time praising the Lord and giving thanks to a higher power.  Better, he should have spent a bit more time praising Billy Preston, for without Preston, the Gardens would have been quiet as a tomb.

     But taking the performers in the order of their billing, we should start with Harrison George. George was always known as the "silent" Beatle—the one who never counted for much with the group. John and Paul wrote, of course, and Ringer [sic] had that eccentric charm, but George never made it to the top of the class. 

    Later, after the group disbanded, he was the first after Lennon's disastrous solo efforts to release his own albums.  But they weren't the kind of product that would have attracted much attention if they hadn't been released by a former Beatle. Basically, the same analysis could be made of Harrison's concerts last evening, as applies to his albums. If Horace Nobody had stood on the Garden stage, hoarse of voice and shy of melodies, and offered what Harrison offered, he had been playing to an empty house.

     In a sense, Harrison's show is a very personal matter. Little of the repertoire is widely familiar, having been composed only in recent years, long after the Beatles lost the sales power they had enjoyed collectively. Moreover, it clearly bears the mark of Indian musical tradition because of the enormous influence Ravi Shankar has exerted on Harrison, and Indian music is considerably less extgroverted [sic] than the rock and roll on which the Beatles base their reputation.

     So immediately, Harrison faced the mammoth problem of presenting a personal show in an impersonal setting. Maple Leaf Gardens is not a place for soft-sell, nor is it a place for a sound system that, like Harrison's, washes out the vocals. You take that into account, Harrison clearly didn't have a chance of walking off the stage a winner.

     However, Harrison's basic problem of style was compounded by his vocal state:  horse.  He was so hoarse, in fact, that he was even having trouble speaking, let alone singing. So all the lyrics were sung in a brusk, Dylan-ish style. Above all, he bent over backwards to devote much of his show to an art form that had no business on the Maple Leaf Gardens stage.

     The art form was the Ravi Shankar orchestra of Indian instruments, 16 in all, under the direction of presumably Mrs. Ravi Shankar. Until yesterday, Shankar himself had been conducting the orchestra on the Harrison tour, but he was waylaid in Chicago with an unspecified ailment and failed to make the Toronto engagement.

     Now, Shankar, like his orchestra, is an impeccable musician in his milieu. The milieu, unfortunately, is an intimate theater with a knowledgeable and appreciative audience. Harrison's audience of young swingers is far from knowledgeable and even farther from appreciative. They paid their $10 a head for a rock and roll concert, and that's what they wanted. 

    Shankar had bowed to the demands of his concert schedule, too. His delicate acoustic music remains acoustic but has been amplified and rearranged to underscore the beat and downplay the melodies. I guess it was inevitable that Indian music, having shaped the form of Western pop music, should find itself being altered by that Western music in return.

    Candidly, I have to admit that I enjoyed some of the bouncy passages. At no time, though, did music and singing from Shankar's ensemble fit the format most ticket holders had expected.  Out of two hours of playing time, Shanker's group was given 45 minutes. That seemed excessive. It also thinned the audience.

     Whatever Harrison's weaknesses are, the inability to pick good sidemen is not one. On guitar, he had Robben Ford, who is young but competent, just the kind of guy to cover up when George got tired of playing lead guitar himself.  On drums, Andy Newmark of Sly and the Family Stone. Tom Scott on a variety of saxes and woodwinds, giving just the right melodic touch to everything and others, not the least of them being Billy Preston.

     Preston doesn't worry much about art forms. He's a natural entertainer out of the gospel training ground. He plays all the keyboards, starting with piano and finishing with an assortment of synthesizers, better than anyone should. He sings with a heartfelt drama. He dances, and he can make even the deadest audience come to life. 

    For the first two hours, Preston stuck to the supporting role with Harrison, filling in marvelous keyboard riffs with ultimate reliability. Then, 10 minutes before the end of the show, Harrison set Preston loose, and Preston responded with a rousing "Nothing From Nothing" before following up with "Out a Space" that had everyone, including Preston, on their feet and dancing. In Preston's case, the dancing took him across the stage and back several times. Before anyone had a chance to sit down and recover from Preston, Harrison slammed into his best-known contemporary piece, "What Is Life," and capitalized on Preston's store of goodwill.

    For this sense of using the Preston created enthusiasm to his own advantage, Harrison deserves the greatest respect as a professional. But at the same time, the ease with which Preston shook the audience from its lethargically and brought it to its feet contrasts vividly with Harrison's own lack of character.

     I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out what Harrison had contributed to the evening. Then I asked a friend what he thought of the show without a moment of hesitation; he replied, "Preston's incredible," and that pretty well sums it up. A pretty fair concert that would have been disastrous with feels Billy Preston to pull George Harrison's fat out of the fire.

 Billy Preston, incidentally, headlined a concert of his own at Toronto's Matching Hall earlier this fall. It drew less than 1/10 the number of people who turned out for Harrison, but Preston, of course, isn't an ex-Beatle.