Heart to Heart
By Alan Freeman
Rave Monthly
June 1964
George Harrison -- in MY flat, sitting on MY settee, drinking MY coffee! Pop-pickers, how many of you wouldn't have given a right arm to have been in my position? Sure, I've met the Beatles plenty of times, often when we've been all working, perhaps at a party at their houses or mine, but never have I had the chance to sit down without any rush and just talk heart to heart.
George didn't just arrive. He breezed in, not exactly on time, of course. They're leading such a hectic life just now that would have been like expecting a top hit from Victor Sylvester!
But from the moment he dropped his black corduroy coat casually on the floor and started thumbing out a two-fingered version of "chopsticks" on my baby grand, we were laughing two beats to the bar.
But that was one of the snags, because this, I reckon, was a rare chance to talk to George. He's been labeled the most serious of The Beatles. Well, if that's true, the others must be the zaniest characters ever. He just doesn't believe in being serious for long, about a couple of minutes in every hour, if you care, to check it with the stopwatch.
But I tried. I mentioned one of the last times I had been with the boys an evening, which, on the face of it, had been hilarious, yet in truth pinpointed the trouble of being a Beatle. "That's the sort of thing which annoys us," George suddenly burst out as he recalls it. "People treat us sometimes as if we're just things and not human beings."
This feeling that people sometimes treat them as objects nags. They try not to face it, but at times, as has happened just now, they have to blurt out their real feelings. Of course, they've worked hard to be world famous. They like being liked, but what they can never be sure of now is how genuine people are being to them. Is it because they are really liked, or is it because they happen to be Beatles? They can never get away from it, as the recent fiasco at their attempted holiday proved to their cost; they are discovering that the world is too small for them.
But George had been serious long enough; the suspicions that had triggered off the outbursts were pushed into the background. His face cracked into a grin that evening. "You mentioned Alan, a scream, wasn't it? We were all in an Austin Princess when the fans spotted us, and the chauffeur made a dash for it."
"Yes", I said. "And the door Paul McCartney was leaning against flew open as we rolled around a corner. "
Friends, you should have seen it! It was a scene that would have made the Keystone Cops look like Dr Kildare weepie. The swinging door hit a parked car and flew clean off with the fans closing in for the kill. We had to shoot off like lightning, leaving the door and Klaus, one of the Beatles' friends, who jumped out to recover it, standing in the roadway.
"The best part of the joke," George reminded me, "was that the police were going to arrest Klaus for trying to pinch the door. Can you imagine it? The thing was so heavy it would take a couple of men to lift it anyway."
After circling half a dozen blocks with a tartan rug tied over the door so that it looked like a mobile tent, we arrived back at the scene of the crime to find the place swimming with policemen. We managed to sort things out peacefully enough, but that pop-pickers is the funny side of some of the things that happened to the Beatles all the time.
The grin left George's face as he said, "It's great being world famous, but when people start jumping into your car, when you're out on a private night out, then it becomes a bit of a strain."
"Do you ever feel, George," I said, "that show business and the fame that goes with it is stifling you?"
"How could it? Show business is my life. None of us have ever done what you might call 'an honest day's work'. I was employed for a couple of months as an apprentice electrician. Not that I ever worked at it.
"John did a bit of ditch digging to help buy his first guitar, and Paul was once second in command of a lorry. Not what you'd call an ambitious array of trades.
"We eat, breathe, sleep, and dream, beat music, and then get up and play it. Started doing it because we enjoyed it. We still enjoy it. When we stop having a ball, we'll pack it in."
I produced one of my prized pieces of furniture, an old mahogany tea chest converted into a cigarette box. "Tea must have been valuable in those days," George cracked, "I see you've even got a lock on it."
Then he casually dampened my pride by flicking out his solid gold cigarette lighter, a £130 birthday present from manager Brian Epstein. "Now I know why you enjoy being a Beatle," I told him, as he lit up my ciggy with a flourish. I was joking, of course, because money isn't the motive that has taken these fabulous young men to the top.
"We never had any great ambition to do things with music," George told me. "Everything just sort of happened. In fact, if Brian Epstein hadn't taken us in hand and started organizing things, we would probably still have been playing dance halls for £5 10s a night between the four of us."
Now this, I thought, was a fascinating confession. Could it possibly be true that this great group didn't even take their world-shaking Mersybeat seriously?
"Mersybeat? There's no such thing," George insisted. "What we play is the old rock and roll warmed up modern style. Our great idols were Elvis, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, Larry Williams, Little Richard, and all the old rock and roll kings. When others threw their guitars in the dustbin, we kept on playing their stuff.
"I remember during the skiffle craze, we were playing one club where the manager kept handing up bits of paper saying, 'Will you kindly stop playing rock and roll? Rock and roll is dead.' So we introduced each number by saying it was one made famous by Lead Belly or Blind Lemon Jefferson or somebody, and just kept on beating out the same old stuff. Nobody noticed the difference. We were pretty crummy in those days."
Incidentally, Paul McCartney plays a left-handed guitar, and George curled me up with the story of how he learned to play. "Paul started off as a trumpet player," he told me, "but then he decided he wanted to sing. He had a bit of trouble trying to sing and play the trumpet at the same time, so he packed it in and brought a guitar. In those days, though they didn't cater for left-handed guitars, so he had to buy an ordinary one, and then play the chords back to front. It was a scream, really, because instead of strumming the strings down, he had to scratch them up from the bottom. Finally, he switched the strings over.
"And then the funniest thing happened, we started playing with John's skiffle group, the Quarrymen, and we found that John didn't have a proper guitar, just a weird old thing that he used to pluck out a few strange banjo chords that his mother had taught him. Anyway, he started learning to play on Paul's guitar, which by this time, had been converted for a left-handed player, and that left John with the same problem.
"He had to learn to play back-to-front chords too, beating his fingers up over instead of down. We made a terrible old sound in those days. We really did."
Then I asked him, "When did the Beatles decide they wanted to become stars?"
"We didn't. We never took it seriously at all. I remember all the fuss and bother. We went to a couple of auditions for Carol Lewis' Discovery Show. Eventually, we got through a couple of heats to the big regional final in Manchester. We had to dash off for a train after our number and didn't even go on stage for our applause. It didn't bother us. We didn't hear any more, and we didn't even care. It was all a great giggle. And it stayed that way since."
While I was talking, George had wandered restlessly over to the baby grand and started picking out a few restless chords. "Ringo and me have had an organ moved into the flat," he announced, in part explanation of his keyboard doodling, "And we're both learning how to play. Ringo's gone a bit potty and is trying to learn the guitar, and I'm having a crack at the drums. So the place looks a bit like a madman's music shop."
Then he remembered that he ought to ring the flat, but he stopped in dismay halfway to the telephone. "I've just thought, Oh, I don't know the phone number. It's so secret. They don't even let me know it. They can't trust me with it."
You know, he wasn't joking either. It just so happened that I had that very, very, very secret number in my little book of very, very, very secret addresses. So I was able to help him get in touch with this old drumming buddy. I know what you're thinking, pop-pickers, but you might as well save the stamp. That number goes no further than the walls of my flat, not even for good friends like you.
As a refugee from Melbourne, where I began my checkered pop-picking career, I was eager to know how the boys were looking forward to their three weeks in Australia, which were scheduled for this month. George didn't bother trying to flatter me. "It's not the same as America, is it? I mean, America's a place I'd like to spend a holiday in.
"Australia, yes, but this won't be a holiday, and we won't see much of the country at all. We're really excited, though, about our return trip to the States for the premiere of our film over there in July.
" Actually, I wouldn't mind buying a house over there, say, in California or Florida, where we could live some of the time. "
How did he think the film had turned out? "We like it, but we're not trying to kid anybody that we're actors. We've seen all the rushes, and we all agree that Ringo comes out of it better than anybody. It's hilarious, really. We made a lot of it up as we went along."
They didn't take it seriously. Of course, they didn't take anything seriously, least of all themselves. "School was a giggle. Skiffle was a laugh, and Germany was the greatest gag of all," said George. "The first time we went, I was kicked out for being underage. I was 17. Then, Paul and Pete, our drummer at the time, were both deported. The owner of the club where we were playing claimed that they tried to burn down his cinema or something. John was asked to leave more quietly because he didn't have a work permit. They just gave him a train ticket and told him to be out of town by the morning. When we got back from Hamburg, the second time, the Liverpool promoters started billing us as 'the group from Germany', and people kept congratulating us on speaking such good English, crazy, isn't it?"
I was tempted to ask George whether or not he took his new girlfriend seriously, but there are some things you don't talk about, even to your friends, so I asked about his guitar playing instead. Surely he was serious about that?
"Nah, I'm just fooling with it. Really, what I'd really like to do is play classical guitar. If I could do that, I'd really have achieved something. It's so complicated. The trouble is, I've learned to play the guitar my own way, and it's the wrong way around.
"It's almost like having learned to play the piano with your feet, then having to make a start with your fingers. You just haven't got a clue. I wouldn't mind going back to scratch, but I could never find anyone to teach me.
"I learned one piece, Box Prelude, in Tenerife last April. I've had time to learn nothing more since. I know I have the feeling for it. I'm sure I could do it with practice. But for the moment, the pop parade comes first."
I don't know about you pop-pickers, but I, for one am, pretty pleased to hear it. In my book, George Harrison is already one of the greatest.
No comments:
Post a Comment