George Harrison Talks about the Indian Sound (1966)

 

George Harrison Talks about the Indian Sound (1966)

By Sean O'Mahony

Beat Instrumental

March 1966

    Just before George Harrison took off for Barbados with Pattie for their delayed honeymoon, he talked to me about the Beatles. Thinking of future trends in the pop music sphere, his use of a sitar on the backing track of "Norwegian Wood" and his newfound interest in Indian music have received a lot of comment recently.

     The Beatles, of course, are not the only ones to mention the music of the subcontinent in pop terms; many devotees like Decca's Tony Hall and Donovan are reputedly knocked out by the playing of gentlemen like Ravi Shankar. 

    When I talked to George, he was sitting on the wooden block floor of his music room in his home in Esher, nursing his sitar. All the room contains is a wall hung with guitars and a small jukebox. There aren't many Beatles titles on the list of records either. As George explained, he had to sit cross-legged on the floor because it was impossible to play the sitar any other way. Its long neck and heavy bowl make it almost impossible to play standing up, unless you rest the bowl on a table or something to support it. The equivalent of frets on this instrument are brass ring-like pieces which are fixed onto the neck, but compared with an ordinary guitar as we know it, they seem to be much scarcer, with the result that you have to play the instrument rather like a cross between a violin and a guitar to find the intermediate notes between the frets. 

    I couldn't resist asking George whether he thought this type of music would catch on. "I wouldn't be at all surprised if one day, when we are a lot older, our kids walk into the room and put some records on, which will be based on this type of music," he replied. "Maybe we will turn around and say, 'What the hell is that noise?'"

     "Isn't the Indian music scale different from ours? "I asked him. "Yes, it is different," George agreed. "In actual fact, it is far more complicated than the one we use. We think that Indian music has a lot of weird sounds in it. It doesn't sound right to our ears because we aren't used to it. In fact, to my mind, it's much more advanced than our scale. 

    "It does sound a bit distorted, but you have got to remember that a lot of the most interesting noises on top discs today are based on distortion. Jeff Beck, for example, gets some fabulous sounds by moving his guitar in front of his amp to create feedback." George returned to his sitar, but somehow I don't think we will see the Beatles sitting cross-legged on stage playing Indian instruments.