GEORGE HARRISON

The author of biographies of John Lennon and Paul McCartney turns his attention to George Harrison (1943–2001).

“Fuck off…can’t you see I’m meditating?” Thus quoth George—never Sir George, for unlike bandmates Sir Paul and Sir Ringo, Harrison was never knighted. That fact, reports longtime Beatle-watcher Norman, seems to have rankled, for if Harrison seemed to be bucking for sainthood throughout much of his too-short life, he was also all too human. His wife, Pattie Boyd Harrison, once asked George’s assistant, “What’s he got his hands in today, the prayer-beads or the cocaine?” Norman is no mean-spirited, character-assassinating biographer in the Albert Goldman vein, but he does seem to take a certain pleasure in catching Harrison out doing things he shouldn’t have, such as seducing Ringo’s wife—no secret, and present in other Harrison bios, but lingered over all the same. The author makes a few things clear: Harrison was a nimble guitarist, one of the best in the business, but he was undervalued by both Lennon and McCartney as a songwriter, which resulted in his long-pent-up solo effort, All Things Must Pass, a dark horse that charted higher than any of their solo efforts. Regrettably, its biggest hit was legally proven to have been inadvertently plagiarized. A creature of “endless self-contradictions,” Harrison was the one Beatle who grew up in true poverty, and while he claimed to renounce the material world, he also spent fortunes on the creature comforts of his British estates and Hawaiian getaway. Given to bad puns (“Vengeance Is Mine Saith the Chord”) and occasional clunkiness—e.g., Tom Petty was “the blondest man in Country rock”; after the Beatles broke up, “Beatleness still ran through him like the grain in old oak”—Norman nonetheless knows his subject and the soulful torments Harrison endured. The quiet Beatle turns out to have feet of clay—a surprise to some, perhaps.

A well-informed, serviceably written biography of an enigmatic musician.