Chapter V

A NGLA DESH, the Beatles' break-up, My Sweet Lord, into ! all of these plays-within-the-play, leaping in from the wings, dressed tall in green, comes wily manager Allen Klein from New Jersey, of whom George says: He's quite nice really. But there's a part of him that's odd. He operates on the basis of: 'Do unto others as they do unto you except you do it first'. Thing is, they think you are going to do them, even though it never crossed your mind.

The My Sweet Lord affair also features Allen Klein in a bizarre footnote to the court case in which George was alleged to have copied some notes from the song He's So Fine into his song My Sweet Lord, as if theft were necessary.

George says that the law-suit is still going on. Fie told an interviewer this year, rp/y. What happened after the court case was that the judge said My Sweet Lord was similar to He's So Fine; that I was not guilty of stealing the tune but that there was a copyright infringement. He wanted me and the guy who was suing me to get our lawyers together and sort out some compensation. But the guy wouldn't settle for that; he kept trying to bring the matter back into court. Now he has died and Allen Klein has bought the right to He's So Fine and the right to continue the law-suit. It's a joke; having settled all the Beatle law-suits he must have felt lonely not having somebody to sue. So it's still going on. I even tried to give My Sweet Lord away to get the thing settled— just let 'em have it; it doesn't matter to me. I've never had any money from it—it's always been in escrow—and as far as I'm concerned the effect the song has had far exceeds any bitching that's been going on

between copyright people; it's jus: greed and jealousy and all that. Give them the song— I don't care. But my lawyers said "Oh no, you can't do that; it's impossible. . . ." So, it drags on, but it's certainly not giving me any sleepless nights.

Our conversations on tape for I Me Mine began in California when I was doing Ronald Colman impersonations at Warner Brothers Records at Burbank. I played the English Director of Creative Services, and \^/ice President. The conversations ended in England, a year later, after I had left Warners and moved to Suffolk, to become a typist; Joan and the children preceded me.

During that year, George had, as the 'sixties phrase would have it, 'been through many changes''. He completed his second Warner Brothers album George Harrison, he married Olivia Arias who bore him a brown-eyed handsome son, Dhani, born in the Royal Borough of Windsor on ist August i₉₇S.

His interest in Formula One motor racing had been rekindled and in the natural course of events he has become friendly with many of the great names of the most competitive business I sport. He turned more and more to the improve­ment of his gardens, and he joined in the great Rutles adventure: the notion of a marvellous existentialist Beatles.

Less and less, he was the rock У roll hero (never inside his own head) and he spoke dismissively of the trappings of the business. I had just been to the Grammy awards-—the music business equivalent of the film industry's Oscars. Nice, if you like that sort of thing.

That sort of thing is awful. I feel as if that has really gone out of my life. I never want to see any of that stuff" again. It is such a had diversion in your life. I would rather go and see the head-hunters up the Amazon or watch Monty Python.

Monty Python. Eric (Idle) is incredible. Michael Palin too. He is very funny. They all are. They filled that empty space for me; after 1968, 1969, they really kept me going, you know. What should have

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happened is that the Bonzos¹ and the Beatles should have turned into one great Rutle band with all the Pythons and had a laugh. Instead, we had to laugh on the other side of our face.

Eric Idle became one oj George's merriest friend! in the mid-seventies. Probably the most musical member oj the great Python team, be saw limitless absurdities in the Beatles' story and his skill as a writer of inventive comedy ran away with the silver spoon with the extraordinary story oj the 'prefab four' who became /die's Ruths, jrom their beginnings as four penniless rockers to their break-up during the decline oj their company Rutle Corps.

The Rutles was the tribute beyond all other tributes to the Beatles story. The death of Brian Epstein, the MBEs at Buckingham Palace, the peace efforts of John Lennon and his wife Yoko, 'Quiet' George's Indian connection, Paul's cuteness and Ringo's noisiness, all these were sent up, not without love and understanding and style.

The sureness of Eric Idle'sjudgment was encouraged and confirmed by George who plunged into Eric's project as publicist, adviser and as actor, playing a nosey reporter interviewing press officer Eric Manchester (Michael Palin) as he lied about and denied the decline of Rutle Corps.

The Rutles told the story so much better than the usual boring documentary. Try and see that film. That is a recommendation rather like saying: "Don't bother me—see my lawyer. He will explain every­thing". That was an escape valve: being in the Rutles. Escape from school, escape from Bladders, escape from the Bearles, escape into happiness. The great escape. No time to lose.

It is all so silly anyway, all the way through. Ringo's story was funny, you know. We were talking about school once and he said that he had been in hospital so much, that when he went back to school he had to get a note, an official note, to say he had left and come back from hospital and the school said to him: "you never went to this school" and he said: "yes, I did. I've just been in hospital a lot". Then, he said, a couple of years later, they were saying, proudly, "This was Ringo's desk. The great man sat here". Madness. There was always plenty of that. We were always meeting the wrong people, Lord Mayors and

¹ The Boozo Dog Band, a grcaL musical and nonsense group of the 'sixties, full of brains and madness, led by Vivian Stanshall and featuring, among others Neil Innes (later of The Rutles), and 'Legs' Larry Smith.

Police Chiefs, and so on. It would depend on what mood you were in how you behaved. That's why the fab four were good, because if one of us was in a bad mood, the others would cover. "We protected each other.

So now, you have to be more on your guard when you're alone. I miss them at times. We had great love for each other.

George, despite our friendship throughout the Beatlej'Apple years, and since, was never the 'public relations Beatle'. Once, in Canada, in a hotel, tired and oppressed by meeting 'the wrong people' he offered his foot, rather than his hand, to the sister-in-law or some such relative, of the hotel manager. He first removed his shoe.

That was only zany wacky Liverpool humour: not intended to be insulting with the lowest part of the body. Anyway, 1 couldn't handle any of that again, though in its own way, there's as much going on now as ever. One just sees it differently. It's really funny, trips, trips, changing all the time. You know I have to get into a hot bath every day. To thaw me out. My body turns into rigor mortis between going to sleep and waking up, and the day, the first haff, is a constant battle to get in that body and rattle them pots and pans.

Proving things to whoever, used to be worrying, puzzling. Acid ended a lot of that. Who was I trying to prove it to, whatever it is? Probably to everybody, all the time. The first part of my life, certainly, that was what it was. Funny how people say: "You've only one life, Squire". I've given up saying "You've got as many as you like and more, even ones you don't want". But it's true. We have.

Apple. Well I knew at the beginning, in Wigmore Street, before Savile Row and all that madness, I knew after coming back from the Maharishi's in Rishikesh in April, 1968, that though we had all been plugging into the peace, things were splitting and racing off down a blind back alley. Again, other people's trips. If everyone had 'got it' in Rishikesh, they would have been meditating more and not getting into so many of the distractions. Or, if we had to get involved more with outside matters, meditation would have helped handle it. Then Apple might have turned into all the things it could and should have been. Instead we were all crazy.

We all have to meet some difficult people but the famous can rarely meet

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anyone casually and the arrival, in most environments, oj one of the Beatles usually made waves. Rishikesh, Rochdale, Washington . . . the sensation was similar.

I met Kissinger and Ford. Ford was very friendly. Kissinger looked like an Arab, talked like a German and was tanned all over, like Clark Gable. He was a bit like Charlie Chaplin, like a Rude. He fitted into that silly cartoon world we live in as do Edward Hearh and Harold Wilson and the Duke of Edinburgh, whom I also met. Anyway, this is digressing.

The good thing about giving up touring was that it forced the split, or helped to. It was "No thank you very much. Give us a break." But even if you stay at home a lot, there is still a lot to do, juggling, without having to go on stage as well, every night. On the other hand, some people do that to escape. That is the good thing about going on the road; nobody can ever find you. You are always somewhere else and you have a legitimate reason for being somewhere else and ignoring your accountants. You are working. So, ha ha. That is why a lot of people get into that side of life.

When George left Esher and came to Oxfordshire in 1969, it was a removal most dramatic, in the real sense of that word. The house into which he was to invest so much love and from which he would draw so much strength is one of the extraordinary houses of Europe. It cost many hundreds of thousands to establish the building and the grounds from the 1870s onwards. One picture is worth a thousand words. It is a dream on a hill and it came, not by chance, to the right man at the right time. I was with him, the day he moved in, and took it over, this great neglected but not ruined Gothic pile, from a handful oj nuns and a segregated priest with a rude twinkle in his eye and a broken arm. It was February, it was cold, and we had a cup of tea in the library.

The house was going to be knocked down because the Catholics would not pay for the upkeep. What a thing, to knock down a house Hke this. It's hard to credit that they would bring a great iron ball and smash this down and bulldoze it, but they would have done. I came here after the years at Esher, when we went through all the marijuana,

and the psychedelics, plus all we've talked about: childhood, of silly teachers and laws, keep off the grass and all of that.

I remember once going to Claremont Park where Clive of India had lived and they had made it into a school, as they so often do with old houses, and they had sold part of the garden for bungalows, in one of which we lived, but round the other side you could get into this park with rhododendrons and lakes, which was very nice. I'd go there on acid and trip out and sit under the trees with the sun shining.

But I remember once having a deep and emotional upset probably heightened by the drugs as well. It was ten minutes from closing time and there was a nasty old watchman type of guy saying, "get out, get away" (because we looked a bit 'funny' in those days remember?). He was jumping to conclusions that we shouldn't be seen looking like that and T remember being very hurt and saying: "all I want to do is look at the trees. . . ." The result of that was the thought 'OK, I'll buy my own park".

Funny thing, the man who built this one, Sir Frank, had signs saying "Don't Keep Off the Grass". So it was like heaven.

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There was a bad domestic year, 1974. All that splitting up around the house. Simply Shady that song is about it. At the same time I was doing a Splinter album and a Ravi Shankar album and my own album and then during rehearsals, I was trying to finish my album and in the end Denis O'Brien¹ carried me out of the studio to my first concert (in Canada) because I was trying to finish the album in time to get it out to coincide with the tour, which is the way the 'business' needs it. By the time I got to Washington and met the President and everybody, well ... in fact 1 didn't go on the plane to New York for the gig. I tried to stow away, I tried to phone the airport and book myself a flight to London! I was going to go home and not turn up for the last eight, however many concerts ahead in three days or four days.

Going to the White

House had seemed like the climax and that had seemed to be that. But it wasn't. I had to do the gigs. I was shell-shocked after that and after I got back home.

When I got off the plane, and back home I went into the garden and I was so relieved. That was the nearest I got to a nervous breakdown. J couldn't, even go into the house. I was a bit wound up—then when I came in, I looked in the mirror and decided: "Oh, I'm not that bad after all". Ego. That reflection. All those bits of rubbish everywhere and T was, I realised, getting dragged down into that hole. . . .

The tour in 19/4, across Canada and the United States _y was George's first up-front series of public appearances since the break-up oj the Beatles, tie had made several appearances with Delaney and Bonnie, in 1969 bolstered by Eric Clapton and other friends and protected by Delaney and Bonnie's headlinins. But the 1074 tour will not be forgotten by anyone who saw any of the ¹ George's business manager.

Memories of those nights together are a gift. . . him playing acoustic guitar or ukulele under a big moon where the nights were warm and we cheated the English winter of the chance to chill our bones. In spite of the human tendency to take one's mate for granted, even then I was well aware that these were precious moments. I was also blissfully ignorant of how short our days together were meant to be. Those memories will resound with love and reverence for the rest of my life and I don't mind saying on this occasion that they are 'Mine'.