Brainwashed (2002)

” Namah Parvarti Pataye Hare Hare Mahadev
Namah Parvarti Pataye Hare Hare
Namah Parvarti Pataye Hare Hare

Shiva Shiva Shankara Mahadeva
Hare Hare Hare Hare Mahadeva
Shiva Shiva Shankara Mahadeva
Shiva Shiva Shankara Mahadeva

Namah Parvarti Pataye Hare Hare
Namah Parvarti Pataye Hare Hare
Shiva Shiva Shankara Mahadeva

Shiva Shiva Shankara Mahadeva“

George Harrison died in 2001. To the record buying populus, he was The Quiet Beatle, the intense Beatle whose fieriest sentiments blew threw his Gibson. He was the least interested in chasing that most commercial of hits; instead, his was a crusade that preceded, succeeded and involved his existence.

The Beatles sojourned to India in 1968, where meditative retreats awaited the quartet. Drummer Ringo Starr left after ten days, bassist Paul McCartney little longer. The two guitarists continued their search for the enlightened touch, but only one of them made a lifelong habit of the schooling once they’d returned to London. For John Lennon, art, marriage and parenthood awaited for him in the guise of conceptualist Yoko Ono.

Which left Harrison on his own to spread the teachings he valued so dearly in a record buying market.

It was Harrison who wrote, recorded and released the most astonishing of the solo Beatle records. Compiling a life’s work of material, the Epicurean three album work was an accomplished no.1 record.

There were shadows, whispers and conversations on every track. The album proved a favourite of Martin Scorsese’s, as he used Harrison’s music intrinsically in his stormy 1990 masterpiece Goodfellas.

 

By then, Harrison had proved a very different figure. His guitar had returned to rockier territories, no doubt influenced by his friendships with exalted pop stars Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty. Harrison’s moodier, more garrulous demeanour didn’t make him a likely flagwaver for the soft pop market, but the  jangly guitar pieces This Is Love and Cheer Down were very, very popular.

He worked with Lynne on Cloud Nine, a dazzlingly inventive return to form spoiled by the fetid production. Harboring each and every one of the worst of eighties clichés, it seemed to be Harrison’s most stagnant work.

A return to The Beatles restored his fortunes, though the band’s hi-fi recording strategies may have seemed at odds with his withdrawn philosophies. With it’s excessive sound, garish lyrics and antiquated feel, Free As A Bird has rarely been listened to in the twenty five years since its release.

The same went for Real Love and Harrison wisely put the brakes on a third Lennon recording. It was better to appreciate the living than try and revive the dead.

Harrison had his album to record, before illness, misfortune and a near fatal stabbing kept setting the release date back. By the time it was released in 2002, fifteen years had elapsed since Harrison had last unveiled a record. It was a triumphant return to form, one the songwriting guitarist wasn’t around to see.

He died from cancer, the same disease that claimed Beatle wives Maureen Starkey and Linda McCartney. McCartney and Starr joined the conduit of musicians who sent off the inimitable musician during The Concert For George.

Many people covered George’s work, while Starr sang a song he’d written with his ex Beatle. Such a transformation breathed new life to the song. Photograph, in its original form, had once sounded like another spurn lover looking at the photographs that held more than memories for them.

Now, it was Starr’s way of saying good-bye to his close friend. You can visibly see Starr fighting back his tears as the words ” Now you’re expecting me to live without you/But that’s not something that I’m looking forward to”  pass his shaking lips.

McCartney’s tributes were clumsier, though he did point to Dhani Harrison in recognition of his dad. Uncannily similar in stature, appearance and voice, Dhani was the perfect candidate to complete his father’s final work.

He is credited as a co-producer, his name resting beside his father’s and Jeff Lynne’s. Perhaps mindful of the overbearing production that hung all over Cloud Nine, Lynne chose a more tactful way of producing the album. Session drummer Jim Keltner plays full belt, without a loop to aid him, while Lynne’s additional guitar effects were there to decorate Harrison’s burning originals. Starr, strangely, does not play on the album, though pianist Jools Holland does feature on the album’s sprightlier numbers.

 The album’s sole cover, Between The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea returned Harrison to his love of vaudeville. He strums a ukulele, an instrument first heard on the flippantP2 Vatican Blues (Last Saturday Night). The strident Marwa Blues found the guitarist working his fingers through a slide guitar. It was a gorgeous instrumental, echoing his late sixties Beatle performances with a melancholic, Hindustani flavour within. It set to paint out a glorious sunset, and was warmly received by the 2004 Grammies. McCartney, who had underestimated Harrison’s songwriting abilities in the late sixties, thought it a favourite of his. The complexities, subtleties and shadings Harrison’s guitar emulated were beyond those of Lennon’s ability on the same instrument.

Time, age and endurance had only strengthened Harrison’s commitment both to his guitar and to his meditation. In fact, there’s little compromise, change or distraction from Harrison’s main focus: Eastern mantras delivered over some incredible choice of chords. Just as Harrison’s creative muse strengthened when time was called on The Beatles, Harrison’s excellent swansong benefited from the ends of its writers movements.

Though par excellence a Harrison album, Dhani sports a weathered backing vocal. He joins his father on the mantra that breaks up the stormy title track (see at the top of the piece). He plays the whimsical keyboard that hangs on the cheerful Rising Son, the choppy guitar on the punchy Any Road and sports the higher harmony on the naked Run So Far. Dhani later admitted that Stuck Inside A Cloud was chosen as the seventh track, as Harrison traditionally held that spot for his favourite number.

Behind the punchy licks, a sadness is at play. The “nervous system” Harrison once claimed he and The Beatles gifted their fans is mentioned again in the song lyrics. Then there’s Stuck Inside A Cloud, illustrative of the smoking habit he’d spent a lifetime consuming. Lastly, Never Get Over You sounded very different in the hands of a dying man than it would have earlier in Harrison’s career.

It wasn’t uncommon for a posthumous pop album to be so moribund. Queen’s Made In Heaven packed a punch louder than Roger Taylor’s thunderous drumming at it’s most unbridled.

But Harrison’s moribund nature had been a part of his music since the grouchily named Don’t Bother Me was written in 1963. He was famously shadowed as the least communicative of the Beatles, something Beatle author Philip Norman cruelly took pains to point out in his 2001 eulogy (which I won’t be linking you to). What distinguishes this work from Harrison’s past material, is how readily he accepts his fate. This is a man waiting for his last breath, relishing the time he has left to spend with his son. Fittingly, Dhani has acted as his father’s custodian in the decades since.

It all comes together on the appropriately named Looking For My Life. His sincerest prayer to a God that has given him purpose, Harrison points to the animals, plants, questions and high-points that decorate the songwriter’s lifestyle. Credit to the garrulous guitarist, he claims “I never got any G.C.E.s”. That someone could sing on the Ed O Sullivan show in ’64 and still look back with some regret shows how deeply rooted Harrison was to his life as a person.