GEORGE: THE FRIENDLIEST BEATLE

THE SECOND IN A SERIES OF PROFILES IN WHICH TONY BARROW EXPLAINS WHAT THE BEATLES WERE REALLY LIKE

You are viewing: Who Was The Nicest Beatle

George always got along well with the ladies. He was known for it within the Beatles’ circle. When the Beatles did a television special involving dancers, George would steam in there like a shot to chat up the best-looking showgirls, two or three at a time. They said he was cheeky, had a smashing smile and stared deep into their eyes.

Other people had very different views. Some thought George was the shy Beatle, the one who said very little. He frowned a lot on stage, giving fans a false impression that he was being temperamental. He wasn’t really in a bad mood, just trying hard to hear if his guitar sounded right through the loudspeakers.

Not only was George the Beatle who changed most during the lifespan of the group, he was the one who was seen totally differently by different people. To some he was serious, studious and sometimes sulky. Others saw him as a pleasant, chummy and cheerful lad. Others would say he was far too deep for them. In a way, everyone was right and he was all of these things and more. George wasn’t a simple person to assess, even once you got to know him, but the one characteristic which never changed was his fundamental sincerity. George genuinely believed in what he said and did.

UPSET

Although he featured so little as a songwriter in the heydays of Beatlemania, it was one of George’s compositions, “Cry For A Shadow”, which went on record in Germany at the very start of the group’s career and generated interest in Britain as well as over there on the continent. In view of this, it upset George when the stuff he wrote a bit later failed to catch the ear of Parlophone producer George Martin in the recording studios. The bitter reality was that whilst George’s songs were not bad at all, the material coming from the pens of Lennon and McCartney was quite extraordinary, enough to put any average songwriter in the shade. If George had been running a group of his own in the early Sixties, I have no doubt he’d have blossomed very adequately as a most successful songwriter. It was only because he was operating alongside John and Paul that George came off third best.

Even in the early days, those of us working at close quarters to the Beatles could see that George needed an extra interest. Brian Epstein put it like this: “John and Paul have their songwriting and Ringo is still rather new. But George could do with some sort of special little ventures of his own.” This was Eppy’s way of telling me we ought to be paying particular attention to George so far as getting him extra press publicity was concerned. Easier said than done, that.

SPOTLIGHT

It wasn’t such a simple task to point the spotlight at George, even once the press became so keen to get hold of the Beatles when Beatlemania had developed into Fleet Street’s latest fad.

Read more : Who Is The Guy In The Cheez It Commercial

Feature writers always wanted to interview John or Paul first. Some would go for Ringo because he was the cute one with the nose and he was expected to make the occasional hilariously funny remark. But few journalists picked George as the Beatle they most wanted to talk to. In their eyes, he took himself too seriously and didn’t mix easily.

George was the straight-faced fellow who stood in the background and didn’t go out of his way to be at the center of a conversation – at least that’s how the press saw him.

George certainly was more at home and most at ease with the specialist music writers, the magazine people who were aware of his studious approach to playing and would get a good story from him on that level. Otherwise I had to sell him pretty hard to persuade journalists to interview George.

Then came a golden opportunity. A national newspaper wanted to run a regular column by a Beatle for a while. George was the man for the job, not only because it gave him the ‘extra interest’ that Eppy recognised he needed but also because George got on with ‘Daily Express’ man Derek Taylor, the guy chosen to ‘ghost’ the articles. This was a friendship which grew on both business and personal levels, one which has lasted over 25 years and is still as strong today. George didn’t always get a good press for himself.

UNPLEASANT

Even in Hamburg days he’d hit the headlines in a negative way, charged with deceiving the authorities about his age. At seventeen he had no right to be performing in the local clubs there. Avoiding any more unpleasant action, they sent him home in disgrace for being too young. It’s true he was the youngest Beatle but the small age difference assumed a grand significance when all the Fab Four were teenagers.

When John and Cynthia started going out together, George often made a nuisance of himself by tagging along at awkward moments turning a cosy twosome into an embarrassing trio without even realising the lovers wanted to be left alone. But he was far from naive over affairs of the heart even then.

From the earliest days of their acquaintance, Paul can recall how George was only too prepared to nick his girlfriends. Nobody’s girl was safe around George. A remarkable number of Liverpool’s most sought-after young women passed to and fro between George and Paul, but if it was down to sheer weight of numbers, I gather the statistics could always show that Harrison scored over McCartney. As I said earlier, he was known for it.

In Paris, just as the Beatles were becoming famous, George made negative news for himself again. He threw a glass of icy fruit juice over a P.R. aide at breakfast in a brief fit of bad temper. It wasn’t a crucial incident by any means but it blew up into a big story because the Beatles had such a clean-cut image for being four exceptionally good-humoured fun-lovin’ rock’n’rollers at the time and a single example of bad manners stood out, even if it took place within the privacy of the group’s hotel suite.

SNAPPY

I met George soon after “Love Me Do” was released and I got to know him in 1963. Someone warned me he could be snappy. Not only that, he’d lash out with his fists if he felt cornered. At school he’d been in more than his fair share of punch-ups. All this surprised me. He seemed such a mild bloke, not at all aggressive but only too ready to make new friends and happy to share a joke. He had this curious but harmless habit of bringing his face within an inch of the person he was speaking to, male or female, giving the impression that what was about to be said must be highly confidential and well worth hearing. Then he’d just ask how you were, where you’d been or what time it was.

Read more : Who Owns Vitalia

He seemed a little out of his depth in the company of John and Paul, even on social outings. At a party he’d brighten up visibly when he spotted a familiar face. Within the Beatles, he was not a dominant personality, not a party to the policy·making machinery which traditionally involved John, Paul and Brian Epstein. On the whole, George let them take care of business, although he did concern himself quite closely with financial affairs. He was far more careful with his money than the other three.

It is well-known that George was the first to crack under the pressures of excessive popularity, affected mentally if not physically by the unique battering the Beatles withstood when Beatlemania was reaching a peak. Insiders watched a former chum change into an individual from whom hostility rather than friendliness flowed only too readily. Some couldn’t understand it at all. He’d been such an easy-going Beatle before. Now the calmness and contentment were all gone, along with his sense of humour. Of course the truth is that George was still the same chap underneath. But he wore this heavy armour of belligerence in the hope that it would frighten Beatlemania away.

In August 1966, within minutes of boarding our chartered jet plane in San Francisco after the Beatles’ very last concert, George sighed and declared it was all over. “That’s it. I’m not a Beatle any longer.” We knew what he meant. Without the touring, the uncomfortable trappings of Beatlemania would become obsolete and George would be able to get back to making music in the relative peace of a recording studio instead of on the battlefield of a concert stage. Well, that’s how it seemed to George, and who’d blame him. No serious musician could enjoy those last massive stadium concerts where an inadequate sound system fought for audio supremacy against the constant screams of 60,000 kids.

PLACID

In the post-touring era, George resumed much of his placid approach to life, finding considerable mental tranquility in Transcendental Meditation and the musical heritage of the East.

By 1967 he was chatty and cheerful again, smiling more or less as he’d done in the old days. His main happiness came from India, from his mantras and his sitars. His only remaining unhappiness was that the Beatles did not record more of his compositions and his personal chart successes were few and far between.

George’s near-obsessive interest in Eastern cultures brought with it a number of eccentricities which onlookers couldn’t understand. Yet they made much more good sense than drugs and set a better example.

Today, despite his continuing closeness to the music and the spiritual teachings of India, George has placed his special interests within the context of a fuller and wisely varied lifestyle. He leads a fairly normal life as a fulltime movie businessman and part-time musician.

Now that he’s free to come and go as he wishes, George takes a more positive view of ‘live’ appearances, picking carefully the gigs he wants to do and turning his back very deliberately upon the rest.

In his way, George has proved just as ambitious over each new phase of his ongoing career as Paul is over his. But where Paul is addicted to the adrenalin-inducing thrill of public performances, George has taught himself to take them or leave them.

– The Beatles Book Monthly (Aug. 1988)

Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHO