Cool/Funny/Lovely Stories About George | Page 3 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

That was beautiful, parlance. Thanks so much for posting.

This is from Eric Idle’s Greedy B*****d Diary and is another one which is heartbreaking:

29/11/03

Today was a bad day for me. The anniversary of George’s death two years ago is on my mind all day. I know I will have to write something about him, and that is a painful thing even to think about. That man, so alive with those amazing eyes, lying so still as I scattered rose petals on him, my shoulders shaking, weeping. Sitting with him. Seeing him so thin, hearing that terrible merciless cough – no, it’s too damn painful.

Even when we first met I felt like I’d known him forever. Not the Beatle George, he never seemed like that to me, nor the bearded garden gnome George, but the man, the real man with the deep dark eyes and the crooked grin and the loud laugh. I felt I knew him already. I felt I’d met him as a child. In fact, I was convinced we’d met in Wallasey when I was about seven, in New Brighton playing in the sand hills at the Red Noses. There’s no way to prove this, of course, but it was a very strong feeling I have, and still have. I would meet kids and play, as kids do, and have no idea who they were. So who knows, sometime in the summer of 1950, might we really have met on the other side of the Mersey?

I never knew a man like him. It was as if we fell in love. His attention, his concern, his loving friendship was so strong and powerful that it encompassed your entire life. You felt comfortable and secure. We would stay up all night and talk for hours about our lives, about the hurts and pains, about the groups we had been in and the trying emotional strains and problems that being in such groups entails. He was always full of spiritual comfort, counsel, and advice. He saw everything from the cosmic point of view. Our deaths were natural and unavoidable, and he viewed everything from that perspective, even then in the midseventies. He had come off a tour of America, where things had been unpleasant for him. The ‘Dark Hoarse Tour,’ he called it. His pseudonym – for hotels, security (and guitar picks) – had been Jack Lumber. (He was always a raving certified Python fanatic, as, of course, I was always a raving certified Beatle fan.) Drugs and brandy had ruined his voice on that tour, and I think he had set out to challenge the expectations of his North American audiences, presenting Ravi Shankar and the Indian music and then doing jokey versions of various of his songs. The good news was that he met Olivia, the love of his life, and retired to Friar Park, where he felt safe and from where he would only rarely emerge. Here he would discover the other great love of his life, gardening, which became a living example of his concern to create beauty on the planet wherever he could. 

His enthusiasm was contagious. He played the jukebox to inform and instruct. He revelled in sharing his delight in all kinds of music. He would go through periods of furious passions, often lasting for months or even years at a time, when he would insist you shared his joy of Smokey Robinson or the songs of Hoagy Carmichael or the Hawaiian music of Gaby Pahinui or even the ukulele nonsenses of George Formby. During this latter stage everyone had to learn the uke, even Liv he taught to strum away. His taste was, like him, catholic. He embraced all forms of life. It was to be savoured and enjoyed. But music was at the heart of it. It could speak more truly to the soul. And the soul was what George was about. The clear-eyed gurus gazed down in the hall from their photographs, looking straight at us. As we talked and grew to know each other I opened my heart to him as I have to no other man before or since. Indeed, only my wife and my shrink have heard me speak so nearly (and at such length) of my existence and experiences. It was, and I can only say this simply, like the beginning of a love affair, and I suppose in a way it was exactly that, because he won my heart and I fell in love with him and am filled with that love to this day. When he died, I could not believe it. I knelt at his feet and put my hand on him, and my whole body was wracked and shaken with sorrow. They had given us rose petals and finally my shoulders could stop shaking long enough for me to sprinkle them on him, and I could back away to the sympathetic embraces of the living. He lay now deathly still in his saffron and purple robes, his face painted white with the red dot on his forehead. We sat shivah, a small group of his friends and family in the room, now weeping, now laughing. Some reminiscence would start, something inappropriate he would want to share and then the realisation that he would not be sharing it, that he was indeed gone, and sorrow would flood over us. 

“Come on, everybody, Dad wouldn’t want this”, Dhani would remind us, and we would play music, the chants he loved, recorded in Friar Park, or a few of the last tracks that would constitute the basis of his final album. And, oh, the pangs as I remember our last phone conversation, me in France, he in Switzerland, sometime in August. His voice seemed weak as we chatted for about twenty minutes. 
“What are you working on?” I asked him. 
“I’m doing the sleeve notes for my album. If I can ever finish them in time. And if not, then you will” 
My heart felt like it was stabbed as he told me clearly he was dying. Even then I refused to believe it. Not him. Not George. George couldn’t die. I needed him too much. He was my cornerstone. A Friar Park visit always an option. George didn’t die. It wasn’t possible.

On this day last year I was in the Royal Albert Hall at the amazing memorial concert for George organised by Liv and Dhani and Eric Clapton, one minute laughing with Mike Palin and the Terrys and the next losing it as Joe Brown played “Here Comes The Sun ” and having to hide in the bathroom backstage, sobbing. I wasn’t the only one with red eyes that night. Was ever a man so loved? So many friends. So many strong men in tears. I almost lost it again onstage at the end when Joe played the ukulele so beautifully and sang “I’ll See You In My Dreams” as thousands of rose petals fell from the ceiling. Everyone left the stage quietly, avoiding one another’s eyes, here a friendly arm, there a hand on a shoulder. Too sad for words.

I’m so glad I finally found this article again. Been looking for it for ages! 

In August 2000, Ravi Shankar’s first wife, the reclusive surbahar virtuoso Annapurna Devi, gave Man’s World a rare interview in which she spoke about her torturous marriage and the tragic life of their son Shubho. The interview was a bit bizarre. She invited the writer Aalif Surti to her house, allowed him to wander around, but refused to meet him. She asked him to give a written set of questions and then answered all of them on paper.

In the Hindustani classical music fraternity, Annapurna Devi’s genius is part of a growing mythology. The daughter of the great Ustad Allauddin Khan, the sister of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and the divorced wife of Pandit Ravi Shankar, she is considered to be one of the greatest living exponents of both the surbahar and the sitar.

The tragedy is that her music is lost to the world. Four decades ago, following problems with Ravi Shankar, she took a vow never to perform in public. Since then she has lived as a virtual recluse, rarely stepping out of her Mumbai residence. She is 74, but has never made a recording. No outsider has seen her play in almost 50 years, except for George Harrison , who in the 1970s was allowed the rare opportunity of sitting through her daily riyaz, that too following a special request from the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Annapurna Devi’s virtuosity, however, is attested by the accomplishments of her students, among whom are some of the greatest musicians of this country — Nikhil Banerjee, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Nityanand Haldipur, Basant Kabra, Amit Bhattacharya, and Amit Roy.

Annapurna Devi’s aloofness from the world extends to not even taking phone calls. The only time she has spoken to the press has been through her students. For this article she made the concession of letting the writer into the house, but did not allow a face to face meeting. She later answered a written questionnaire on a variety of subjects including her hurt at the manner in which Ravi Shankar chose to portray their marriage and the death of their only son Shubho in his autobiography Raga Mala. “I am aware of the false and fabricated stories about me regarding what happened in my married life…,” she says at one point, “…I think Panditji is losing his sense of propriety or his mental balance, or that he has turned into a pathological liar.”

Annapurna Devi’s sixth floor flat at South Mumbai’s Akashganga Apartments bears her name plate and a plastic plaque which says, “Please ring the bell only three times. If no one answers, kindly leave your card/letter. Thank you for your co-operation.” I ring the bell once and the door is opened by a smiling Rooshikumar Pandya (“He is all the time laughing-laughing,” the liftman tells me). A psychology teacher at a Montreal College, Pandya came to Mumbai in the early 1980s to take music lessons from Annapurna Devi and never went back. He married her in 1984. Most visitors to the house don’t get past his room, just across from the main door. However, tonight one of her students, Atul Merchant, takes me through the passage into the ‘forbidden zone’.

We pass the kitchen, where Annapurna Devi herself cooks and cleans, as she keeps no servants in the house. But even while she is busy in the kitchen, her ears, Atul claims, monitor the students playing in the drawing room. Nothing escapes her ears. “Once,” recalls Atul, “her student, sarodist Basant Kabra, was practising Raag Bihaag. All of us sitting near him couldn’t discern any mistake, until Ma yelled from the kitchen, ‘Nishad ka taraf besura hai, sunai nahin deta kya?’” Across the bottom of the kitchen door is a small wooden partition, which was kept, I am later told, for her dachshund Munna. It’s been twenty years since Munna reached the big kennel in the sky but the partition symbolises her affection for him and immortalises his memory.

Straight ahead is a door, which is firmly shut. “Maa is meditating,” Atul says simply and guides me into the drawing room cum talim room. Alongside a wall is a row of sitars of different sizes in their sheaths. We come into a large drawing room opening out through sliding doors on to the Arabian Sea. Near the centre of the room is a well-worn chattai. “This is where Dakhinamohan Tagore, Nikhil Bannerjee, Aashish Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Nityanand Haldipur, Basant Kabra and every one of Maa’s students has sat and learnt from her. And this round cane munda is where Maa sits while teaching,” Atul says. One instantly perceives that the air in the room is extraordinarily dense with silence. There is a sense of an involuntary freezing of the chattering mind. Around the room are paintings and bronze busts of Allauddin Khan, her father and guru, and her legendary surbahar. But it is a small framed sketch in the corner that catches my eye. “That was drawn by Shubho when he was young,” Atul informs me. It is hypnotic. A stark black graphic depicting a series of doors leading you into them. It’s eerie.

Later, I spoke to one of Annapurna’s senior students of Shubho’s illustration. He quickly remarked, “It sucks you in, doesn’t it?” Shubho is Annapurna and Ravi Shankar’s son who died under tragic circumstances in 1992.

(…) 

Around this time, Uday Shankar’s younger brother, eighteen-year-old Robindra Shankar (he changed his name to Ravi Shankar around 1940), came to learn at Maihar. At that time, Annapurna was a shy thirteen-year-old and, in the words of Ravi Shankar, “very bright and quite attractive, with lovely eyes and a brighter complexion than Alubhai’s (Ali Akbar Khan).” Their marriage was not a love marriage. “I was brought up by Ma and Baba in an ashram-like atmosphere at Maihar. There was no question of my getting attracted to Panditji. Ours was an arranged marriage and not a love marriage,” Annapurna Devi says with finality.

Pandit Ravi Shankar too writes in his latest autobiography, Raga Mala, “There was no love or romance or hanky-panky at all between Annapurna and myself, despite what many people thought at that time. I do not know how she truly felt about the match before marriage, although I was told that she had ‘agreed’.” And on the morning of May 15, 1941, Annapurna was converted to Hinduism and the same evening they were married according to Hindu rites. Connoisseurs and music critics believe that she is a more gifted musician than either Ravi Shankar or Ali Akbar. As Ustad Amir Khan would later point out, “Annapurna Devi is 80 percent of Ustad Allauddin Khan, Ali Akbar is 70 percent and Ravi Shankar is about 40 percent.” Ali Akbar himself agrees in his oft-quoted statement: “Put Ravi Shankar, Pannalal (Ghosh) and me on one side and put Annapurna on the other and yet her side of the scale will be heavier.”

Annapurna claims this was what led to the discord in their marriage. Says she, “Whenever I performed, people appreciated my playing and I sensed that Panditji was not too happy about their response. I was not that fond of performing anyway so I stopped it and continued my sadhana.” It is no secret that it was this marriage that was the basis of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s popular film Abhimaan, where a famous singer (Amitabh Bachchan) and his shy wife (Jaya Bachchan) have problems in their marriage when her popularity soars above his. Mukherjee in fact discussed the story with Annapurna Devi before he embarked on the film. However, while in the movie the couple gets back together to live happily ever after, in real life Ravi Shankar and Annapurna Devi’s marital discord got worse and they eventually divorced. To save her marriage, Annapurna Devi says she took a vow before an image of Baba and Goddess Shardama never to perform in public again. But even a sacrifice as great as this didn’t save her marriage.

Ravi Shankar recalls the issue a little differently. In a recent television interview he said, “As long as we were married I used to force her to play along with me and give programmes… But after that she didn’t want to perform alone. She always wanted to sit with me. And after we separated she didn’t want to perform… She maybe doesn’t like to face the public or she is nervous or whatever but it is of her own will that she has stopped. This is very sad because she is a fantastic musician.”

Madanlal Vyas, who was Ravi Shankar’s student and the music critic for The Navbharat Times for 36 years, gives another perspective. “After the concerts people used to surround Annapurna Devi more than him, which Panditji could not tolerate. He was no match for her. She is a genius. Even Baba, the unforgiving and uncompromising Guru called her the embodiment of Saraswati. What higher praise than this?”

Unfortunately, her music is lost to the world. There are very few people who remember watching her in concert. There is only one recording of her playing in existence: a rare, private recording from one of their jugalbandi performances which was made from the speaker placed outside the door when the auditorium was filled. Apart from Ravi Shankar, and her current husband, Rooshi Pandya, the only person who has heard her play since she withdrew from public life is the Beatle George Harrison . The story goes that when he was here in the 1970s with violinist Yehudi Menuhin, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asked them if she could do anything. Menuhin said he wanted to ask for something impossible — could Mrs Gandhi get Annapurna Devi to play for him? After much persuasion, a reluctant Annapurna Devi agreed, not to a special performance, but to allow them to sit in on her daily riyaz. On the appointed day, however, Menuhin had to rush back home on account of an illness in the family. Harrison thus became the lucky one to see her play.

http://bkdonline.wordpress.com…..ationship/

I just found this one, so heartwarming!:

Harrison left Fijians with memories, music

A couple of years ago, George Harrison and his lovely wife, Olivia, visited Lomalagi Resort on Vanua Levu, in Fiji. After a couple of days they asked if they could visit the nearby Fijian village.
The visit was arranged, with much excitement and anticipation by the villagers. When we arrived, they had a big area set up, with mats and cushions for all of us. Tea was served. Then the men put on a Fijian “meke” — a beautifully choreographed war dance.

Following that performance, the “Lomalagi Band Boys ” got out their guitars and a ukulele and began to play. George immediately jumped up and joined the band.

He played a couple of Beatles songs, then joined with the boys, playing along with them.

First he took the ukulele and began to play. After a couple of Fijian songs, he borrowed one of the guitars and played more Beatles songs, to wild cheering and applause. The concert lasted more than an hour.

The musicians’ guitars and ukulele were very old and pretty beat up. About six weeks after Harrison’s visit, a huge box arrived, containing three guitars, a ukulele, small percussion instruments for the band and for the school children, and lots of extra guitar and ukulele strings. A few days later, two more packages arrived, each containing a dozen Beatles cassettes.

George Harrison will be missed by all but his legacy lives on — in the beautiful Fiji islands.

Collin McKenny
Owner, Lomalagi Resort
Vanua Levu, Fiji

A really touching article about George’s relationship with Carl Perkins and his sons. I wish this information had been included in Scorsese’s documentary.

When he heard George Harrison had died, Greg Perkins, the youngest son of longtime Harrison friend Carl Perkins, sat outside and reminisced about how his favorite Beatle loved gardening. Greg’s brother, Stan, was saddened but smiled as he thought of Harrison at his daddy’s funeral. As Harrison stood to honor the fallen legend, he reached out and tapped the casket three times to reconnect with his old friend. Jackson musician Wes Henley, who played and toured with rockabilly legend Perkins and his sons, grabbed his guitar and played his favorite Harrison tune, “Something .”

These three Jackson residents felt a loss more acutely than most after the Beatle’s death last month. While many were only fans of the Beatles guitarist, this trio became friends because of their relationship with Carl Perkins. Harrison, an icon to many musicians and songwriters, idolized the man these Jacksonians called father and friend. “He said ‘If it hadn’t have been for your daddy, I never would have picked up a guitar,'” Stan, 48, told The Jackson Sun recently during an interview.

Lucky for Beatles fans all over the world, Harrison was a Perkins fanatic. The proof is endless. Harrison’s playing on those early Beatles albums was styled after Perkins’ sound.

In addition, the Fab Four recorded three of Perkins’ songs on their major studio releases: “Honey Don’t ,” “Matchbox ” and “Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby “, the tune Harrison sang on “Beatles For Sale “. That’s more than any other artist whose songs they performed. When the Beatles toured Hamburg, Germany, and greater fame waited just around the corner for them, Harrison, as a tribute, told everyone he met his name was “Carl,” not George. “No one knew him as George there,” Stan said, recalling Harrison’s pleasure at telling that story. 

Harrison admired Perkins so much that when the Beatles performed in St. Louis in the mid-1960s, Harrison rented a car and drove south by himself. His mission, he would later tell Stan, was to find Carl Perkins. “Now here’s a 21-year-old Englishman driving an American-made car, probably on the wrong side of the road – I can just picture it – in search of Carl Perkins,” Stan said. “He never did get to Jackson. He went a while and then turned around.”

Even later in life, at Friar Park, Harrison’s Victorian home in England’s Henley-on-Thames, his personal jukebox was filled with Carl Perkins music from the heyday of Sun Records.

Henley and the two Perkins brothers met with Harrison several times in the last 15 years. The first time each met him was at his home in England in the 1980s. In 1998, Harrison traveled to Jackson to pay his respects at Perkins’ funeral. Two months after that, the trio spent a poignant evening with Harrison in Los Angeles, because he wanted to be close to Perkins again. That visit sealed a friendship they treasure more now after Harrison’s death.

With George Harrison in England

Greg met him first, in London, during the filming of a 1986 special for Cinemax that is credited with rejuvenating Carl Perkins’ career. After writing the million-seller “Blue Suede Shoes” in 1956, extensive commercial success eluded Perkins for 30 years. But interest in his rockabilly music, fueled by the popularity of the Stray Cats in the early 1980s, brought some of music’s greats together to honor him and put him back in the spotlight. The special featured Harrison, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr , Dave Edmunds, the Stray Cats and Roseanne Cash – all paying tribute to Perkins’ rockabilly sounds. Greg remembers Harrison being very laid-back and personable during rehearsals before those sessions. He always wanted to make everyone feel comfortable, Greg said. “But when it came time to record,” Greg, 42, said, recalling Harrison’s professionalism, “you got your chords right.” Case in point: During the week of rehearsals, the band was practicing “Blue Suede Shoes.” As they started their first take, Harrison stopped them immediately and told the Perkins brothers – and Carl – that they were playing it wrong. 

“And he was right,” Greg said. “For years, we had been hitting a different lick. We had started doing it the Elvis Presley way, because that’s the way dad had started doing it.” In Perkins’ version, there is a pause and drum fill at the end of each phrase in each verse. Elvis’ version keeps time and flows into the chorus. Stan said Carl preferred the Elvis version because it was easier to do live. “But George recognized the difference between the two, and he wanted to go back to the original way it was recorded,” Greg said. “He was that big of a fan.” The next year, Carl, Stan, Greg, Henley and Tiptonville keyboardist Joe Schenk traveled to Harrisons’s estate to spend a week with Harrison and perform at the 10-year anniversary party for Handmade Films, Harrison’s production company. The trio – Stan, Greg and Wes – say they went from being fans of Harrison’s to being friends during this trip to England. “He was just like a friend that you’ve known forever. And he never showed that big-headedness that he could have,” Greg said. “Most of the time, your idols don’t measure up to what you expect they are going to be,” Stan said. “But when you meet one and he exceeds what you expect him to be, by more than you can imagine, that’s the mark of a great man.” “He was genuine to the core,” said Henley, 45. “He hugged us and absolutley made us feel like it was our home.” The country boys from Tennessee – who asked for and were given Coca-Cola to drink, despite a cellar crammed with expensive wines – were amazed that someone known as the “Quiet Beatle” was such a lively, joyful host. “You could tell George loved to have a good time with people he felt comfortable with,” Stan said. “He loved to eat and laugh and loved you to do the same.” Harrison’s house was a converted monastery, and the more than 100 rooms were big and filled with oversized furniture. Intricately carved wood trim adorned every wall. The home’s grounds were expansive and filled with ornamental gardens. But he was ever the rebel and rascal. At his own company’s party, Harrison poked fun at the stuffy Englishmen who spoke at the formal black-tie dinner. “He’d say, ‘Man, look at him, he’s so full of it’,” Stan said. “And George didn’t even have on a tuxedo.” The band remembers playing every Carl Perkins song they knew that night, and a couple that they made up on the spot, Stan said, laughing. Harrison joined the band onstage as they played old-time Rock ‘N’ Roll music with his idol.

Carl Perkins’ funeral

A little more than a decade later, Harrison would play again with Perkins – but this time, it was a tribute. Harrison chartered a plane and traveled alone from Los Angeles to Jackson to pay his respects to Perkins, who died in January 1998 after several strokes. Stan was numb with grief at the time and said no one in the family was concerned with what “celebrities” would attend the funeral. They were afraid the event would become a circus act. He now says what Harrison did was remarkable. “It took a lot of love for him to do what he did,” Stan said. “You know he didn’t know what he was getting into. That took a lot of love. But he was focused in on one thing, he was going to pay his respects to his friend.” Harrison had no intention of singing at the funeral. At the time, he was being treated for throat cancer and wasn’t sure he could perform, Henley said. Perkins battled throat cancer, as well, and he was declared cancer free in 1993 after two years of treatments. “When Wynonna (Judd) asked (Harrison) to get up, I could see a little terror,” Henley said. “And I think that was more about, as he said later, he wasn’t sure anything was going to come out. He hadn’t been singing at all.” After being prodded by Wynonna several times, Harrison sprung to his feet. Touching Perkins’ casket as he got up, he grabbed Ricky Skaggs’ guitar and sang “Your True Love.” The song was released in 1957, when Harrison was been 14. Seven years later, it was one of many songs the Beatles played with Perkins after a June 1964 recording session at their Abbey Road studio. Stan said Harrison kept his eyes on the family as he started playing, almost unsure if he should be performing. He looked like he wanted some reassurance that the family was OK with his impromptu tribute. “He wanted to see our reaction,” Stan said, referring to his family, brothers Greg and Steve and sister Debbie. Perkins’ wife, Valda, did not attend the funeral. “I smiled at him, and it seemed like when I did that, and we might have all done it at the same time, it lifted his spirits and he wanted to sing.” Perkins’ funeral, broadcast live on a local TV station, had been a solemn affair up to that point with religious songs and emotional performances from Wynonna, Skaggs, Billy Ray Cyrus and others. But when Harrison started playing the jangly blues song, the mood changed, Henley said. “It made it more of a celebration about Carl rather than a grieving thing,” Henley said. “It was a fitting closing thing,” Stan said. “And if my dad could have raised up out of that box right there, he would have smiled and said, ‘Go, Cat, Go!’ I guarantee you. That’s the way he’d have wanted to go out.”

After the funeral, Harrison wanted to see Perkins’ home. The only people there were Valda and a woman who was watching the house. Harrison was taken inside through the kitchen. To his left, Perkins’ black G&L guitar rested on a stand next to his living room easy chair. “He knew that was dad’s guitar and he went to pick it up – and the woman stopped him,” Stan said. “She said ‘Don’t you touch that guitar.’ And he turned to her and said he just wanted to hold it. She said, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t do it today.'” “She didn’t know who he was. She didn’t know he was George Harrison , but it wouldn’t have mattered to her. When she found out, it still didn’t make no difference. He wasn’t picking that guitar up that day. Not that day.

With George Harrison in Los Angeles

Two months after Perkins’ funeral, the connection would reunite Harrison his Jackson friends for what turned out to be their final visit. The Perkins’ brothers and Henley were in Los Angeles to perform at a Perkins tribute at the House of Blues. The show featured Johnny Rivers, Dwight Yoakam, a reunited Stray Cats, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Steven Tyler. It was a great musical moment, but a bittersweet celebration for two sons who lost their father and a man who lost a close friend. Harrison got word to the three that he wanted to see them again. He arrived at their hotel incognito and met them in the lobby alone. The four spent six or seven hours talking about Perkins and their favorite music. “The visit was really about George wanting to grieve and be close to somebody who was close to Carl,” Henley said. “He wanted to feel close to Carl.” “I knew how much he loved my daddy, and I knew how much I loved him and was already missing him,” Stan said. “There was a connection there, and he just wanted to reminisce.” He also asked a lot of questions about Perkins’ health: the throat cancer, the strokes, any other symptoms, what to look for. It was almost like Harrison had a premonition that his own days were numbered, Stan said.
“He felt like he was sicker than he was being told he was,” Henley said. “He said they had found a spot on his left lung, and they said there was nothing to it. But he wasn’t too sure.” Doctors later found cancer there and in Harrison’s brain.
In Los Angeles, Harrison was able to find closure with Perkins’ death, and the boys in the band were able to repay Harrison for being at the funeral. To show thanks, Stan gave Harrison a guitar from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, the custom-made Peavey that Perkins used on the Cinemax special. Harrison recognized it immediately. “Tears started to roll down his cheek, and he was genuinely touched,” Stan said. Harrison also had gifts. A deeply spiritual man, Harrison wanted to share his faith with his friends because they were grieving. He gave each of the guys a book on Hare Krishna called “Autobiography of a Yogi.”

Greg, who has read the whole book, said his dad and Harrison did talk about religion. Even though one attended Bemis United Methodist Church and the other was a mystical devotee of Eastern thought, Greg said they found common ground. “They each came from different areas of the world, but what they used to talk about a lot was that both faiths were based on a belief in God ,” he said.

A close bond

Harrison and Perkins shared a bond. Each was a musical innovator.
Perkins took the blues from Memphis, the gospel from small country churches and the country from Nashville and mixed it all up into rockabilly music. Harrison built on what Perkins and other early rockers did to create a new kind of music – music that had integrity and honesty, but was fueled by passion and emotion. In their later years, after fame peaked for one and after it became a nuisance for the other, they often returned to their roots and longed for the escape provided in playing what Stan calls, “good old feel-good music.”

For three Jackson musicians, they are just glad they were along for the ride. “I have to believe that the spirit of Carl Perkins and the spirit of George Harrison are pretty close together right now,” Stan said. “‘Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby ‘ is getting played right now, and I bet George is teaching my daddy the chords to ‘Something .'”

A Man With A Truly Big Heart

by Konrad Engbers

The man who founded Engbers Garden Centre has told how George Harrison helped him to establish the business in its early days.

Konrad Engbers recalls how George visited the centre just after he started. “He came in to see me and asked how things were. I told him it was a little slow and he said ‘I’ll give it a little push for you’. He then bought almost every tree I had in stock and first thing the next day a motorcycle courier turned up with payment. “Ever since then he was one of my most loyal and regular customers.”

Konrad, aged 79, sold the business two years ago but has never forgotten how George helped him on his way. They first met when he arrived at Konrad’s original nursery near Abingdon in the late 60s. “He had called in to another nursery just along the road from mine,” said Konrad. “The owner there told him he didn’t serve hippies and to clear off. I had no idea who he was but we got talking and he began to visit regularly. There was a small hut in the nursery that I had converted into a bar. We used to sit together and enjoy a couple of drinks. I remember one particular occasion when he played his guitar there for me.”

And George would walk down the hill from Friar Park to the market where Konrad ran a stall. “He would wait in the queue, take his turn and never expected any preferential treatment. One day he asked me up to his garden for advice on some trees that were dying. After that, he regularly asked for my advice on any gardening matters. “One Christmas Eve he sent a message down to the stall inviting me to Friar Park for a drink with his then wife, Patti . And on another occasion he took me over to the Catherine Wheel for lunch.”

When Konrad had problems getting planning permission for his nursery at Shiplake he had lots of support from many people, including George. George continued to visit Engbers and, Konrad said, would sit in the coffee shop in his dirty wellies talking about herbs and Hare Krishna, herbal tea and plants. Nobody would recognise him. But it was for the support that George gave him that Konrad remembers the star most.

He said: “He was such a kind man with no airs and graces — a man with a truly big heart.”

I love stories about George and gardening.

Olivia Harrison: “In terms of landscape design, he liked the idea of Capability Brown, so we started calling him Capability George. He thought that everyone, as a matter of course, should have themselves regularly overwhelmed by nature. He used to say that all unused buildings should be knocked down and gardens put in their place.

The way nature played tricks amused him, too. Once he planted lots of this pinky coloured weed on one side of the lake only for it all to spring up on the other side. ‘It’s jumped,’ he laughed.

Without a doubt, George never felt more at peace than when he was gardening. He loved the gardens here and always said you felt closest to God when you were in the garden. Some days when he was working in the recording studio, he’d look out of the window and say, with a shake of his head, ‘We’re not getting much gardening done today.’

Every time I go out there, I think he’ll just pop out from behind a shrub, like he used to.”

This is another touching excerpt from Klaus Voormann’s book, very kindly translated by thateventuality on tumblr. More of her translations from the book are at the link.

When I visited George there in the spring of 2001, he was already marked by his illness. Still he absolutely needed to show me the changes in the park… Because he wasn’t that fit anymore, we used a little gold cart. We drove along the winding paths peacefully, and I listened with great interest to his passion speeches about the Canadian goldenrod, indigenous rhododendron bushes or the little bamboo forest that transported the visitor into a Japanese Zen garden for a few moments. It was like a botanical tour. He knew every centimeter of his estate and much of it was planted and tended to by himself and Olivia personally. Helpfully by his side at the beginning was his gardener Morris, with whom George as a gardener in disguise had a close friendship. After his retirement a nursery took over the job, George registered immediately when a flower pot wasn’t at the right place or if some leaves on a shrub showed signs of a fungus.
After a while we came to a place where different types of grass grew that I had never seen before. George stopped the cart and looked at the softly swaying grass for a long time. After a while he turned to me.
“You know, it took many, many years until I understood that this grass has a special meaning to me. Somehow I feel connected to it. So when I’m not here anymore, than you just have to imagine me as a swaying sea of grass and then I’ll be close to you.”
I must have looked rather clueless. For one, it was news to me that he had a special relationship with grass, and for another I didn’t like the idea one bit that George might soon no longer be here.
George seemed to guess my thoughts. “Grass isn’t just grass. There are thousands of different types, soft, hard, long short. I love these big fields with the long, soft grass, the waves when the wind sweeps through them. How much easier would our life be if we could learn from these observations? Just give in to the wind of life and not always resist it. You know what I mean?” George laughed mischievously.
I understood all too well what the wise, heavily breathing philosopher George was trying to tell me. We were driving around for a while in the golf cart, George at the wheel, when he suddenly stopped again.
“Now look at that. You have to do everything yourself.”
I didn’t even know what George meant. The garden looked immaculate.
“That little tree there. Just laying there when it should have been planted already. They forgot that birch tree. It’s going to die.” While he grumbled to himself, he climbed out of the vehicle to take a closer look at the little tree.
“Wait here for a minute, Klaus, I’ll be right back.”
He shuffled around the corner, and a short while later I heard the sound of an approaching motor. Aha, I thought, George found an employee to do this for him. But when the vehicle came around the corner, good old George himself sat at the wheel of the small dredger.
“Go and get a big bucket of water over there,” he called to me, “it was too heavy for me to lift with this thing.”
He told me where to go.
When I brought the bucket of water, George had already dug a large hole. He grinned down at me contentedly from his mini dredger.
“Could you please pour half the water into the hole?” He was breathing heavily and I saw small drops of perspiration on his forehead.
“George, leave it, I’ll do it.”
“No, no, Klaus, let me do. I’m okay.” George carefully lifted the birch with the dredger and swung it to the left to place it over the hole. “It has to be planted or it will dry up, and the gardening troupe won’t be back for another two days. Can you carefully tilt the birch down so that the roots are in the hole? Or wait, let me do that, I know how it’s done.”
Slowly, he climbed out of the dredger to then lovingly place the young tree into its designated hole.
“Now you can put the soil on it, so that it’s in tight. You have to put it on in a circular motion.”
I slowly shovelled the soil around the tree.
Then George took bucket, which was now only half full and therefore no longer so heavy. Slowly he watered the problem child from all sides. “Alright, that’s enough now.” Then he patted the tree trunk and smiled. “Good boy, now we both feel better again.”