As a lifelong Beatlemanic, it continuously amazes me that I still can come across clips and pictures of the band that I personally have never seen before.
There are quite a few of those in the new two-part documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World. The doc, directed by the legendary Martin Scorsese, airs Wednesday, Oct. 5 and Thursday, Oct. 6 on HBO Canada.
Since the whole world knows the history of the Beatles, I laughed out loud upon seeing a rare and hilarious interview clip from the band's early heyday (about 1964, it looks like) that cheekily hints at the later tensions that would tear the band apart.
The four Beatles are seated side by side -- Harrison, Ringo Starr, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, left to right -- but the camera is locked on Harrison and Starr as the interviewer asks Harrison a question about how the band maintains its public image.
Harrison answers that the Beatles never purposely crafted a public image, it just sort of happened, so they don't have to concentrate on maintaining anything.
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"We just remain ourselves," Harrison says. "Don't we Ringo?"
To which a playful Starr responds:
"Well, WE do -- I mean, it's the other two we're worried about."
All four Beatles laugh, although Harrison and Starr surely more genuinely than Lennon and McCartney. Lennon actually throws something at Harrison and Starr.
The scene fits snugly with what emerges as the general theme of George Harrison: Living in the Material World. Namely, that Harrison was an "insider" and an "outsider" at the same time, and he spent much of his life frustrated by that.
Harrison was in the Beatles, but he wasn't one of the two main Beatles, so to speak. While Lennon and McCartney competed with each other as songwriters and took the craft to new heights, Harrison was left to brood over his own material.
But Harrison always was "a cocky little guy," as McCartney says in the doc. Harrison never was in awe of his more celebrated bandmates.
Recalling the song Don't Bother Me, which was Harrison's first foray into songwriting, Harrison recalls, "It was written basically as an exercise to see if I could write a song. Because I thought, well, if John and Paul can write, everybody must be able to."
Harrison then laughs in that familiar impish way he often did when saying something a little brave.
The "half-insider, half-outsider" theme also applies to Harrison's subsequent fascination with spiritualism and Eastern philosophies. The doc strongly suggests that Harrison truly ached to be a spiritual being, but he was so famous and such a staple of the material world, he knew he never completely could disappear into spirituality, and that annoyed him.
"George had two incredible, separate personalities," Starr says. "He had the love, bag-of-beads personality, and the bag of anger. He was very black and white."
As a straight-up documentary, the first hour of George Harrison: Living in the Material World is the most compelling. It's interesting to hear about the early days of the Beatles through Harrison's perspective for a change.
There are segments late in Part 1 and throughout Part 2 that drag. The total three-hour-plus running time could have been tidied up. But having said that, the doc certainly doesn't linger on Harrison's far-too-young demise at the age of 58 in 2001.
"There's George with cancer, and he knows his life is limited," says Terry Gilliam from the legendary comedy team Monty Python. "And what he does is buys a house in Switzerland, so he can avoid paying the tax man here (in England, presumably).
"The man who wrote the song Taxman, even in his final hours, was determined to cheat the tax man.
"And I thought, 'There's George: Grace, and humour, and a weird kind of angry bitterness about certain things in life.' "
bill.harris@sunmedia.ca
