Chapter VI

^; OTOR RACING? George: I don't really know why I got ! into it but it was long ago and half the people who were in. it, i who were racing then are in the background now. You know, older people like Stirling Moss, Graham Hill, Jack Brabham and Rob Walker. Fangio was the champion, Juan Manuel Fangio, five times world champion, and this is as far back as we're going.

It was Geoff Duke who was the big hero at the time on motor bikes. Most of the bikes were big single 500 cc Manx Nortons; 1953/54 and the Italians had just come out with their Gilera motor bike which walked away with everything just as the Japanese did later. I used to go and watch all kinds of races and T saw one Grand Prix (they used to have them at Aintree then) and there was also good sports car racing. Stirling Moss was in the Mercedes team, great, but never world champion. It was Mercedes Benz, before the Le Mans crash when they got out of lacing because a car killed all those people. They were first, second, third and fourth, in almost every race they entered.

I remember the early early days of the BRM; British Racing Motor— a patriotic thing, and it won a lot of races. As a kid, I used to write away and get photographs of all of them. I got the BRM with the sixteen cylinder engine in the front, and the Connaught, Vanwall, Ferrari and Maserati; this was before they had rear engine cars. Then I lost touch with that for a while because I got into guitars, yet during the sixties, all the way through, 1 was aware of who the world champ­ion was, and most particularly when Jackie Stewart was on his way

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to being world champion at the end of the sixties, because it was interesting to see who in sport grew long hair. Jackie was the one in racing and the outspoken one. I remember reading interviews with him in the papers where he would nip home to Geneva after the race and buy his latest Beatle album ... so there you are.

I saw them all racing over the years since, mainly at Monte Carlo. I had dinner with jack Brabham, one time, and Dennis Hulme in a little bistro outside of Monte Carlo and sat in Brabham's car after dinner as the mechanics were getting it ready for the Grand Prix. So that was it, it was always there, in the background.

I got myself deep into Formula One land in 1977. It had been difficult getting in anywhere without a hassle and never knowing entirely what was going on. I decided in Long Beach, California, to go down there a day early, and got some tickets off somebody to get in and the next day I met Jackie Stewart and hung out with him. Now, it's like anything else, good fortune. Within music I was fortunate enough to meet Bismillah Khan and Ah Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar and the best musicians in their world, and if you're talking about rock 'n' roll I was fortunate to meet and know Elvis and Little Richard and Fats Domino, and it's always been a case of meeting the people who are the best in their own field—like Shakespeare, Derek Nimmo and Jerzy Kosinski. Now it's Emerson Fittipaldi and Niki Lauda, fody Scheckter, Mario and all those. They are people who happen to be the best at their thing and you might as well, if you are interested in something, if you have the opportunity, you might as well hang out with the best ones, where the experience whatever it is, is maybe the deepest.

Now as to motor racing in relation to me and my other interests. I know that racing is to a lot of people, dopey, maybe from a spiritual point of view. Motor cars—polluters, killers, maimers, noisemakers. Good racing, though, involves heightened awareness for the com­petitors. Those drivers have to be so together in their concentration and the handful of them who arc the best have had some sort of expansion of their consciousness. In relation to musicians and music, the variants motor-racing people work with are difficult. Everything is such a compromise. There are so many different things they are

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able to do with the basic chassis of the car that it is quite the hardest job in the world for any one of them to try to have the advantage over somebody else. Yet they can.

T here, without subtlety we ended the passage on Formula One motor-racing and there the tapes stopped. There was one lengthy passage, now dis­carded, which had details, excruciating indeed, of every car George has ever owned: make, model, where bought, price paid, dates, re-sale information, reasons for purchase and disposal, marks for performance, mpg, camshaft rake-over, sprocket-wrangling and so on, and the 'and so on' of cars is quite something as those obsessives who have not been murdered by close relatives will know.

Clearly, the section of insane detail on personal cars had to go: the entire affair would have been thrown out of balance. Where, one would quite legiti­mately have been asked, is a section about musical instruments used, owned, borrowed, blown, etc.? And where, one might reasonably expect to have to explain, was the thread by thread detail on clothes and shoes ? Favourite actors and actresses? Foods, drink . . . my God we would have never finished in time for Christmas next year and we are late already. No, the cars had to go; far too much excruciation.

We began all of this arguing that there would be a clear indication within the narrative that while everyone else was 'busy growing up' in the nineteen-sixties, the Beatles too were doing their bit in this respect rather than 'fooling around being rock V roll stars'. Maybe this has become clearer. I hope so. It could also be true that the four of them did have a little fun during, the mad years and certainly, if it is not too long ago by then, there will be a few daft memories to pass to grandchildren to soften a hard 21st century, but mainly, for George as for the other three, it has been a matter of alliterative recovery since the nineteen-sixties: rehabilitation, renewal and rest.

They were busy, dangerous- times, those days and nights spent climbing the summit of the material world and they required such restrictive concentration that George lost the habit of certain skills which we, maybe, underrate: walking around, doing a bit of shopping, catching a train, and now and again, requesting someone to take a running jump at himself without having to see

the whole nothingness of the non-event regurgitated in the popular print sooner or later. This is why fame is a dangerous bird but then is no doubt that it can be dealt with most firmly and, even, tamed and I would guess that there is no combination of weapons more dynamic than a strong childhood within the closeness of Liverpool, a sense of humour and a belief in a power higher than ourselves.

It would be a relief for me to feel I could write about ' The George I Know' without restraint but from the opening of this narrative until right now, I have been fettered by his sharp and unpredictable sense of embarrassment at reading something about himself which is, however slightly, wide of the mark in so far as he understands himself. Since I first met him, nearly seventeen years ago, I have written hundreds of thousands of words about him and sometimes I have got away with some quite elaborate praise, but not often; it was less trouble to call him grumpy than generous, and this book will indicate elements of both in his make-up. In fact, he is a paradox, a state of being which I find immensely reassuring. He is enormously free and easy with his kindnesses in a material and spiritual sense and he is also very quick, sometimes harsh, in defence of his rights which are, one need hardly say, frequently challenged.

During research these past months I have read some curious 'historical' views on the fabulous four. The most surprising^ protagonist I discovered was William Deedes,in 1963, Minister without Portfolio but with Lots of Views. In the then untabloid Daily Express he was quoted as saying: " The Beatles herald a cultural movement which may become part of the history of our time. . . .

". . . their aim is to be first class in their work, failure to attain this is spotted and criticised ruthlessly by their many highly discriminating critics. To be top in the beat business demands work, skill, sweat.

"There is no place at all for the la^y, the incompetent, the slipshod.

"Something important and heartening is happening here. The young are rejecting some of the sloppy standards of their elders by ivhich far too much of our output has been governed in recent years."

All that was really a very longtime ago and I believe it to have been accurate, although since then there has been a great deal of to and fro about the influence of the Beatles; but what Mr. Deedes said from a distance remains true, close up, of George Harrison. He is still trying to be first class in his work, still subject to ruthless criticism, and he still rejects the sloppy standards of his

elders, and now whimsically enough, the sloppy standards of those of the young who are not in pursuit of excellence.

I have had to find one word to say what the man is. 'Brave'' comes mar, but it has too close a relationship with suffering and I have therefore concluded that, pirate as he is, he deserves the word 'bold' for he is, in truth, quite the boldest man 1 have ever met.

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Lord Krishna to his devotee Arjuna:

"Among thousands of men, perhaps one strives for spiritual

attainment; and, among the blessed true seekers that assiduously

try to reach Me, perhaps one perceives Me as I am."

Bhagavad Gita (Ch. y, Ver. 3)