Hello George.
Letter writing is one of those skills that is slowly dying away. I’d say that’s a shame but seeing how I can’t remember the last time I sat down and wrote a letter, I’m partly to blame. I could be off on this, but the last letter I wrote by hand was likely while I was at Marine Corps Recruit Training in San Diego back in 1996, where I was pretty prolific at the practice. Surely, I’ve written a letter since then (surely!), but e-mail came out in a big way not long thereafter and ended up being a kind of extinction level event for letter writing, so who knows? No e-mail I’ve ever written, even a personal one, has felt the same as a written letter.
Letter writing in Boot Camp is tricky. They say that the best way to survive Boot Camp is to blend in and make yourself anonymous, but getting and receiving letters in Boot Camp makes you anything but. Write your letters, sure, but they would always warn me that you shouldn’t want your loved ones to write back in return. The Drill Instructors hand out mail every night in Boot Camp and if you start becoming that guy who is getting called up to the front to grab a fat stack of letters, you’re going to be seen. That’s bad. I don’t know if there was a part of me that was a little soft in the solar plexus region of my body and was still naively tethered to the home I left in July 1996, or if there was a more durable part of me that was actively refusing to shut off that side of my heart/mind/soul (perhaps both), but I both wrote and received letters by the bushel.
All that to say, I’m not a big letter writer. I may have been at one point but haven’t been for quite some time. I don’t write to my mom or other family members. I don’t write to friends in other cities. I don’t write to my former Marine friends. And one thing I’m 100% certain of, I don’t write to musicians, especially ones who have been dead for decades. This whole experience feels very scary and foreign to me, but I read a book recently in which writer Hanif Abdurraqib wrote letters (among other things) to the various members of A Tribe Called Quest and it sounded like a pursuit worth emulating.
I guess let’s start here. You already know this, but you died on November 29, 2001. You died two months after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City, Washington DC, and in the skies of Pennsylvania. I remember how cold the world felt in the weeks and months after those attacks and how much colder the world felt when one of our great musician thinkers died not long thereafter. The world and its messy geopolitics were speeding down a highway to some pretty dark and scary places, and we needed more of your spirit and more of your words, not fewer of both. The universe had other plans, though. Luckily, you had already given us so much and had provided such a beautiful blueprint to follow, all we needed was to just follow it.
I don’t know what it’s like where you are now, but you probably know this, too; I’m a massive Beatles fan. I honestly don’t think a day goes by when I don’t at least (if even for a literal second) think of the Beatles, either as a whole or as 4 separate solo entities. The music you and your brothers made (I’m going to call them your brothers) changed my life in profound ways that I wouldn’t remotely be able to adequately express in a letter like this. You and your brothers taught me about love, both in the romantic sense and in the duty to one another sense. You and your brothers taught me about empathy. You and your brothers taught me that there was more to this place than what’s right in front of our noses. You and your brothers made music that made our souls vibrate. I could go on and on and on here, but if where you are is how I envision it, you already know this.
I’m one of those people who goes through Beatle periods, or “kicks” as people often call it. I’ll go through long stretches of time where I don’t listen to Beatles music or any of your solo works on any kind of regular basis, but then, usually out of the blue, will listen to nothing else but that music for weeks on end. I almost always text my brother with a “going through a Lennon kick” (for example) and he’ll often text me the same. That’s usually all that really needs to be said by either one of us. Those simple 5-word texts may not seem like much, but they tell me everything I need to know about where my brother’s headspace (and mine) is at any given time. A Lennon phase means something. A Paul phase means something else entirely. The same with your music.
I’m in the middle of a pretty intense “George Harrison kick” at the moment. And in this period of time, I’ve slowly come to some pretty interesting realizations about the Beatles, especially as it pertains to you and your role with that group. The Beatles’ roles have always fascinated me. John was the mad genius songwriter. …the guy who could knock out songs like “I Am the Walrus”one day and then “All You Need is Love” the next. John’s greatest skills were introspection and presenting complex ideas so simply that we couldn’t help but absorb them. Paul was the melodic genius of the group. He could knock out a song like “Yesterday”one day and then “I’ve Just Seen a Face” the next. Paul’s great skill was writing a melody so beautiful that it carried a lot of the thematic weight when the lyrics fell short, as they often did. Ringo was the glue guy. Every band needs a guy who just kind of holds everything together. There’s no better role for a drummer.
People always called you “the quiet Beatle.” Or if it wasn’t the “quiet Beatle” label, you were given the “the dark and mysterious” label. The stories always talk about John and Paul writing together, not as often about John, Paul, and George doing the same. When you’re watching a live performance of the Beatles, it’s usually John or Paul up on the lead mic and you going back and forth between providing harmonies or guitar solos in the back. You were often only given 1 or 2 songs on an album while John or Paul provided the rest. The “quiet” label works, at least at face value.
I know the truth of the Beatles’ roles was a lot more filled with grey than the mythologies us fans come up with in our heads, but I’ve always been curious if those labels rang true to you. They seem true to me. But it also rings true to me, both from personal experience and from listening to the songs you did as a Beatle and as a solo artist, that being “the quiet” anything is only an external representation of who you are as a person. I know what it’s like to be a shy, quiet person to everyone else, but to have an internal monologue or dialogue that burns deep within and is anything but quiet. In fact, it can be deafening. I know what it feels like to have ideas or thoughts you want to share, but an internal voice in your head wrestling with a heavy dose of impostor syndrome, so you stay quiet. I know what it feels like to be around super smart, super capable people, whom everyone loves at the jump, and to want nothing more than that same love and adulation given to you with equal intensity. …and to not get it.
I know your “quiet” is not the same as my “quiet.” My “quiet” is often a survival tactic. Or at least it has been for much of my life. Just like with the letters in Boot Camp, you don’t open your mouth, you don’t open yourself up to the possibility of getting hurt or letdown. Your “quiet” was because you were passenger to a once in a generation musical moment that borders more on the celestially miraculous side of things than just random happenstance. I’ve long thought about how miraculous it was that two songwriting geniuses named John Lennon and Paul McCartney would grow up literally 10 minutes from one another. These two guys who would go on to make music that would help change the course of human history were practically neighbors.
But the older I get and the more perspective I gain, I realize that while it’s extraordinary what happened between John and Paul, partnerships happen literally all the time. There’s Elton and Bernie. There’s Rodgers and Hammerstein. There’s Simon and Garfunkel. The Gershwin brothers. Even going beyond music, Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates had Paul Allen. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Michael Jordan had Scottie Pippen. The list of successful “duos” is long and distinguished.
Look, music exists for a lot of reasons. Music entertains us. Music moves us. Music is fun and can get us dancing. But beyond all of that (admittedly) important stuff, music, when it’s truly great, helps us learn more about ourselves. Music helps us learn who we are as people and why we’re here on this earth. Music asks questions and asks us to do the same within ourselves. Few people have ever put as much love and care into that dynamic as you did as both a Beatle and a solo artist. You had questions you wanted to examine and to answer. You wanted to know about purpose. You wanted to know about love. You wanted to know about our reasons for being here. And that became your goal as both a human and as a musician. We all benefitted from your pursuit of knowledge and capital “T” Truth!
So, George, my dear friend, you were the miracle of that group. John and Paul as a songwriting duo were always going to push sonic limits and change the trajectory of popular music, but you were instrumental in asking me, everyone who listened to your music, and even your fellow bandmates to dig deep and to ask questions and to discover our purpose on this planet and in this cosmos. All that other stuff is fun, important, and 100% necessary, but aren’t those higher questions the freaking purpose of both music and of life itself.
And just like all miraculous happenings, your music always gets to me at exactly the right time I need to hear it. I don’t plan it. I don’t seek it out. But when I need your music the most, it just appears to me like it’s willed to be from on high. I first remember that happening (in non-earth shattering ways) when I was a teen getting into the Beatles and heard you sing “Without going out of my door, I can know all things on Earth. Without looking out of my window, I could know the ways of Heaven” on your “The Inner Light” song. If ever a line more perfectly summed up my overall spiritual outlook on life and connection, it’s that one. We have everything we need to know peace, to know higher powers, and to know ourselves. We already have it and are already enough.
I remember that miracle of hearing your music at the exact right time happening again when I was leaving Marine Combat Training (MCT), which is the training we go to immediately after Boot Camp. I can’t think of a time in my life where I felt more out of my depth and alone than the time I spent at MCT at Camp Pendleton California. I was cold. I was tired. I was sad and alone and constantly wondering what in the fuck I had gotten myself into. That all washed away as the plane I was on took off from California for Virginia as your “Here Comes the Sun” played on my Walk-Man. You sang “it’s alright” and I knew I’d be okay. …and I was. In fact, the next 4 years of my life would be some of the most fulfilling and enjoyable moments of my entire life.
Not long after my dad died in 2003, I heard your “All Things Must Pass” song on the radio. The song always always always ALWAYS gets to me deep within and makes me feel so simultaneously grounded but also elevated (which is kind of your brand). I distinctly remember hearing this line; “Now the darkness only stays the night time. In the morning it will fade away. Daylight is good at arriving at the right time. It’s not always gonna be this grey.” When you’re deep in the midst of a soul shattering grief, you cling to any lifeline you can. For me, this song and this line (in particular) were less of a lifeline and more of a north star to guide me as I waded through the darkness. I knew that what I was feeling wasn’t permanent. I knew that the sadness I was feeling would be there for a long, long time, but that when I was ready (or when the universe was ready for me) to move on, the darkness would make way for something new and different. The brilliance of that song is that you acknowledge that the good times and the bad times… they all pass. But that it’s just a part of it, you know?
I could go on and on. I could talk about hearing your very Hawaiian sounding “Rising Sun” song while sitting on a rock in Kauai, Hawaii while the most gorgeously orange sun rose in the distance. “But in the rising sun, you can feel your life begin. Universe at play inside your DNA, you’re a billion years old today.” That line kind of perfectly captures what it feels like to be me as a 45-year-old person re-discovering my spirituality and re-discovering my want to ask the big questions, as you did. But like I’ve said before, if you’re where I think you are, you already know this. You knew all of this before I typed this out, but I’m glad to have done so, nonetheless.
Thank you. Thank you for being the quiet one so loudly.
Matthew
An open and shut book 
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