Sinister: Something

[P F]

I heard about George Harrison's death in that odd,
halfway way - someone was talking about a George, and
the film industry, in the past tense. And you put it
together, and think you know what it has to mean: and
it did.

Sadness at this death: sadness in the life too? Maybe
it was just the way his eyes came to look. Or the way
that a presumed superstar, who should have had
anything and everything, looked shifty and reluctant.
Tiredness; silence. Absences: where is he? You'd
remember, every five years or so, that we'd all heard
nothing from him: and sigh.

But this could be a mere projection: maybe he found
the life he wanted. Gardening, playing music with
friends, making lazy jokes?

In a snippet of quotation on his involvement with the
Natural Law Party - who seem the most foolish of
follies - he talks of how if the party won, they might
really be able to "take on MI5 or whoever runs this
country" - and this kind of fighting talk is good to
see: suggests that he hadn't quite forgotten the
lessons, or the beliefs, of the decade for which he
invented some of the shorthand.

I didn't, don't, know his music well enough. At least
I can say that my attitude to it and him haven't
suddenly changed with his death: the distant interest
and sympathy I feel now (as you do for the dead) is
(for once) what I felt about his records when he was
alive. At least, thanks to a sinister comrade, I got
to hear All Things Must Pass, on rotation for weeks as
washing-up music, before he went. The extraordinary
Spectortastickisms, the tumbling cracker-barrel, of
'Awaiting On You All'. The slow acoustic burn of 'My
Sweet Lord' - which is beautifully crafted and
arranged despite its silly lyrical coda.

More distantly, in childhood - the 1980 (?) LP with
'Faster', about the racing driver. The sort of song
that a child would like.

And great craftsmanship, real musical skill, runs
through his work. I always did think of him as a great
songwriter in his way. He had his own trademarks (in
chords and melodies), which I've wished before that I
could identify; and almost everything he wrote was
musically subtle. One reason, perhaps, why it also
feels frail - weak, in need of protection, or of a
hug.

Nicky D, who unlike me knows the entire back catalogue
extremely well, has had harsh things to say about him,
but writes eloquently of crying at his death - crying
for himself: for the passing of time, for a
(cross-)generational loss: for our childhoods, that
were really gone long ago but of whose vanishing we're
occasionally reminded, by vanishing acts like this.


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