When Marty met George
Daniel Finkelstein
Martin Scorsese’s new documentary about George Harrison, Living in the Material World, hasn’t been going long when its subject says something that made me laugh out loud, and at the same time explained all that followed.
Speaking of his first attempt at writing music — a song called 'Don’t Bother Me' — he said he thought he’d have a go, because he figured that if John and Paul could write songs, how hard could it be?
It’s always been the mathematics of The Beatles that has puzzled me, the sheer improbability that someone as brilliant as Paul McCartney should have teamed up with someone as good as John Lennon and then asked George Harrison to be their guitar player. What are the chances?
Well, it turns out, as Harrison’s statement suggests, that they were not independent variables. The competition and the co-operation lifted them all. By himself, George Harrison might have been accomplished, might have joined a band that did well and been celebrated for his musicality, but without the others he wouldn’t have written 'Something' and 'Here Comes the Sun'.
Harrison’s comment conveys something else too. He saw himself as an equal to John and Paul (and the superior in musical skill, certainly to John) and always resented that they did not see him the same way. He was on the outside of their partnership while being on the inside of the band. Lennon and McCartney never got over the fact that he was younger than them and later that they wrote the big hits.
The film shows that George’s dissatisfaction with his junior status was more important in the breakup of The Beatles than is commonly understood. It was also he (though this is less well portrayed) that first became fed up with the fans and the concerts and insisted the group stop touring.
So George Harrison was central to the birth, the success and the death of rock’s greatest band. And over nearly four hours, Scorsese tells that story with pace and style. The interviews are fresh (I hadn’t seen Astrid Kirchner on camera before or, at least, I don’t think I had), and the footage even better. If you are a fan of the Beatles you will, no question about it, love this film.
But, and I am a bit surprised to find myself saying this, it is quite flawed.
I believe The Beatles are of first rate importance. In the 1960s there arose the idea that there was a generation gap, a gulf between parents and children that would be renewed in each generation. This turned out to be wrong. The generation gap was a single event. A gulf separates those who grew up in the sixties and after the sixties from those who grew up before it. The Western world changed – in manners, in taste, in attitudes towards class and sex, gender equality, and deference to authority.
The Beatles did not create this, but they articulated it, gave it a sound and an image. They weren’t, as the music critic Ian Macdonald brilliantly pointed out, a product of the counter-culture, they were the representatives of the culture, of commerce and popular taste.
So Scorsese is making a film about something that matters, but never quite succeeds in conveying that. Living in the Material World portrays the clash between Harrison’s spirituality and his materialism well, yet it never goes beyond the guitarist’s own dilemma. Released from the chains of class, shorn of traditional religion and a product of consumer capitalism, Harrison’s internal conflict is the world’s external conflict and his confusion is ours. Yet this broader point is never made. Nor any other broad point.
The alternative to making a film that provides a striking theory is to make one full of details. Yet oddly, Scorsese hasn’t done this either. The film skims across Harrison’s life stopping for ages in odd places (motor racing for instance) while missing out entirely large chunks of his career. Just to give a small example, Revolver (on which Harrison’s brilliant and biographically central song Taxman features) is not mentioned at all. Nor, later in his career, is the episode in which his album Somewhere in England was sent back to him by his record company because it wasn’t good enough.
Some of his best songs — the gloriously good 'Blow Away' for instance and 'Any Road' from his last, and rather good, album Brainwashed — are not mentioned or played at all, while songs on All things Must Pass are played several times.
Anyone who listens to John Lennon’s demo tape of 'Real Love' and then listens to The Beatles version of the same thing will realise that it is Harrison’s contribution that makes it distinctively The Beatles. He was central to their sound, and to their ethos. I have just spent nearly four hours in his company and I loved it. I am glad that Scorsese made it. It’s just that, well, I was hoping for something even better.
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Comments
October 18th, 2011 5:27pm
Old Slaughter
Excellent review. Agree with all of it. Exactly how I felt about it.
Always my fav fab.
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October 18th, 2011 6:09pm
Austin Barry
As much as I admire him, I don’t think Scorsese has the cultural background to do justice to the Beatles and George Harrison.
You really had to be in England for the zeitgeist to register. Marty wouldn’t know what it meant to come from some misty, bleak northern industrial tip, to remember drab, bee-hived girls, drink the awful Red Barrel slop, munch the dessicated paper-thin Wimpy Burgers, to be excited by a high-life represented by shrimp cocktails with limp lettuce and Berni Inn mixed grills washed down with Blue Nun, and everywhere fugged by sweet tobacco smoke.
And then it all changing.
You really did have to be there.
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October 18th, 2011 6:54pm
Tron
For anyone who hasn't seen it I would recommend the DVD 'Concert for George'.
To hear all his great songs one after another played with great skill and love surprised an old Beatles fan like me.
I'd forgotten just how many wonderful tunes and guitar riffs he had written. Billy Preston, Tom Petty, Clapton and McCartney stand out but everyone is great.
At the end I was in awe of George's talent and then I remembered he wasn't even the best songwriter in the band. What a band!
I agree, you have to be British and have lived through the 1960's to fully appreciate the impact of The Beatles. If not you can still love the music.
I look forward to seeing the new film.
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October 18th, 2011 6:59pm
I S
Thanks for this. Hugely underrated figure. Funniest Beatle (check the press intervews); guitarist of great taste and style; wrote several excellent songs and was the least affected by the trappings of fame.
'Revolution in the Head' by Ian MacDonald is the best ever book about the Beatles.
Scorsese made an excellent film on Dylan, but the US experience of the Beatles phenomenon was very different to ours.
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October 18th, 2011 7:00pm
Old Slaughter
And yet The Fink wasn't there, and nor was I, and I suggest he gets it and I dare say I do. Maybe just a British thing.
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October 18th, 2011 7:22pm
EC
" It’s just that, well, I was hoping for something even better."
Daniel, (btw so glad you've abandoned the "Danny" - a somewhat misguided and tad undignified attempt to hold on to a youthful image, not to mention your hair)
I felt exactly the same way after watching "Senna" yesterday.
Scorsese will, no doubt, have similarly assembled a wealth of material for this film and I hope it turns out better. As Austin Barry's comment implies, Scorsese shouldn't automatically expect our grateful applause for his perspective on George or 'The Beatles'. "Hollywood" has a particularly dismal track record when it comes down to historical fact, or indeed, trying to interpret foreign cultures (even more so British) for its 'output.'
Anyway, my copy of this film is in the post, and this time, ever the optimist, I really am hoping for the best!
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October 18th, 2011 11:27pm
Old Slaughter
Nah, 'Senna' was almost flawless.
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October 18th, 2011 11:39pm
Archie
I am second to none in my admiration of Scorsese's work, but surely to capture the essence of anything as iconic - not to say cosmically legendary - as The Beatles or an individual member of same, one has to be of the time and place, notwithstanding such peculiarities as the best book I that have ever read on the sixties was written by an American!
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October 19th, 2011 12:14am
Chris
No mention of George Formby, I suppose?
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October 19th, 2011 10:09am
Dave B
Mr Harrison's autobiography ignored Mr Lennon, who was a bit miffed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Me_Mine#I_Me_Mine_book
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October 19th, 2011 11:29am
Jeremy
Austin Barry:
"...the dessicated paper-thin Wimpy Burgers..."
I rather enjoyed the Wimpy burger, back in the day. It had a distinctive and fondly-remembered flavour which neither McDonalds nor Burger King can reproduce. Wimpy did the best mikshakes, too. They were actually made of milk, as opposed to unsuckable corporate goo. And they used to serve their coffee in those groovy see-through cups and saucers, Expresso Bongo style. It was an excellent place to meet and hang out with your mates...mate. The culture of the place was a lot more idiosyncratic than McDonalds, and therefore more British. By comparison, walking into McDonald's is a dismal experience - much like walking into the Disney Store. Everything is obscenely corporate and standardised, and the standard is not very high.
So the director of Casino and Goodfellas makes a film about George Harrison. Think about that for a moment. The American sensibility is not the same thing as the British. I think I'll leave it alone.
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October 19th, 2011 12:34pm
I S
Archie - Which book are you recommending?
Chris - Great point. I doubt if Scorsese picked up on George's delightful habit of carrying 2 ukeleles on holiday and his regular appearances at the George Formby conventions.
Austin - Personally, I'm very fond of the bee-hived, pencil-skirted, kohl-eyed, nylon-stockinged, 60's scrubbers.
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October 22nd, 2011 12:07am
Archie
I S : The book is Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London by one Shawn Levy, who, believe it or not, is the film critic of The Oregonian, a Portland daily! It was pressed on me by someone who hadn't even lived through those times, unlike your truly! Quite extraordinary! And yes, Austin Barry, I miss those quirky Wimpy Bars, which we all considered dreadfully naff at the time and were something of a guilty pleasure. They have an absolutely awful reputation amongst foreign former travellers, North Americans, Australians and such!
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October 22nd, 2011 2:52pm
I S
Archie - Thanks very much for responding. I will seek out the book you recommend.
Can I, in a similar vein, recommend Dominic Sandbrook's books on the '50s and '60s which are immensely readable and entertaining. Also, as previously mentioned, Ian MacDonald's book on The Beatles is stunningly good.
I, too, enjoyed Wimpy bars!
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January 17th, 2012 7:05pm
Andrew Lyttle
Surely you meant to marvel that someone as brilliant as John Lennon teamed up with someone as good as Paul McCartney.
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