Customer Reviews

Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison

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As much as I enjoyed this book, I will suggest that readers go in knowing that it is really not for those who aren't Beatle experts. This does not offer much in the way of new information in re the Beatles and there are a few errors which Beatle Literati will pick up immediately.

What makes this book wonderful and distinct is that it explores the influences that helped George Harrison develop, share and explore his spirituality. In fact, it is this very sharing on George Harrison's part that makes his music so distinct.

The few errors contained are nothing on the level of those in Bob Spitz' biography. Spitz' errors are so glaring that you wonder how on earth he could write it without checking. To add insult to injury, Spitz has taken personal issue with critics and Beatle experts who have called him on these errors and purports to have written the "definitive" Beatle biography.

I like the way this author hones in on why George's spiritual hunger was not satisfied by material success while living in the Material World. George's spiritual Long & Winding Road took him through Hindu teachings as well as the Hare Krishna devotees. At no time did George commit himself to any one faith or expression of faith; as stated in his own song, "if you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there."

It has been well documented that the former Beatle was at home with Hindu teachings and philosophy; yoga; mediatation and the traditions of each. Even so, he kept his mind open to new and different ideas and possibilities. Greene does an excellent job of exploring and examining this aspect of the man's life. Greene also does an excellent job of explaining what rituals George practiced and his rationale for the forms these expressions took. This is very interesting.

One thing I would like to see discussed and explored was George's view of Catholicism in adult life. He had a statue of the Blessed Mother at his Friar Park home which suggests that the seeds of Catholicism which had been imparted to him early had taken root and borne fruit. He was even baptized in the Catholic church as an infant. George even said in an interview that, as a young boy he attended the Catholic masses, but later became disenchanted when people were there about showcasing their clothing. He even said he enjoyed the services, but had trouble believing that only Jesus was God's child. I found it interesting that George even said that he would get confirmed later, but for whatever reasons never did.

I like the way this author informed readers of Prabhupada and his private contact with George and the Vedic precept that the sacred chants are gifts from God to be shared.

Instead of being a rehashing of well documented facts such as Mark Shapiro's books and the poorly written tabloids by Geoffrey Guiliano, this is a work to be taken very seriously. It stands apart from other biographies of the youngest Beatle in that it digs deeply into his spiritual quest and explains in good detail the aspects of religions George followed. This book shares a place of honor with Simon Leng's book and George's autobiography. This is a book Harrison fans will undoubtedly treasure.

I was fortunate enough to be able to read an advance copy of this book, and I have to say: I love it. While I knew, of course, who George Harrison was, I never considered myself a huge fan. Author Joshua Greene has changed that by bringing me inside Harrison's world to explore the spiritual, societal, and musical forces that make up his genius. It was intriguing to learn that many of Harrison's pronouncements on yoga, meditation, and health practices -- which in his day were considered "far out" -- have now been embraced by the mainstream. In an era of self-serving, do-nothing celebrities (Paris Hilton or Jessica Simpson, anyone?) it is refreshing to read of a man who used his fame to truly help others. I learned a great deal from reading this book. If I could, I would give it ten stars -- I loved it.

George Harrison is still the most mysterious Beatle, and I was excited to see a book that promised to shed more light on his lifelong devotion to Indian religion. Long after the famous 1968 retreat with the Maharishi, George remained a serious devotee of Indian music and philosophy; I was curious to know how that passion deepened after the Beatles broke up, when George was out of the public eye and free to follow his Eastern bliss.

Unfortunately, most of the book recycles information you can find in any standard Beatles biography, and it peters out just a few years into his solo career. The author's only real angle is that he knew a handful of members from the Hare Krishna temple George supported off and on throughout his life. It's disappointing to see George surrounded by these American ISCKON followers while his relationship with, say, Ravi Shankar goes almost totally unexplored; the author's tendency to make up dialogue instead of reporting what his interviewees actually said adds to the sense that there really isn't enough new information here to warrant a book.

Part of the problem too may lie with George. After his disastrous Dark Horse tour in 1974, when he found out his fans didn't want to follow a rock star (even an ex-Beatle) into the mystic, his interest in India seems to have softened. Friar Park and its massive garden became maybe the best expression of his later beliefs, an eclectic, private act of devotion far from the public eye. I wish this book had worked a little harder at pulling back the shrubs.

George Harrison was the Beatle with the spiritual reputation. Some even wrote him off as a nut case or someone who had succumbed to the cult of the Hare Krishnas. (He was a great benefactor and supporter of the group.)

Our western culture often writes off public figures who take spiritual turns in life, treating them as quacks, cranks, kooks and people who can no longer be taken seriously. In some ways that's what happened to "the quiet Beatle."

But in this book's sympathetic analysis, Harrison emerges as someone resembling a modern-day Buddha or St. Francis of Assisi (my comparison, not the author's). While Harrison wasn't born into wealth and privilege as Francis and the Buddha were, he did attain it in very young adulthood as a member of the Beatles "royal family." And like Francis and the Buddha, in his young adulthood he grew to struggle with questions of "Is that all there is?" because he had it all and still felt empty.

So he set out on the journey to find true holiness. This is the book that documents that journey.

If you seek dirt or gossip about George here, you won't find much. The book was written by Joshua Greene, a former Hare Krishna devotee who greatly respects and admires Harrison and actually spent time in his presence and knew Harrison's ISKCON friends. That given, Greene does manage to nicely walk the tightrope between saccharine and salacious in giving a seemingly accurate portrayal of both Harrison's strengths and weaknesses.

The author's familiarity with Hindu scriptures and spirituality is a great asset in this book. He beautifully weaves in a few stories from those scriptures to help the reader see and understand why those scriptures touched Harrison's soul and were his rock that supported him throughout his late- and post-Beatles life.

The book also expresses funny anecdotes about the intersection of spirituality, rock 'n roll, and humor in Harrison's life. In Harrison's Friar Park estate, between large pictures of his most revered gurus, he'd hung the famous depiction of dogs playing cards.

When Harrison tried to hold a 1969 Paris hotel press conference to help prevent French Krishna devotees from being hassled by police, reporters refused to listen. They kept asking stupid questions about mop top haircuts and whether the Beatles were really breaking up. The press had no interest in spiritual matters. It grew to a mob scene in which George and a friend, an American from the London Hare Krishnas (complete with dhoti and shaved head) escaped by shimmying down a nearby laundry chute. They fell two stories, but landed safely in a pile of dirty linen, much to the astonishment of women folding towels in the basement. Reporters followed them down the chute, and in a scene that could have been out of _A Hard Day's Night_, Harrison and the Krishna devotee bolted out to a taxi, reporters in hot pursuit and throwing themselves before the taxi to prevent departure.

Harrison never was able to fully extricate himself from that Beatlemania. The guy mostly just wanted to be left alone while still pursuing his music & gardening, but the "left alone" wasn't to be, so he turned to Hindu spirituality as his refuge, befriending fledgling Hare Krishna devotees in England and growing to be their major benefactor.

In one chapter, Greene weaves in a beautiful story from Hindu scripture in which Krishna is surrouded by the gopis--cowherd girls who would cry when Krishna left after singing to them. One cannot help seeing the similarity between gopis and groupies, and how stories about Krishna resonated with Harrison's own life.

Not that Harrison saw himself as a god. Far from it. But others did--those who refused to see him in anything other than his bigger-than-life BEATLE/demigod persona. He hated that.

"We've got to show them we're more than these bodies," Harrison told a friend after a man approached him at a NYC sidewalk cafe and said, "Aren't you George Harrison?" and Harrison deadpanned, "No."

Altogether a gentle, beautiful book that leaves the reader understanding and empathizing with Harrison's life-long journey toward finding God. George always had very human questions and struggles in his spiritual journey, but he never stopped seeking.

"Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison" by Joshua M. Greene went straight to my heart and has become my favorite book about The Beatles. It struck me that most people who write about the Fab Four concentrate on John and Paul, and by comparison I knew little about the group's lead guitarist. This offers a refreshing viewpoint.

Greene talks about the lovely, quiet child George was, and how he always was sensitive to his spiritual side. Greene covers but does not dwell on the history of The Beatles - that was just an opportunity that enabled George to afford to take his spiritual journey. Greene uses beautiful language to describe George's experiences in India, where he found "perfected creation. Ecology, flawless as fresh cloth, washed and ironed and uncorrupted, whole and healthy, a partnership of earth and air and water and sky ... this goddess of nature spoke to him in commanding tones, a goddess of magnificent things as large as a mountain and small as a leaf."

The book is very well written, easy to follow, well documented, professionally presented and really quite moving. Very nicely done.

I just finished reading this book, and sadly, I was disappointed. There are a few reasons:

1. There are lots of small factual errors -- like Henley is north of London (it's west of London), George had an Aston Mini (it's an Austin Mini), the Natural Law Party was running a candidate for president (they ran candidates for Parliament -- Great Britain has no president!). There are a *lot* of them.

2. He's annoyingly inconsistent about citing sources. There are several pages of endnotes in the back, but it's not clear how he chose what to cite and what not to bother citing. There are a number of events he reports where I'd like to know where he got the information from, but there's no note.

3. He's vague about dates and unclear about chronology. On one page he'll narrate things that happened years apart. They're thematically related, but it's not clear how they developed from one to the next.

4. He has a number of interesting and informative things to say about Indian religion, Paramahansa Yogananda, TM, and Krishna Consciousness. He explained a number of things about them that were helpful for me as a westerner. But he offers no analysis of how these strands relate to each other (or even *if* they do). And since most of the teachers George related to were Indians who popularized elements of Indian spirituality for westerners, I wonder how faithful they are to authentic Indian religion. Greene says nothing about that. (A friend who is a professor of Hinduism and Buddhism tells me that TM diverges substantially from traditional Vedic religion.)

5. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that Greene is absolutely uncritical of any element of George's spiritual adventures. Everything is related and taken at absolute face value. I'm not suggesting that an author needs to be a cyncial slash-and-destroyer like Albert Goldman ... but surely not every single little bit is all sweetness and light. How much of an element was there of Maharishi wanting to cash in on the Beatles fame? And how did George understand and react to that? I've read that George at times got annoyed by Krishna devotees attaching themselves to him (he disparaged some of them as "fans"), but Greene says nothing about it. How did George feel about that, and how did it affect his devotion?

And an element that I'd like to know more about, and that Greene passes over very superficially, is what George's childhood experiences of religion were, and how they affected his later spiritual development.

So all in all, I thought Greene missed the opportunity to do a much better book. Sadly, though, this is probably the best we're going to get.

On page 90 of "Here Comes The Sun", we find the following quote from John Lennon: "George himself is no mystery, but the mystery inside George is immense. It's watching him uncover it all little by little that's so damn interesting." In this book, we get the opportunity to watch George Harrison uncover the mystery inside. And, as the subtitle implies, the connection between music and spirituality in George Harrison's life, as well as his contribution to The Beatles collective musical personae, is made abundantly clear. The simple, straightforward writing style renders a complex personality accessible while providing the feel of an adventure novel, complete with unexpected plot twists and surprising resolutions. In addition to giving the reader an intimate view of George Harrison's inner life, we also get a very plausible sense of how he experienced the world. I think the books biggest accomplishment is its personalism: the devotional tradition that resonated with George extols the experience of the sweetness of the Supreme Godhead as indicative of a more intimate relationship than one in which the majesty of "God" predominates ones worship. The author takes us well beyond the superficial majesty of fame and fortune and offers us a taste of the sweetness of George Harrison.

This bio is probably the most comprehensive Harrison bio you can buy. Especially when it comes to his "Spiritual Journey". Greene's writing style is very accessible and it makes the book a very easy read. A drawback would be that Greene does focus heavily on George's association with the Hare Krishnas and sort of exaggerates his connection with them. They were a big part of his spiritual life but not necessarily as huge as what Greene makes it out to be. The musical aspects may seem glossed over but this book is more about George the man and his journey through life and how he found the things that were most important to him. For those new to George or those older fans this book has everything you'll need to get a better grip on who this reclusive figure really was.

The title of the song "Here Comes the Sun" seems to refer to God, who is like the sun and makes everything all right. In his own way, George Harrison was also like the sun, because he brought so much warmth and light to the world. And the book "Here Comes the Sun" traces the trajectory of George's life and career, from its rapid ascent to its brilliant conlusion, in my opinion, brilliantly.

I greatly enjoyed reading this book and recommend it highly. Joshua Greene approaches the life of George Harrison from a unique perspective -- George's spiritual journey. (One could not easily approach the lives of the other Beatles in this way.) Greene traces how George's spirituality shaped George's life and music. The author gives significant attention to the relationships that George developed with several Indian religious teachers as well as his fellow "devotees." One clearly sees the context out of which George wrote music in his post-Beatle days. There is enough in this book to satisfy those simply looking for a biography of George. More importantly, this book helps the reader to see George Harrison, though very human at times, as the deeply spiritual person that he was -- and as a strong advocate for Krishna Consciousness. The reader will learn a lot not only about George but Hindu teaching.