George Harrison visiting Bob Dylan in Woodstock, New York (Nov. 1968)
I heard someone walk into the room and, assuming it was Barry Imhoff or Gary Shafner, I kept pounding away at the keys of the electric typewriter.
“Hi,” Bob Dylan said, pulling a chair over to my desk and slumping into it. “So have you seen George lately?”
Startled by his voice, it took a few seconds for me to respond. “Not since his tour a year ago,” I said.
“I really like George,” he said, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a cigarette.
I nodded my head. I liked George, too.
“So, I was thinking about it. I remember you from the Isle of Wight.” He turned his head and smiled at me, sideways. “I can’t believe I forgot my harmonicas. That was cool when you flew in on the helicopter.”
“Yeah, that was pretty cool,” I agreed. I wasn’t really sure how to talk to Bob, so I just followed his lead.
“That was a weird show,” he said. “I hadn’t performed in a long time, and I was pretty nervous.”
“You didn’t seem nervous,” I said, hoping to reassure him.
“Yeah?” he turned his head to the side and looked at me, narrowing his eyes, measuring my honesty. Then he seemed to relax. “Well, that’s good. But I sure felt it.”
He laughed, then, almost shyly, and averted his eyes. “I’m glad you’re on the tour,” he said. “Any friend of George’s is a friend of mine.”
- Chris O’Dell, “Santana (September - October 1975)”, Miss O’Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved
“We walked toward the sun and slipped through a copse of weeping willow. There in the middle of a field of wildflowers were two huge boulders weighing several tons and standing one atop the other like a pair of giant granite acrobats. “Are those the work of a sculptor?” I asked. “No,” [George] said, “they came from opposite ends of the property, but we moved them here and stacked them in this field. Everyone wants to know about them. In fact, when Ringo came round for a visit last summer, he asked about them, as well. I told him that Paul’s record company had sent them as a promo for his new album, Standing Stone. Ringo was really miffed that he hadn’t gotten his standing stones, but I said they’d probably only posted them to A-list people.” Liverpool accents always sound to me like a joke is coming, but Harrison’s wit was deadpan and dead-on.”
— Paul Simon, c/o Rolling Stone: Harrison: By the Editors of Rolling Stone. (2002)
miscellaneous pics of John and George!!
⋆⁺₊⋆ ☀︎ ⋆⁺₊⋆
⋆⁺₊⋆ ☀︎ ⋆⁺₊⋆
⋆⁺₊⋆ ☀︎ ⋆⁺₊⋆
-Bengal
“I first met John Lennon through Tony King, who had moved to LA to become Apple Records’ general manager in the US. In fact, the first time I met John Lennon, he was dancing with Tony King. Nothing unusual in that, other than the fact that they weren’t in a nightclub, there was no music playing and Tony was in full drag as Queen Elizabeth II. They were at Capitol Records in Hollywood, where Tony’s new office was, shooting a TV advert for John’s forthcoming album Mind Games, and, for reasons best known to John, this was the big concept. I took to him straight away. It wasn’t just that he was a Beatle and therefore one of my idols. He was a Beatle who thought it was a good idea to promote his new album by dancing around with a man dragged up as the Queen, for fuck’s sake. I thought: We’re going to get on like a house on fire. And I was right. As soon as we started talking, it felt like I’d known him my entire life. We began spending a lot of time together, whenever I was in America. He’d separated from Yoko and was living in Los Angeles with May Pang. I know that period in his life is supposed to have been really troubled and unpleasant and dark, but I’ve got to be honest, I never saw that in him at all. I heard stories occasionally – about some sessions he’d done with Phil Spector that went completely out of control, about him going crazy one night and smashing up the record producer Lou Adler’s house. I could see a darkness in some of the people he was hanging out with: Harry Nilsson was a sweet guy, an incredibly talented singer and songwriter, but one drink too many and he’d turn into someone else, someone you really had to watch yourself around. And John and I certainly took a lot of drugs together and had some berserk nights out, as poor old Dr John would tell you. We went to see him at the Troubadour and he invited John onstage to jam. John was so pissed he ended up playing the organ with his elbows. It somehow fell to me to get him offstage.”
— Elton John, Me. (2019) (Note: You can watch the Mind Games commercial of John and Tony King in drag dancing here. You can read the continuation of this quote here.)
“Of course, the artists most people would like to see [John] get involved with are the other ex-Beatles—preferably all at once and on a permanent basis! John has been asked so many times about the possibilities and probabilities of this happening that a smile of resignation comes on to his face at the mention of the others. ‘It’s strange the way people talk about them, as if we were enemies. You know, they were good blokes—I liked them, and I still do. You have to get on with the people in your group if you choose to stay with them for all that time! ‘When they come to the States I usually see them. Ringo and George are here a lot of the time and Paul sometimes comes via New York on his way to L.A. I’ve worked with Ringo and George both together and separately, and played with Paul—there were a lot of other people there too but everybody seemed to be watching us! ‘I was going down to New Orleans to help out on Paul’s last album Venus and Mars, but I was too busy being happy at the time. If you’re reading this, Paul, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it…’ […] And then, of course, there’s Yoko. ‘We are back together now. and happier than over before. It’s the old, old story—when you get someone back that you’ve lost it’s better than ever.’ It was the reconciliation which so involved John that he couldn’t tear himself away to work with McCartney in New Orleans.”
— John Lennon, interview w/ Penny Grant for Game: Enjoying the big apple. (1975)
Joan Baez at the Viking Hotel in Newport, 1964. She is reading Cavalier, a men's adult magazine similar to Playboy.
Int: It’s possible - you know this as well as anybody does. It’s possible that all of you will be best known not for your individual work but because you were Beatles. Does that trouble you at all?
George: No, not at all because who are we anyway, you know? I mean, even if they knew me as me - George Harrison - they don’t really know me. It doesn’t matter what they remember you for. It’s really what you attain for your own personal self that counts.
“Y’know, it’s something that other people see us as The Beatles, and I try to see us as The Beatles, but I can’t.” - Scene and Heard (1967)
“To be able to deal with these people thinking you were some wonderful thing - it was difficult to come to terms with. I was feeling, you know, like nothing. Even now I look back and see, relative to a lot of other groups, The Beatles did have something. But it’s a bit too much to accept that we’re supposedly the designers of this incredible change. In many ways we were just swept along with everybody else.” - Rolling Stone (1987)
“I don’t mean to sound mysterious or try to baffle anyone, but when people come up to me expecting me to be just like what they thought a Beatle would be, they’re disappointed. I never was a Beatle, except musically. I don’t think any of us was. What is a Beatle anyway? I’m not a Beatle or an ex-Beatle or even the George Harrison. I’m just a man. Very ordinary.” - Men Only (1978)
“Like Chance, the main character in Being There (one of George’s favorite books), he wanted to just ‘be there’ in his garden, in his solitude, with his hands in the dirt. He didn’t want to ‘be’ anything but a man who loved music, the earth, women, and God.” - Chris O’Dell
paul: john likes me ?!?! but ...😳 hes a boy ... and ... IM a boy >_<
george: uughh how can i get them to see im just as good of a songwriter as them🚬🚬
john: okay ringo now hit the second tower
it's kinda funny that get back gave them name credits. imagine sitting down to watch 8 hours of beatles footage and not being clear on which ones are the beatles
i mainly use twitter but their beatles fandom is nothing compared to this so here i am
111 posts