Alaska Employment Law

In a perfect world, he would have been the bass player

The supply of new books about the Beatles is endless, and will likely remain so for … ah, who knows? So let’s say forever. Still, authors continue to search for new angles, and thus we come to While My Guitar Gently Weeps: The Music of George Harrison, by Simon Leng, which appeared in the UK in 2003 and has lately been released in an American edition.  Mr. Leng notes, correctly, that although the musical genius of Lennon and McCartney has been endlessly dissected and reviewed, song by song by song, no one has done Mr. Harrison the same favor. And he’s more or less right. So I found myself really looking forward to this book, which thoughtfully examines every single song on every single post-Beatles George Harrison album. It was my hope that I would discover some gems that I had overlooked.

Mr. Harrison was, in the beginning, the moodily handsome one, the one my wife said “should have been the bass player,” because the bass player is the dark, silent one the girls all want to be with (so she says; what do I know?). In the Beatles, the original bass player was the musically inept Stuart Sutcliffe (he definitely passed the “moodily handsome” test), who died a romantic death and was succeeded by the very musical Paul McCartney (too cute and talkative to be moodily handsome). Mr. Harrison, though, worshipped at the altar of Carl Perkins – even calling himself Carl Harrison for a while – and became the Beatles’ lead guitarist.

Sad to say, with a couple of exceptions, Mr. Leng didn’t open my eyes to much that was new or gemlike. The Harrison albums that I thought were great, or at least pretty good, are the ones that, when all is said and done, Mr. Leng considers great (All Things Must Pass and The Concert for Bangladesh), pretty darn good (Living in the Material World, Cloud Nine, and Brainwashed) and perfectly enjoyable (Thirty-Three & 1/3). Mr. Leng has some interesting things to say about George’s work with the Beatles and makes a few intriguing points about the ways in which Harrison and Lennon collaborated musically (though they co-authorized precisely one song, the 1961 instrumental “Cry for A Shadow,” a reference to Cliff Richard’s backing band, the Shadows). And he contends that Mr. Harrison was a gifted producer, citing the band Splinter as the most successful project (not counting the Beatles themselves) on the Apple records label after Badfinger. Just don’t try to find any music by Splinter (I did, eventually, on an Italian website).

The verdict: for rabid fans only. The rest of you can skip it.