GEORGE MOVES TO FRIAR PARK

A second extract from George Harrison: Behind The Locked Door by Graeme Thomson.

         It is the beginning of 1970 and George and Pattie have decided to move from Kinfauns, their house in Esher, to Friar Park in Henley, the house (and gardens) that would become synonymous with George for the remainder of his life. It was, I think, where he was always meant to be…

‘My Sweet Lord’ was one of the last songs George wrote in Esher. Not long after seeing in the new year and the new decade he and his wife moved to Friar Park on the outskirts of Henley-On-Thames, a well-heeled town on the river 40 miles west of London. A 120-room late Victorian oddity, he would call it home for the remainder of his life. More than bricks and mortar, it was part sanctuary, part folly, part cosmic joke, and a life-long passion which he restored and nurtured and which became so closely associated with the man who lived there it is now almost impossible to imagine one without the other. Like the music he was about to make, Friar Park reflected the complexities of his inner character on a monumental scale. 

Kinfauns was too small, too conventional, too exposed. “I am seeking the absolute peace of complete privacy,” he said during his hunt for a new home. “I am also insisting on a private lake, because water is very peaceful for the mind.”

 “George said to me, ‘I don’t care what the house is like as long as it’s not on the road and there is room to put in a recording studio’,” says Pattie Boyd. “At Esher, girls managed to get into the garden, even into the house, and it was a bit of a nightmare. And he really wanted a studio where he could work on stuff himself, that was the real reason for having a big house.” She spent much of 1969 looking for a suitable location. They found one: Plumpton Place, near Lewes in East Sussex, at the end of a sweeping drive surrounded by moats and gardens. But the elderly owner refused Harrison’s offer on the grounds that “she didn’t want rock and roll musicians buying her lovely house.” The lady must have either experienced a swift change of heart or an offer she couldn’t refuse: shortly afterwards Jimmy Page bought the property.

Boyd finally spotted a small advert in the Sunday Times placed by the Salesian Sisters of St. John Bosco. The nuns had been running a school in Friar Park in Henley-On-Thames which had recently closed, and the remarkable building was now facing demolition unless a buyer could be found. Its vast husk was inhabited by six nuns and a monk, which must have appealed to Harrison’s sense of humour. Boyd went to view it and instantly fell in love; Harrison came the next day and fell equally hard. Built by Sir Frank Crisp in 1898 on the site of an old monastery, the redbrick neo-Gothic pile was an essay in English eccentricity writ large. Harrison’s £140,000 bought him a gatehouse, two lodges, 12 acres of formal gardens, another 20 acres of land, a three-storey mansion with 25 bedrooms and numerous public rooms, including a ballroom and a library. There were turrets, towers and parapets with glowering gargoyles.

But that was the least of it. As well as being an eminent lawyer and keen amateur horticulturalist, Crisp was also a microscopist, and the home he built rewarded those with an eye for detail and a taste for the playfully absurd. “He was clearly a wonderful man with a great sense of humour, he travelled extensively and brought back all sorts of things he discovered in other countries,” says Boyd. “His attention to detail was exquisite and just what George understood. He loved it for many reasons.”

The parkland, open to the public during Crisp’s lifetime and long after his death in 1919, was a cross between Botanical garden, fairground attraction and Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. The centrepiece of the Alpine garden was a replica of the Matterhorn made from 20,000 tons of Yorkshire granite. There was a series of man-made underground caves and grottos through which one could travel by boat from one lake to another, the journey enlivened by distorting circus mirrors, gnomes, fairies, toadstools and shimmering blue glass. Above ground there were Elizabethan and Japanese gardens, topiary, a maze. Signs on the lawn read, to the delight of the future hippie interlopers, “Don’t keep off the grass.”

Inside, the double doors led to a marble vestibule and then a huge hall with a grand staircase and a minstrel’s gallery above. The fireplace was vast, flanked on each side by a panel showing the Tree of Life and the Tree of Destiny. The dining room had stained glass windows and the ballroom ceiling was dotted with cherubs. There were Swastikas all over the house: the sacred Hindu symbols were removed when World War Two began but there was still evidence of them in the Seventies. A closer look revealed the true art of the microscopist: all the light switches were monk’s faces, activated by clicking the nose; the walls were adorned with puns, aphorisms, maxims and proverbs, several of which found their way into Harrison’s conversation and eventually his songs. Every new corner seemed to reveal some new whimsical delight, but there was a dark, shadowy intrigue to the place as well. Friar Park was, in many ways, the ultimate expression of Harrison’s worldview. How could he not love it? 

Unfortunately, on his arrival in March 1970 he found only the ghost of Friar Park’s past splendour: the gardens had been used as a local dump, brambles and ivy covered everything, the lakes had been filled in, and internally the house was in a state of extreme disrepair, with grass growing through the floors, whole walls crumbling, and many parts of the building closed off. In the early months they lived like gold-class squatters. There was no heating, no furniture and no beds, so they slept in the hall in sleeping bags, wrapped in coats and scarves and with a fire burning constantly in the huge grate. Even then they almost froze. The only other inhabitable space was the original kitchen, a huge tiled room with flagstone floors, industrial-sized sinks and a walk-in pantry. Slowly, with the guiding hand of architect David Platt, they began to restore parts of the property. For a period they lived in one of the lodges. Back in the house they would sleep on a mattress on the floor in a different room every other night. It was a game. “We were like children – we were playing,” says Boyd. “We could decorate, we embarked on a huge garden programme, it was so exciting. It was huge fun.”

Friar Park soon began filling up with people: first to land was Terry Doran, the “man from the motor trade” of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ fame who had graduated from flogging cars to running Apple Publishing. Now, post-Beatles, he became Harrison’s personal fixer. [Apple secretary] Chris O’Dell moved in after falling foul of Allen Klein’s cull of Apple staff, and was quick to form a fast and lasting friendship with Pattie Boyd. “I think Friar Park was a folly for them as much as for the man who built it,” says O’Dell. “There were no boundaries – George’s main goal was to get it back to how it was before the nuns had it and closed everything up. He read everything he could and got all this information from people in the village who knew the house, and it became his passion. Pattie had her mind inside the house and he had his outside the house. He loved the gardens.”

John Lennon popped around – he called it Henley-on-Toast and thought Friar Park a little gloomy – and musicians gravitated there, especially when, shortly after moving in, Harrison began working on his album. Every new visitor got the tour and a sleeping bag. The first person up in the morning brought everyone else tea. “I was there when George was just exploring it himself,” says Bobby Whitlock. “We put the wellies and jackets on, got a couple of torches and went down this hole in his yard and suddenly we’re in a tunnel with a creek going down the middle of it. It was real interesting! Came out on another pond, and another tunnel, a cave. One bathroom had 12 wooden holes going around the walls, and all the light switches had little friars. It was very cold. I stayed right up at the very top, the tallest room in the tower, Room 101 Pattie called it. There was supposed to be a ghost but I never saw it.”

They would mess around on the replica of the Matterhorn, or ride around the property on go-karts. In the morning it was tea, eggs or porridge and newspapers at the kitchen table, and then into London to record or setting to work on the house and gardens. At night there would be Indian cooking, and they would sit in the kitchen to eat, drink and talk. Harrison might play them his new songs, or he might disappear to meditate. They would listen to music, or watch a movie in the makeshift screening room in the office next to the kitchen. “He loved The Producers,” says O’Dell. “I can’t tell you how many times we watched that in a very short space of time.” His favourite new TV show was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He saw something of The Beatles’ iconoclastic appeal in their irreverent though essentially benign anarchy. He would explain the humour to the bemused American contingent and memorise lines, much as he had Dylan lyrics. “He had that obsessive compulsive part of him, definitely,” says O’Dell.
       The house teased out the prankster in Harrison, the same strain which prompted him to tear off Delaney Bramlett’s trousers, put a flaming ashtray on his head and, years earlier, to play “gear” practical jokes with Gerry Marsden. “This shows the playful side of George,” says Bobby Keys, recalling the first time he arrived at Friar Park. “He said to [Beatles aide] Mal [Evans], ‘Okay Mal, take the guys to their rooms.’ Mal said, ‘Follow me, boys.’ This place had a subterranean cave network underneath, so we followed Mal down into this cave, thinking ‘The guy’s a Beatle, but this is still a little weird.’ Eventually in the middle of this labyrinth of caves George jumped out and tried to scare us: ‘Woohooohoo.’ Well, it didn’t really scare us much. So that was his introduction.”

GEORGE TURNS TO FACE THE EAST

Today, the first of two extracts from George Harrison: Behind The Locked Door by Graeme Thomson which Omnibus published in 2013. 

The first conscious inkling of the East and all the musical, philosophical and spiritual treasures it harboured came the previous year [1965], during the making of Help!. The film was one of The Beatles’ least soulful, least committed projects, in which alternative spirituality was mockingly played for the broadest of laughs: “See what you’ve done with your filthy Eastern ways!” Lennon says to Ahme, played by Eleanor Bron, the high priestess of the fiendish cult.

Filming in the Bahamas during February and March 1965, they were bored, stoned virtually the entire time, and often obviously contemptuous of Dick Lester’s brasher follow up to A Hard Day’s Night. In Nassau, on Harrison’s twenty-second birthday, he was approached by Swami Vishnu Devananda, a 37-year-old Indian guru who had started teaching Sivananda Yoga and preaching its wider message throughout north America. Devananda had recently opened one of his yogic ashrams on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, a short hop from Nassau, and he gave each member of the band a copy of his book, The Complete Illustrated Guide To Yoga. Harrison later – much later, for he didn’t read it for several years – saw this as a sign. Perhaps it was. Either that or a smart piece of opportunism from someone already well-practised in the art of converting willing Westerners to the ancient ways of the East. There was no shortage of either type in the Sixties.

Later, in April, filming Help! back in England at Twickenham Film Studios, Harrison heard the sitar for the first time, played by the Indian musicians brought in to perform in the movie’s Rajahama scene. He picked it up, took a look at it, plucked, twanged, fingered a few shapes, and found himself intrigued. This was essentially the end of his curiosity until he experienced what amounted to a life-changing shift in his perception of the universe and his own consciousness.

Harrison’s immersion in eastern spirituality came via an accumulation of experiences – notably music, travel, literature, lecture, yoga and meditation. The initial impetus was his first encounter with LSD, then liquid and legal, in the summer of 1965. Attending a dinner party in London, Harrison, Lennon and their wives were spiked by their host, The Beatles’ dentist John Riley. At the end of the meal Riley put acid in their coffee with the intention, they later suspected, of instigating some communal scene of unbridled sexual abandon. Instead, when they learned what had happened, they swiftly left.

By the time they reached the Pickwick Club, another favourite London haunt, Harrison was coming up. He felt “a very concentrated version of the best feeling I’d ever had in my whole life,” he recalled. “It was fantastic, I felt in love, not with anything or anybody in particular, but with everything.” By the time they had moved on to the Ad Lib club things had become a little darker and stranger. En route Boyd tried to smash a window. In the club the elevator appeared to be on fire, and hours seemed to pass in seconds. As dawn rose Harrison drove everyone home – very slowly, very carefully – in his Mini. They stopped on the way to play football before falling into [his Esher home] Kinfauns, bolting the door, and willing sleep to come.

Amid all the confusion, terror and disorientation of his 12-hour trip Harrison was hit by a life-altering illumination. “It was as if I’d never tasted, talked, seen, thought or heard properly before,” he said. “For the first time in my life I wasn’t conscious of ego.” Unlike alcohol or pot, acid didn’t make the edges of existence appealingly fuzzy. Instead, it brought into blinding focus all the questions and doubts already lurking in his consciousness. “It was an awakening, and the realisation that the important thing in life is to ask: ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where am I going?’ and ‘Where have I been?,” he said. “ All the other bullshit – that was just bullshit.” He had the hyper-real sense of escaping his body, of becoming pure energy, infinite and omnipresent.

There is, according to Roger McGuinn, “a misunderstanding about what we were doing back in the Sixties with psychedelic drugs. We were really seeking a higher power. We were looking at it like the peyote used by American Indians, as a sacrament to find out what was happening spiritually. It does free you up to see things other than the three dimensions that we’re used to. It’s not hallucinating so much as seeing into another dimension.”

Applied to many other musicians this interpretation would seem fanciful, and certainly not everyone who dropped acid shared such lofty aspirations. But Harrison was spiked. He was not deliberately seeking to alter his perception. He had no expectations and was taken entirely by surprise when he discovered that LSD gave him a temporary glimpse of a higher form of self. Later, he would claim that he only really needed to take it once, that the inaugural experience was enough. In fact his fascination with the drug lasted two years, from the summer of 1965 to the summer of 1967, the year he wrote ‘It’s All Too Much’, not a terribly good song but perhaps his clearest expression of how acid impacted on his wider consciousness. “The more I go inside/The more there is to see,” he sang, picturing himself “floating down the stream of time/From life to life”. There was also a word of caution: “Take a piece but not too much,” advice that he generally heeded even if several of his peers and at least one of his band mates did not.

McGuinn was a happy participant when Harrison took his second trip a few weeks later. The Beatles were on tour in the States, and this time the illumination of transcendence came with a direct connection to the music of India. When they arrived in Los Angeles on August 22 the band holed up for a week in a large rented house belonging to Zsa Zsa Gabor at 2850 Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills. On the afternoon of August 24 they sent a limousine to pick up McGuinn and David Crosby from The Byrds, who they had met earlier that month at Blaises nightclub in London. The ensemble took LSD soaked in sugar cubes and promptly hid in the bathroom, the designated chill-out zone throughout the peak pressure points of Beatlemania. Harrison thought he had held onto the memory of how extraordinary his first acid trip had been, but as he came up he found that “the concept was nowhere near as big as the reality.”

“George, John, Crosby and I, and Peter Fonda, all dropped acid,” says McGuinn. “Ringo did, too, I think, but he wasn’t hanging out with us. We went into the bathroom to get away from the security guards because they scared us – there were all these armed guards around the house because the little girls were trying to climb in over the fence. It was a wild scene, like A Hard Day’s Night. So we found solace in this bathroom that had a nine foot-square tub, and we were all sitting on the edge of the tub with a guitar, passing it back and forth and comparing notes. That was when I first learned that the first thing both George and I ever learned was the riff from Gene Vincent’s ‘Woman Love’.

“Then I played something for him a little like Ravi Shankar, and George immediately said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘That’s like Ravi.’ David Crosby and I had access to Ravi Shankar’s records because he recorded for World Pacific and Jim Dickson, our manager, had been the engineer at World Pacific. So we knew about Ravi. David was a big fan, he had seen Ravi in person and got very excited about it. David told George all about Ravi Shankar, and David can be extremely enthusiastic. He kind of jumps up and down, he can sell something to you really easily. The Help! movie had been in the can by that time and there was a scene with some Indian music, so obviously it wasn’t the first time they had heard Indian music, but I don’t think they knew about Ravi Shankar. That was the first time he became aware of him, and George sought him out and became a student.” 

ERIC & GEORGE

Last night I drove my son Sam over to Cranleigh to spend the night at a friend’s house and on the way passed the Windmill, a pub in the Hurtwood forest behind which there is a lane that leads to Eric Clapton’s Spanish villa, Hurtwood Lodge. I strolled down the lane once a year or two ago, only to come up against the sturdy wooden gates that protect Eric from prying fans and nosey buggers like me. It always amazes me that until John’s murder George Harrison permitted fans to wander around the grounds of Friar Park, his estate on the outskirts of Henley, to admire the gardens which he tended so lovingly.

         Just before he died my friend Timothy White proposed to me that he should write a book about the intermingling lives of Eric and George for Omnibus Press to publish. It sounded like a great idea and he was obviously the right man for the job. At the time Timothy was the editor of Billboard, America’s foremost music industry trade paper, but he’d cut his teeth as a writer on Rolling Stone. He’d befriended George and was one of the few writers to have been shown around Friar Park. He told me about the underground grotto accessible through a trapdoor in the kitchen, the boat on which you could sail through underground caverns, and the lake with pillars built up from the bed that enabled George to ‘walk on water’. In the event Timothy never wrote the book, but Graeme Thomson’s superb George biography Behind The Locked Door, published late last year by Omnibus, somehow made up for it.

Although I got to know John and Paul during my MM days I only ever met George once, and briefly at that, in the company of Derek Taylor at a small reception at the Carlisle Hotel on Madison Avenue in New York in 1975. I never really got to know Eric Clapton either, although I went on the road with him and his band in July 1974, just before 461 Ocean Boulevard came out. I was standing at the side of the stage at a show at Three Rivers baseball stadium in Pittsburgh when who should arrive on the arm of Eric’s manager Robert Stigwood but Pattie Harrison – much to Eric’s delight. What’s she doing here?, I remember thinking, ignorant as I was to the infatuation that inspired Eric to write ‘Layla’ and the love triangle that existed between her and these two great guitarists.

Actually, Eric was pretty much sloshed every time I encountered him on this tour – for Slowhand read Legless – including on stage but somehow – just – he held it together to play well. In the early seventies he was a very different character from the sober, Armani-suited, philanthropic elder statesman of blues guitar we see today. The Band was also on the bill at this show and back at the hotel I befriended their bass player Rick Danko who a year later would try to put the make on my sister Anne when she visited me in NY – but that’s another story.

DECEMBER 8, 2013 - RIP John & George

It is the way of things that on the anniversaries of the death of important world figures there are calls for those alive when it occurred to recall where they were at the time they heard about it. Most recently this occurred with the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of JFK (I was in a dormitory in a [much loathed] boarding school at York), and it’ll probably happen with Nelson Mandela’s death (I was watching TV at home last Thursday evening).

     Today is the 33rd anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon. Because it happened in the evening in New York, which is five hours behind the UK, it was the middle of the night here so, like most people in the UK, it was the following morning when I heard. I was living in Shepherd’s Bush in London with my girlfriend Jenny who’d risen before me on the morning of Tuesday, December 9, 1980. She was listening to the radio when she heard the news and she came rushing into the bedroom to wake me. At first I didn’t believe her, then when I heard the radio it sunk in. I was quite numb. I threw on a few clothes and went out and bought some newspapers. Jenny went off to work but I didn’t go out all morning. I just sat there listening to the radio. One or two friends called me, including Michael Watts, my former MM colleague, who that evening appeared on Newsnight talking about John. At lunchtime I went to the Anglesea Arms pub across the road for lunch and sat on my own. Two men at the bar were discussing John’s murder and I felt like telling them that I knew him once. Then I didn’t because I figured they wouldn’t believe me.

     I learned of George’s death from a front page story in the Guardian written by another former MM colleague, Richard Williams, and the following day took the family to Abbey Road, stopping on the way to buy some flowers which we left in a vase on the studio steps. Olivia had drawn a picture of George, copied from his image in Yellow Submarine, and underneath written ‘Gently Weeping’. I learned later from my friend Keith Badman, a mega Beatles expert, that ITV news had focussed on a picture of George from Yellow Sub at the close of their report that night. Keith had taped it, and he sent me a copy. Yes, it was Olivia’s card.

                  RIP John and George.