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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