GONZO WEEKLY #179: Jon meets John to talk about George

Radio Gonzo

Although I physically lived through them, having been born during the balmy summer of 1959, I missed out on the sixties. I spent the vast majority of the decade living in what was then the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which was quite a strange place, but almost entirely divorced from what was going on in Carnaby Street or Liverpool. I had heard of The Beatles, of course, but my only memories of the four lads who shook the world are fairly fragmented ones. I remember the furore in the news at the end of 1963 when a Church of England vicar asked the band to record “Oh Come all ye Faithfull, Yeah Yeah Yeah”. A couple of years later I remembered the storm in a teacup that happened when various old soldiers sent back their MBES in protest at The Beatles getting theirs, and I remember the rumours in 1969 that Paul McCartney had died. And that is about it. I returned to England to live just under a year after Paul had announced that the band had split up, and about three years later a schoolfriend lent me copies of the Help and Sergeant Pepper albums. And my life changed forever. I became an avid fan. I collected as many books and records as I could get hold of. And by the time that my first wife and I parted company acrimoniously twenty years ago this summer, I had over six hundred LPs in my Beatles collection. Not bad for a band who only released about a dozen albums during their lifetime. Of course they weren't all Beatles records. I had the entire recorded oeuvre of each of the members, as many records as I could find that had been released on the Beatles owned Apple Records, and as many of the guest appearances I could find by individual members. I also had foreign pressings, fan club flexis and over three hundred bootleg tapes, the latter even turned up listed in my first book. I think that you could say that I was a fan. Earlier this year someone sent me details of an illustrated discography of George Harrison by a dude called John Blaney. George Harrison was always my favourite of the Fab Four, and I thought that I was pretty au fait with the music that he had made. But I was interested to see what Blaney had made of this all, and so I emailed him politely asking for a copy of the book as a pdf. When it arrived I loaded it onto my trusty iPad and devoured it in one glorious evening of self indulgence. Four hundred pages, and it only covered the first half of Harrison's career. Bliss. As Psychedelic Baby magazine put it: “Working in chronological order, Blaney follows all the music Harrison made, produced, collaborated on, and released (as head of his Dark Horse label) through the years 1968-79. Even diehard Beatles/Harrison fans will likely not have previously known about some of the varied recordings Harrison was part of, as studio knob-twiddler, writer, player, label boss, etc. Details abound with respect to Harrison's musical relationships with the likes of Doris Troy, Billy Preston, Ravi Shankar, Badfinger, Ringo Starr, et al Naturally, the greatest attention is given to Harrison's own records. Blaney offers backstories about every individual song on Harrison's singles and albums from this period. He also supplies particulars on the playing credits, and offers his critical assessment of each tune/album. And, while he's correct in stating that his book should not be viewed as a biography per se, he does in fact sprinkle in notes about Harrison's personal life (focusing on his spiritual quest, but also touching on his love life, friendships, legal and business affairs, etc.) in drawing parallels between what Harrison was living and the music he made; and he analyzes the lyrics to many of Harrison's songs, offering his impressions of their inspirations and meanings. A key element of the book is its graphics. It is lushly illustrated with a vast selection of relevant images, including album covers and the records themselves, magazine advertisements, etc. In this respect it can function as a coffee table book that one could enjoy flipping through just for the wealth of illustrations.” Then I discovered that he had also done the same sort of thing with both Lennon (one volume) and McCartney (four volumes), and so I blagged copies of these off John Blaney as well. I was massively impressed. Clearly this man is an even bigger Beatlenerd than I am. And that is saying something. So I emailed him again, and made arrangements to do an interview. And not to the surprise of anyone who knows me (or I suspect him) we got on like a house on fire and talked happily for ages, only stopping because I discovered with a guilty double take that I was seven minutes late for doing my next interview. I think that you can take it as a given that I shall be interviewing John Blaney reasonably regularly in the future, if only to get my regular fix of Beatlenerd-dom. But in the meantime this will have to do…