There are some who merely assume that George Harrison’s love for Indian music dates from across the time he and the opposite Beatles went to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s lecture in London, on August 24, 1967. In truth, George’s curiosity was piqued in April 1965 when The Beatles have been filming Assist! in April 1965.
“We were waiting to shoot the scene in the restaurant when the guy gets thrown in the soup, and there were a few Indian musicians playing in the background,” Harrison recalled. “I remember picking up the sitar and trying to hold it and thinking, ‘This is a funny sound.’ It was an incidental thing, but somewhere down the line, I began to hear Ravi Shankar’s name. The third time I heard it, I thought, ‘This is an odd coincidence.’ And then I talked with David Crosby of The Byrds, and he mentioned the name. I went and bought a Ravi record; I put it on and it hit a certain spot in me that I can’t explain, but it seemed very familiar to me. The only way I could describe it was: my intellect didn’t know what was going on and yet this other part of me identified with it. It just called on me… A few months elapsed and then I met this guy from the Asian Music Circle organization who said, ‘Oh, Ravi Shankar’s gonna come to my house for dinner. Do you want to come too?’”
In October 1965, George was first recorded enjoying sitar on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ for Rubber Soul. “I went and bought a sitar from a little shop at the top of Oxford Street called Indiacraft – it stocked little carvings and incense,” he later stated. “It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it a bit. Anyway, we were at the point where we’d recorded the ‘Norwegian Wood’ backing track and it needed something. We would usually start looking through the cupboard to see if we could come up with something, a new sound, and I picked the sitar up – it was just lying around; I hadn’t really figured out what to do with it. It was quite spontaneous: I found the notes that played the lick. It fitted and it worked.”
The second of George’s Indian-influenced songs was “Love You To,” recorded for Revolver. His third was “Within You Without You,” which opens the second aspect of the unique Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Membership Band – the one observe on the album not written by John Lennon or Paul McCartney.
George started writing “Within You Without You” on a pedal harmonium, and the music was merely labeled “Untitled” when he recorded it at Abbey Street Studios on the night of Wednesday, March 15, 1967. As George later recalled, “I’d also spent a lot of time with Ravi Shankar, trying to figure out how to sit and hold the sitar, and how to play it. ‘Within You Without You’ was a song that I wrote based upon a piece of music of Ravi’s that he’d recorded for All-India Radio. It was a very long piece – maybe 30 or 40 minutes – and was written in different parts, with a progression in each. I wrote a mini version of it, using sounds similar to those I’d discovered in his piece. I recorded in three segments and spliced them together later.”
George had an Indian pal enjoying tabla, and The Beatles’ engineer, Geoff Emerick, does a beautiful job of recording the instrument in a method that enhances the observe. George was the one Beatle within the studio that day, and it’s him and Neil Aspinall enjoying tamburas, with the dilruba and swarmandal performed by Indian musicians from the Asian Music Centre in Finchley Street, North London. Two extra dilrubas (much like a sitar however performed with a bow) have been overdubbed on March 22; violins and cellos have been added on April 3. Later that night, George recorded his lead vocals, a sitar half, and acoustic guitar. “Within You Without You” was completed and, in response to John Lennon, was “one of George’s best songs. One of my favorites of his, too. He’s clear on that song. His mind and his music are clear.”
As a footnote, the model included on The Beatles’ Anthology 2 is only instrumental and is slowed to its unique key and velocity. Later within the yr 1967, George continued his exploration of Indian musical concepts when he started work on the soundtrack to the movie Wonderwall.
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