George Harrison
George Harrison - The Making of 'Brainwashed'
(2002)
"Give me plenty of that guitar!"
With that simple request and you can just picture the smile on his face as he made it George Harrison announces the opening of "Brainwashed", the extraordinary album he was working on at the time of his death in November of 2001. And, indeed, "Brainwashed" delivers plenty of the guitar that made Harrison a decisive influence on every generation of players that came after him. The melodic lead lines and beautifully etched fills; the energetic acoustic strumming; the lyrical slide parts; all of that is present in bountiful amounts on these twelve tracks.
But there is much more to this album than great playing. Quite simply, it stands among the best work that Harrison ever did. It is a deeply personal statement from a deeply private man, and it reflects the intimacy he nurtured with questions that had gripped him since he began writing songs as a member of the Beatles: Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going?
There can be no question about the depth of Harrisons spiritual convictions, and "Brainwashed" makes that clear yet again. In his final years, Harrison confronted the imminence of his death, and that experience provides the foundation of this album, though not in a luridly explicit, confessional way. Its more like the events of his last years lent an inevitable gravity to issues Harrison had pondered for decades. When mortality stopped being a philosophical problem, but could be felt every moment in the beat of his pulse, these are the songs that George Harrison wrote. They were left unfinished, of course, as recordings. It had always been Harrisons intention to have Jeff Lynne help him complete the project a task Lynne would have to bring to closure on his own, under the supervision of Harrisons 24-year old son, Dhani. Lynne had co-produced Harrisons 1987 solo album, Cloud Nine; had been his partner in the Traveling Wilburys; had worked with him on "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" for the Beatles Anthology project, and, just as important as any of that, had been one of his closest friends.
Harrison's only child, Dhani had worked closely with his father from the very beginning of the project, as the songs were being written and recorded. In some instances Harrison had given his son instructions about how he'd like the songs to be fleshed out. In others he had sketched out arrangements that served as a kind of road map to the direction a song should take. It is impossible, then, to imagine two people more uniquely qualified than Dhani and Lynne to bring Harrison's vision for this album to fruition.
Still, any collaboration, especially one that is partially posthumous, requires some judicious decision-making. "I'd been talking to George for the past couple or three years about finishing these songs," Lynne says. "He said, 'I'd like you to finish them for me.' We talked about it, and he said that he didn't want the album to be posh. What he wanted, really, was kind of like demos. "But these songs deserved more than that, because they were great, as far as I was concerned," Lynne continues. "I thought if I left them as rough as he would have liked, they wouldn't come over as well. I wanted to make them as good as they could be, and I think we struck a true balance." He then addresses his old friend directly. "So, sorry George," he says, with affection. "I made them a little bit posher than you may have wanted. But I felt I was only doing them justice."
It was the sort of push-and-pull that Lynne and Harrison might have had in the studio had Harrison lived. And Dhani agrees with the direction Lynne decided to take. "The album was always going to be finished this way, with Jeff helping my dad and me with the final production," Dhani explains. "We just stuck to the plan, except that my dad died, which made our job more difficult." "Brainwashed" was completed over a six-month period at the studio in Lynne's California home. It would be fair to say that Harrison haunted the sessions, initially as an absence. "I remember coming in from England and recording guitars with Jeff the first night," Dhani recalls. "It was the most surreal thing ever. I kept turning around, looking for my dad - 'Er, is that all right?' And there's no one there to tell you."
Eventually, however, Harrison's presence began to be felt more positively. "The weirdness of his not being there was hard to take for the first few days," Lynne admits, as he sits in the large room at his home where he had recorded some string parts for "Brainwashed". "But once you got into a song and listened to the vocal up front and big, you could feel the vibe he put into it. Then the weirdness went away, and it was like he was around, and guiding us in some way." One listen to the album will dispel any concern that these songs don't embody the spirit of George Harrison. As Dhani says, "You couldn't cram more of my dad's real, true self into one album." The opening track, "Any Road," finds Harrison re-invoking the Wilburys' cheery folk-rock, with a Zen twist in the chorus: "If you don't know where you're going/Any road will take you there." On the sweet, dreamy "Pisces Fish," Harrison sings, "Some days my life, it seems like fiction/Some other days, it's really quite serene," lines that Dhani hears as central to the song, as well as to his father's journey in this world. "The first part of his life was as hectic as anyone's has ever been," Dhani explains. "He went everywhere and did everything in the most intense way. Then, for the second half of his life, he was in the garden, and he enjoyed nature, planted trees and wrote music. Those two contrasts made up a great balance." The title of the gorgeous instrumental, "Marwa Blues," derives from an Indian raga, and features Harrison's slide playing at its most gorgeous and yearning. The song unfolds like a prayer for deliverance from this world to a realm of endless mystic possibility. "Looking for My Life," on the other hand, summons up a darker reality. "I never knew that life was loaded," Harrison sings. "I never knew that things exploded/I only found it out when I was down upon my knees/Looking for my life." In discussing the song, Dhani uses the same sort of imagery that came naturally to his father. "I've seen a lot of strange things happen to my family in the last few years," he says. "Someone broke into our house and tried to murder us, and then, of course, there was my father's illness and the melee that ensues when the media intrudes upon your life. But you can experience only as much joy as you have had sorrow. Sorrow is like the hollowing out of a wooden block, and joy is what fills it up. The more sorrow you've had, the deeper the joy you can experience."
The old chestnut, "The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," recorded with Jools Holland's band, finds Harrison performing on his beloved ukulele. "Anyone who knew my dad smiles when they hear that," says Dhani. "That's really what he was like around the house." And as for the album's first single***, "Stuck Inside a Cloud," Dhani says, "The title could mean a veil of ignorance, something everyone on earth experiences and is ultimately trying to get rid of. It confuses you and shortens your vision. That's actually my favorite song -- I love it. My dad's favorite number was seven; he did a lot of things according to that number. That's why that song is the seventh track on the album."
Finally, Dhani describes "Brainwashed's" title track as "the truest song on the record." It's a catalogue of all the aspects of society that cloud our minds and blind us to larger truths. "You're brainwashed by the military," Dhani says. "You're brainwashed by corporate industry. You're brainwashed by the news media. And the song is saying that there is an alternative, which is thinking for yourself and self-realization - and God."
That last point is movingly dramatized as the song fades into the sound of Harrison chanting over the mesmerizing drone of a tamboura. It is a powerfully uplifting note on which to end the album. "That chant is very famous in India," Lynne says. "It's sometimes sung by great crowds of people. It was Dhani's idea to put it at the end, and Dhani double-tracks his dad's vocal on it, which is brilliant. His voice sounds exactly like George's." The chant, says Dhani, was his father's "alternative kind of brainwashing. He'd had it on a tape since before I was born. Its just something positive to leave people with at the end of the album."
By the time "Brainwashed" was completed, what had begun in painful feelings of grief and loss had transformed into something healing and redemptive for everyone involved. "It was, like, 'Wow, people are going to get to hear this, and it's great,'" says Lynne. "It began to seem like a more joyful experience, a celebration of George's life." The sort of celebration that Harrison's fans need and deserve and that he would have wanted them to have.
Anthony De Curtis