George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door

Drawing on many new interviews with Harrison's close friends and musical collaborators, music journalist Thomson (Kate Bush: Under the Ivy) challenges the image of George Harrison as "the quiet Beatle," portraying the guitarist as a complex person trying to navigate a middle course between materiality and spirituality, and fame and reclusivity. In tedious and tiresome fashion, Thomson chronicles Harrison's life from his rather run-of-the mill childhood and his early days of making music with The Quarrymen to the beginnings of The Beatles, their rapid ascent to fame and their just as speedy descent. He explores Harrison's embrace of Eastern philosophy, his retirement to his Friar Park estate in England, and with meticulous detail, traces the making of each of Harrison's solo albums. Thomson shows that "Harrison didn't grow up wanting to be a pop star, or a singer, or a songwriter. He just wanted to play guitar." As Thomson observes, many of his friends and many music critics point out that in 1971, with the release of All Things Must Pass, Harrison was already at the top of the musical mountain and his career would move downhill from there. In the end, Thomson reveals very little new information about Harrison, but he succeeds in showing that the guitarist's greatest accomplishment was finding fulfillment every day in the simple joys of being "somewhere" in his life. (Jan.)