George Harrison Didn’t Know if His Life Was a ‘Blessing or a Curse’
George Harrison didn’t know if his life was a “blessing or a curse.” On the one hand, George was blessed and fortunate enough to have become a rich and internationally famous rock star. On the other hand, there were times when he felt as if no one gave him the privacy he desperately craved.
George Harrison didn’t know if his life was a ‘blessing or a curse’
According to Graeme Thomson’s George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door, George visited his childhood home in Liverpool in the mid-1970s. Looking up at the building, he thought: “How do I come into that family, in that house, at that time – and who am I anyway?”
After being with The Beatles and achieving worldwide success, George often questioned why God had placed him in that particular body and given him the life he had. Spirituality later taught him that everything was predetermined. George believed that God wanted him to be famous so that he could spread the spiritual word to all his fans. However, sometimes being famous wasn’t all that great.
During a 1975 interview with Dave Herman at WNEW-FM (per George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters), George spoke about all that he’d accomplished in his life so far. He explained that in Hinduism, you believe your life is like a play and that Krishna has it all planned out. Herman pointed out that people have free will and that George chose what he did with his life to express himself through music and try to educate people through it.
George replied, “To a degree, but I don’t really choose, you know? This is the funny thing. It’s like, to say, in some respects, my life, to be me, is … I’m not sure if it was a blessing or a curse, you see, because, the blessing is that you’re rich and famous and all this looks rosy.
“But on the other hand, behind the scenes, to know that what then you expect of yourself by knowing what you know through being what you’ve been, that’s the thing of learning and knowledge. And then, of what others expect of you and then all the millions of situations you get involved with by being that person.
“This goes for like anybody who goes through a similar sort of situation. Then in some respects it’s a pain in the neck.”
George wished he could be invisible in life
While George knew he had to use his fortunate life to spread good, it came at a price. Being famous meant sacrificing some things, and George often didn’t want to.
In Here Comes The Sun: The Spiritual And Musical Journey Of George Harrison, Joshua M. Greene wrote, “Looking at his career in that practical, realistic way, George was beginning to see little to be happy about. Newsreels and movies of the day may have depicted his life as fun and games, but nothing could have been farther from the truth.
“‘A good romp? That was fair in the films,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘I, Me, Mine,’ ‘but in the real world . . . we didn’t have any space . . . like monkeys in a zoo.”
George never escaped the watchful eye of the public and the hounding of the press. They analyzed and scrutinized his every move. Constantly living life in a fish bowl aggravated him. Herman asked George if his life as a rock star was lonely. George replied that he wished he was invisible sometimes.
“Sure, sometimes it is,” George said. “Sometimes it’s just hard. You’d just like to be anonymous. Sometimes I’d just like to be invisible, even now after ten or whatever, twelve years, of that. I still find I can’t even go out. If I want to go out and watch somebody singing at the Roxy or something, I go in there and it’s like the club tilts over.
“I become part of the show. And that’s amazing after all that time. Sometimes it’s nice to be invisible and just go out and just be nobody.”
The spiritual Beatle came to terms with his life
George might’ve had contradictory views on his life as a rock star, but he eventually came to terms with it all. He realized being a Beatle wasn’t all that bad. The press still watched his every move, but even they cooled toward the end of his life.
When George was preparing to leave the material world for the spiritual one, he didn’t care whether his life was a blessing or a curse. Everything merged into one satisfying existence. George bore no physical or mental scars. As his son, Dhani said, he was like a yogi.
