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When Paul Simon visited George Harrison at his estate in England, he asked him about boulders on the property. Harrison told Simon that the boulders had been there when he moved in. He told his former bandmate, Ringo Starr, a different story, though. Harrison made up a story to make Starr think Paul McCartney left him out of a promotional campaign.

A black and white picture of George Harrison holding up a thumbs up with his arm around Ringo Starr's shoulders.
Ringo Starr and George Harrison | Cummings Archives/Redferns

Paul Simon visited the former Beatle’s home

Simon and Harrison became friends in 1976, after they performed on Saturday Night Live together. Simon visited Harrison’s home, Friar Park, for the first time in 2000. 

“I hadn’t seen George for several years and was anxious to know, in person, how he was faring after the harrowing attack he’d endured just ten months earlier, on New Year’s Eve 1999,” Simon wrote for a special edition of Rolling Stone, “Remembering George.” “‘I’m really happy to see you,’ he said as we shook hands and embraced, ‘and these days, when I say I’m really happy to see someone, I mean I’m really happy.'”

Simon said the beauty of Harrison’s gardens impressed him.

“He looked healthy and his mood was up as we approached a wooden bridge over a pond of waterlilies,” he wrote. “I’d never been to Friar Park before, but the rhythm of the wind in the leaves and the cluster chords of autumn’s orange, gold and evergreen made it easy to understand why he’d chosen to spend the last thirty years gradually planting, pruning, editing and reshaping the land while at the time recasting himself from pop-culture icon to master gardener.”

Paul Simon shared the prank George Harrison pulled on Ringo Starr

While walking around the garden, Simon noticed a large pair of boulders and asked Harrison about them.

“There in the middle of a field of wildflowers were two huge boulders weighing several tons and standing one atop the other like a pair of giant granite acrobats,” Simon wrote. “‘Are those the work of a sculptor?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘they came from opposite ends of the property, but we moved them here and stacked them in this field. Everyone wants to know about them.'”

Harrison used this as an opportunity to prank his former bandmate, Starr.

“‘In fact, when Ringo came round for a visit last summer, he asked about them as well,'” Simon recalled Harrison saying. “‘I told him that Paul’s record company had sent them as a promo for his new album, Standing Stone. Ringo was really miffed that he hadn’t gotten his standing stones, but I said they’d probably only posted them to A-list people.’ Liverpool accents always sound to me like a joke is coming, but Harrison’s wit was deadpan and dead-on.”

George Harrison and Ringo Starr were close friends

Harrison was able to joke like this with Starr because of their close friendship. Starr appreciated Harrison’s humor and recalled that he maintained it even at the end of his life.

“I was going to Boston, ’cause my daughter had a brain tumor,” Starr said in the documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World. “And I said, ‘Well, I gotta go to Boston,’ and [Harrison] goes — they’re the last words I heard him say, actually — and he said, ‘Do you want me to come with ya?’ So that’s the incredible side of George.”

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