THE SPIRITUAL AND MUSICAL JOURNEY

George Harrison, Tokyo Hilton, 1966 (screen capped from footage of The Beatles in the hotel hallway)

“I remember interviewing them, and in those days, honestly, George wasn’t the most exciting Beatle. As a journalist, you’d go after John or Paul of Ringo. George’s introspection made us afraid of getting too much of the mortal sin for a broadcaster, namely dead air. But in retrospect, that was very wrong. I think now that if we had given George the courtesy and respect he deserved, his whole persona might have changed. But none of us did that. It was the other three who got 90 per cent of the action.

When he was interviewed, George was always direct, never flowery with his words. He answered succinctly. If he could answer in two sentences, he never made it into a paragraph. He had kind eyes. When you spoke with him, he looked directly at you. You knew there was sensitivity at work. I remember talking to George in one Beatles interview, and McCartney butts in and asks John, ‘Hey, John, why don’t you tell him who you’re sleeping with now?’ First of all, in those days, you didn’t make those kinds of references on the air. But I remember George looking down. He didn’t say anything, but he looked down as if he was embarrassed or disapproved. I don’t know whether it was for me or for what McCartney said, but it did seem that he felt the comment out of line. Maybe their success in America had hit them so quickly that they didn’t always know how to handle it and would sometimes react with nervous energy and get occasionally snippy. But Harrison never was.“ - Bruce "Cousin Brucie” Morrow on The Beatles, Here Comes The Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison by Joshua M. Greene [x]