“We were proud being Wilburys and it was a lot of fun, but the greatest thing to me was there were some really long-lasting friendships made, and that’s a kind of gift that you just don’t get all the time.” - Tom Petty on The Traveling Wilburys, Billboard (November 28, 2005)
![Q: “You made music that awoke and changed the world. Could you sense that special dimension of it all while it was happening, or were you lost in the middle of it?”
George Harrison: “A combination of both, I think. Lost in the middle of it — not knowing a thing — and at the same time somehow knowing everything. Around the time of Rubber Soul and Revolver it was like I had a sudden flash, and it all seemed to be happening for some real purpose. The main thing for me was having the realization that there was definitely some reason for being here. And now the rest of my life as a person and a musician is about finding out what that reason is, and how to build upon it.”
Q: “Finally, any recent acid flashbacks you care to share?”
GH: “[laughs] No, no, that doesn't happen to me anymore. I've got my own cosmic lighting conductor now. Nature supports me.” - Guitar World (interview conducted in 1992, published in 2001)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hwvlozdzepfmosiy5mbsc6pe/bafkreif2q5zwkc7x4yqd3zkgqamlj4hg5jngr3un4gspr3rwzuokzo2oua)
![George and ukulele, in a screenshot from The Beatles Anthology.
“Former repairman Ron Chambliss remembers George Harrison coming in [to McCabe’s Guitar Shop, Santa Monica] not long before his death. (‘A lot of stars come in. We have a hands-off policy.’) Harrison chatted Chambliss up, shared his deep passion for songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, hipped Ron to a reissue of Carmichael’s recordings and then left. (For Beatles completists: He also bought a metal-body National ukulele with a brown wrinkle finish.) A little stunned, Chambliss went back to work. A half-hour passed and someone told him he had a phone call. He picked up the phone: ‘Hello Ron, this is George, I was in there a little while ago.’ Chambliss affirmed that he remembered who he was. Harrison had simply called to give Chambliss the catalog number of the Carmichael CD so he could order it. ‘He took the time to call me back. It gave me a boost in humanity.’” - LA Weekly (September 24, 2008)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hwvlozdzepfmosiy5mbsc6pe/bafkreicqheyslboynfe4quszqpx43lp5fx6jsjrsj2s3q2h5zjedo7ddzi)
![The Beatles at their press conference held at the George Washington Hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, on September 11, 1964; photo by Vern Barchard. Also featured are two newspaper headlines from September ’64 (from the Miami Herald and the Manchester Evening News). The headlines read: “No segregation, or else—say Beatles” and “Admit All Or No Show, Beatles Say.”
The Beatles refused to play to segregated audiences in America, and had a clause stating this stance included in their concert contracts.
“The Beatles made history: it was the first time blacks and whites sat together in the Gator Bowl [in Jacksonville].” - Larry Kane, MOJO (October 2016)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hwvlozdzepfmosiy5mbsc6pe/bafkreicvsdyrhplynfrpksstahrzgpfdzkckz7ixtm2qjae4rob3y6lnyi)
![George Harrison photographed by Norman Parkinson at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios on September 12, 1963.
“George Harrison is the youngest and most handsome Beatle, the one with the most hair. He calls it ‘hur.’
[…] He has a happy disposition, a ready smile, and a capacity for enjoying himself.
‘For the kick-off,’ George says, ‘we got our laughs. We’ve always had our laughs. You see, we are our own friends.’
He is good at the guitar. On the stage he has almost drawing-room manners, gazing shyly at the floor, strumming away.
Like Arthur Askey before him, he went to the Liverpool Institute, a school that prides itself on the number of people it sends to the university. It didn’t send George. ‘We used to rock it up in the lunch hour, con the teacher into letting us play records.’
[…] ‘It’s all happening,’ he says with relish. ‘I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it. Remember we did this for about two bob a week for three years before we made it. It’s a fast life.’” - Maureen Cleave, The Beatles: Pictures Suitable for Framing featuring photography by Norman Parkinson (1963)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hwvlozdzepfmosiy5mbsc6pe/bafkreifkddng3jl5f4n5b276qchhnv5hmdqh4qragkrjihhnkhvkt5uf3a)
![In Baltimore, MD, on September 13, 1964; photo by Mike Mitchell/Paul Popper/Popperfoto via Getty Images.
“‘I almost fainted,’ recalled [Mary] Meyer, now Mary Meyer Berends, 75. […] [S]he’ll never forget being almost close enough to reach out and touch Harrison.
‘The best things in my life have been marrying a wonderful man and having wonderful children, and after that, it has to be seeing George.’ She said. ‘He didn’t stay long, but he never left my heart.’” - article by Jonathan M. Pitts, The Baltimore Sun (June 11, 2022)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hwvlozdzepfmosiy5mbsc6pe/bafkreicpprshkg6jwqsqna5klh7x4v4j7b6icafmd2r46ossobhpzzc4si)
![Photo by Wolfgang Heilemann.
“I’ll quote Maharishi, which is as good as quoting anybody else, and he says ‘For a forest to be green, each tree must be green,’ and so if people want revolutions, and you want to change the world and you want to make it better, it’s the same. They can only make it good if they themselves have made it — and if each individual makes it himself then automatically everything’s alright. There is no problem if each individual doesn’t have any problems. ‘Cause we create the problems — Christ said ‘Put your own house in order,’ and Elvis said ‘Clean-up your own backyard,’ so that’s the thing. If everybody just fixes themselves up first, instead of everybody going around trying to fix everybody else up like the Lone Ranger, then there isn’t any problem. The problems are created more, sometimes, by people going around trying to fix up the government, or trying to do something. [...] [E]verything is bound by the laws of nature, which are relativity. What goes up must come down. It’s the whole yin-yang thing, left-right, up-down, black-white, wrong-right — all these things are just equal and opposite. It’s like you can’t have the north pole if you don’t have the south pole. You only measure goodness by badness, so in actual fact you can only have good if you have bad. So bad and good are equal and opposite — it’s the law of duality, so really it’s silly to say that’s bad — let’s make it good, because then you know good becomes bad as well. The whole thing is to try and appreciate that it’s changing all the time — that the physical universe is good and bad — and that, surely, is one of the reasons why people turn to religion or philosophy or something — to try and find some underlying Absolute to all this relativity.” - George Harrison, International Times (September 11, 1969)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hwvlozdzepfmosiy5mbsc6pe/bafkreidzjhvjt3x4zy3rkibg6rcpmuyrq7wzsdzqxujpdb263lmyjk5loi)
![George Harrison aboard the QE2, Southampton, England, 8 September 1971; photo © PA Images.
“I played on the single Bangladesh but didn’t play at the concert. The event was filmed, and after George had finished editing it, he invited me to return to England on the QE2, which was the newest and sleekest ocean liner at the time. We had to have special, odd eating times in the dining room because word had spread that he was onboard and people were starting to hassle him with photo and autograph requests. I remember very early one morning playing Ping-Pong with him in the recreation room just so we could avoid curious tourists. We weren’t following any rules, just whacking the ball as hard as we could at each other like little kids. We had that kind of friendship where we could joke around with one another. […] George had brought a mandolin and several guitars with him for the trip back to the U.K., and we would pass the time in his suite playing, writing songs, and reading spiritual books together. I still have several songs on cassette from that trip that I plan to finish writing one day.” - Gary Wright, Dream Weaver: Music, Meditation, and My Friendship with George Harrison](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hwvlozdzepfmosiy5mbsc6pe/bafkreiaulz4ruclabyp4mhq2ivdfouftaeuc2m6zhr32xn22bjsvcxih2m)
![“[In 1974] I just went on a binge, went on the road… all that sort of thing, until it got to the point where I had no voice and almost no body at times. Then I met Olivia and it all worked out fine. There’s a song on the new album, ‘Dark Sweet Lady’: ‘You came and helped me through/When I’d let go/You came from out the blue/Never have known what I’d done without you.’ That sums it up.” - George Harrison, Rolling Stone (April 19, 1979)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hwvlozdzepfmosiy5mbsc6pe/bafkreiaophi35smpuukcltiubf332ln5nxhjvrbcghkfyb7txmzovr3fcu)
