I really want to feel you/
I really want to see you, Lord/
But it takes so long, my Lord/
My sweet Lord, oh, my Lord!
I’m getting carried away again. I’m getting emotional again. I’m holding back tears. Stop me or I’ll cry.
It’s Friday morning, Nov. 30, and, like Beatlemaniacs around the world, I’m mourning the death of George Harrison who, at 58, succumbed to cancer (of the throat) last Thursday, Nov. 29. The sad news is all over the front pages and I’m crushed, expected though George’s demise might be.
I’m driving to Tomas Morato Avenue (Quezon City) for a presscon and on the radio, George’s plaintive song, My Sweet Lord, is playing as part of an FM station’s tribute, and every word of every sentence of every stanza of that song is hitting me hard.
George, The Quiet Beatle, wrote that song in the early ’70s, a few years after The Fab Four broke up. Even if I’ve heard that and other Beatles songs over and over again, it’s only now that The Quiet Beatle is dead that I see some kind of a "premonition" in that song, almost like a longing to be with his Sweet Lord.
He left this world as he lived in it, conscious of God, fearless of death, and at peace….
That was the official family statement, issued by George’s wife, Olivia Arias, and their 24-year-old son Dhani who were beside George when he died at the house of a friend in L.A., giving up his battle with The Big C that started in the mid-’90s, made public only in 1998.
In contrast to the shocking death of fellow Beatle John Lennon at age 40 in the hands of that assassin, Mark Chapman, on Dec. 9, 1980, at the doorstep of the Dakota Mansion in New York where Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono lived, George "left quietly." True to form. In life, he was just as talented as the two other Beatles – Lennon and Paul McCartney – but he was quiet and therefore, like the fourth Beatle Ringo Starr, didn’t get the same attention and recognition of his talent the way John and Paul did.
Besides My Sweet Lord, George wrote a few other songs during his Beatle days (Here Comes The Sun, If I Needed Someone, Taxman and While My Guitar Gently Weeps), including and especially Something which has been covered by the likes of Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra who described it as "a great love song."
I’m sure that thousands – nay, millions! – have expressed undying love and proposed eternal (marital) happiness to their beloved with George softly singing Something in the background – you know, Something in the way she moves attracts me like no other lover – in the same manner that millions of others might have lost their innocence to other Beatles songs, such as… Hey, Jude? (… so let it out and let it in, hey Jude, begin, the movement you need is on your shoulder...)
The wire stories mentioned that George died a quiet death, surrounded not only by his family but also by Hare Krishna practitioners he had befriended a few years after he studied transcendental meditation (TM) in India under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, later introducing the three other Beatles to TM. The Indian influence was very obvious not only in George’s lifestyle but also in his music, with the sitar used extensively as background musical instrument in most of his compositions (listen carefully to While My Guitar Gently Weeps and, that’s it, My Sweet Lord).
I could imagine George’s Hare Krishna soulmates quietly chanting "Hare Krishna! Hare Krishna! Hare Krishna!" the way George does so as refrain in My Sweet Lord, as if lulling himself to Eternal Slumber.
As I type this on my old rickety but still reliable Olympia, I’m playing, again, my Beatles CDs, from Love Me Do to Let It Be, all-inclusive of the Fab Four’s immortal songs from 1962 to 1970, including my favorite, In My Life, which says in part: Some have gone and some remain… some are dead and some are living. In my life, I’ve loved them all…
Even while George was ailing, there were reports that he and the two other surviving Beatles – Paul and Ringo – were planning a reunion concert. It would have been the first big musical event of the New Millennium, a big celebration for Beatlemaniacs in every corner of the globe, a "coming together" long put on hold.
But it wasn’t meant to be.
Years from now, maybe they’ll finally have that much-awaited reunion concert, along with John, in some place where, you know, all the people are living life in peace, forever and ever.
For sure, icons who have gone ahead like Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and Henry Mancini will be among the audience, coming together one more time in sweet reminiscence of yesterday.
Imagine!
I agree with the radio deejay (with a strange twang that’s neither English nor American) when he observes that the Beatles is the only singing group whose members are known individually, independent from their collective identity, so that we know them by their first names as if they were members of our immediate families – that is, as simply John, simply Paul, simply George and simply Ringo.
Suddenly, I was half the man I used to be; there’s a shadow hanging over me. Oh, yesterday came suddenly...
True, indeed! When John was murdered, you, too, must have felt as if one of your extremities was amputated, haven’t you?
And now, it’s George.
I really want to be with you.
George got his wish. He’s now with his Sweet Lord.
Let it be!