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George Harrison
Did you see any today?"


George Harrison fixed me with soft, far-away eyes. He said nothing for a minute or two. Olivia, his girl friend, came into the room, carrying a glass of ice water. We are in Bombay, India.
"Did you see any today?" he asked.
"No," I said. "I didn't see any."
"Me either," George said.
"Well," he continued, "we're going up to Benares. It's either now or twenty years from now, and I'm not sure if I'm going to be around twenty years from now. We're targets for assassination, you know."
"Oh, George, stop that," Olivia said. "Just stop that!"
"Well, we're still going to Benares. You ought to come, Gil," George said. "Living gods guaranteed to line the road, on either side. Take your pick. Some of them live in caves and haven't eaten any solid food in years. You'll see them there, for sure"
"I don't know," I said. "I've got some things to attend to back home. Business things. I've got this whole other business scene happening. I think I'm screwing up enough already, without going to Benares with George Harrison for the Kumbla Mela!
Can you imagine? They'd have my ass for sure. Nancy, too."
"I don't know what you mean." George said.
Not going to the Kumbla Mela in 1976 with George Harrison and his bride to be, Olivia, was the worst mistake I made all that year, unless you count our subsequent involvement with Ray the Parrot, who had us make a funky black jazz album at Long View Farm called Stuff, nearly for free, as I remember it. I also made some mistakes with my student travel company, ALSG, which was at that time growing more quickly than any of us could calculate.
But this is taking us away from a recounting of events which occurred in India, in 1976, when I was still somewhat new to student travel and show business alike.
I can remember the marriage of Ravi Shankar's niece. That's why George Harrison was in India, basically: to attend this marriage. I can remember the ride we took well outside city limits, George Harrison, his perky friend Olivia, and me.

It's late afternoon: we find ourselves in a spacious suburban home, about an hour's drive outside of Bombay. George Harrison is carrying a leather briefcase containing a dozen or so crisp, new copies of Paramahansa Yogananda's book Autobiography of a Yogi.1 George will give you one of these books, personally autographed, if you like.
There are many people in this home, which is airy, wooden, and polished. There are people talking in small groups; all are colorfully dressed. There is the smell of Madras Curry powder wafting through the air, driven by slow moving, overhead, World War II-vintage, three-bladed electric fans. We are at a wedding feast.
We find ourselves seated on the floor — forty of us more or less — in the lotus position, in two long rows, facing each other over a bed of luxurious, wide palm leafs which function as a sort of vegetable place setting. Humps of delectable mixtures, for eating, are on the leaves, and are picked away at by the wedding guests, using their left and only their left hands. I understand the significance of this practice, and follow suit.
George is sitting next to Ravi Shankar, who is not playing the Sitar.
Another Indian gentleman is playing the Sitar, instead, behind us and largely out of sight. He bows and smiles as his eyes meet mine. My interest was just knowing who was playing the Sitar, not much more than that. I am embarrassed by this man's kind smiles. People seem very kind in this house.
Ravi Shankar leans over to George; takes his face in his hands, and kisses it. George acknowledges the gesture wiith a gentle smile, then turns his face forward again, his eyes falling down upon the mantle of green on the polished mahogany floor, which he appears to study, soberly.
Olivia, a lovely young woman and obviously dedicated to her husband-to-be, follows his gaze with her own.
For their part, today's bride and the bridegroom are on the other end of the row of green leaves, smiling to the left and to the right, pecking each other lovingly, and only so slightly aware that a demi-God of the Western world is in their midst, as a guest, sitting next to the uncle of the bride, Ravi Shankar.2
The fans circulate silently overhead, spreading the warm, musk-like smells of living India throughout the wedding party, and out the wide, plant-wreathed windows and into the night.
A song is sung, in a dialect I cannot understand. I see middle-aged aunts mopping their eyes in the doorways to this anointed room. I see a white bird swoop in through one of these doorways, circle around the assembled group, and disappear out a hatchway in the ceiling. I wonder if this is all real.
Later, that same evening, I find myself with George and Olivia in a taxi heading back to the swarm of humanity which is downtown Bombay, and to our hotel.
"Don't worry, he's cool." George said, gesturing to our driver, whose black eyes were riveted on the road ahead, and on the crazy stream of yellow, half-shrouded automobile headlights coming at us, each of them threatening a wild, your-life-is-over collision in the bowels of India.
George applied a match stick to a large, paper-wrapped mixture of London cigarette tobacco and crumpled black hashish. He smoked it alone for several minutes. Olivia would have none of it, when offered. Instead, it was passed to me. I knew joints like this. This was naughty sixties-London. "Can you, will you, smoke this thing? Do so and we will talk about the rest... about peace in our time... about a world which none of us understands, about..."
"George," I said, "you talked to Gary recently?" Gary Wright was then and is still now a childhood friend of mine hailing from northern New Jersey, who emigrated to England in the late sixties for the purpose of avoiding any additional time in medical school, for which he was qualified but manifestly ill-suited, and for the purpose of creating the wildly successful rock 'n' roll band, Spooky Tooth, which had been named, believe it or not, by my Yale comarade-in-arms and ALSG co-founder, Theodore S. Voelkel.
Ted would smoke dope and hallucinate spectacularly mis-matched nouns and adjectives, out of which many rock 'n' roll groups came to be named during that period in time. Spooky Tooth was just one of them.
Ted, a Bill Buckley Conservative in those days, and these, has never received the credit he deserves for these contributions, which made mock and intellectual garbage of then-current (and still current) political dividing lines. Ted Voelkel was a spokesman; no, a spokesperson, for those energy-filled, confused days in the late nineteen-sixties.
"No," George Harrison said. "Haven't talked to Gary in months. You talked to him?"
"Yeah, he doing great." Gary Wright would shortly record the song Dream Weaver, which now presents itself as a selection on any 1990's Karaoke Saturday night bar room offering in the United States.
"Gary is doing fine," I said.
"And so what about Benares?" George Harrison continued.
"No." I said. "I guess I'm not going to Benares..."
"The next time is 1997," George reminded me. "You may be sorry."
"I know," I said.
Although I would deny it many years later, my visit to India, and George Harrison's to the extent that I was given to understand it, had to do with the discovery and interrogation of living gods.
To date, we had each come up empty-handed. 3

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Трибьют ,посвященный Джорджу находится вот тут
http://www.studiowner.com/essays/gh113001.htm
November 30, 2001
Writing almost exclusively these past weeks, and months (and, it seems, years), on the topic of international terrorism, and the threat posed by recent unwelcome events to the "broadband education" of our sons and daughters, it comes as an odd sort of relief to be able to say some things about the unwelcome death of a friend, and the passing of a cultural icon. The experience, however sad and sombre, is uplifting by comparison.
The person I am talking about is George Harrison, the ex-Beatle. I met George (and his lovely-wife-to-be Olivia) on an airplane headed from the islands of the Seychelles to Bombay, India. It was a day in December, 1976. George was an ex-Beatle; I was the owner of the successful student travel company, ALSG, and a dabbler in the electronic recording arts as the proprietor of the Massachusetts countryside recording studio, Long View Farm.

We had a lot to talk about in the airplane, and in the Bombay hotel Taj Mahal where, by further coincidence, we were destined to stay for a week or so. Only, it wasn't about the Beatles that we talked, or about the student travel business in the United States, or about the Massachusetts recording studio (which would soon, with a word or two of encouragement from George, be called upon to host the second-most important rock 'n' roll band in the world, the Rolling Stones.) It was about living gods that we talked.

That's what he was doing in India. That's why I was there. We were hunting for living gods —divinely empowered human creatures who could do things like levitating matchboxes from across a room, or like living in a cave for two decades, like Rip Van Winkle, on nothing but the smell of incense and lofty thoughts.
It turns out that we both had the same paperback book in our flight bags, Paramahansa Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi." We had each read it several times. He autographed my copy of the book; I underlined the paragraphs I liked best in his. The book was to be our Michelin Guide, here in the land of virtual saints and sidewalk transcendence.
Neither George Harrison nor I would think any less of the paperback book because we could find no living gods on the sidewalks of Bombay. With great humor and optimism, George assured this author that all good things take a while sometimes to materialize, and that we should satisfy ourselves in the meanwhile with the beauty ingredient in the here-and-now.
Bombay, for example. George taught me how to purchase silver necklaces in tiny stores in alleyways, and how to haggle for sandlewood carvings which told the story of Indian religious figures, including elephants.
George's friends, as another example. He took me an hour outside of town in a lurching, speeding taxicab to the place where Ravi Shankar lived. There was a reason for the trip. Ravi Shankar's niece was to be married that day, in the presence of a demi-god of the West, who was of course George himself. I was happy to be there, eating with the fingers of my right hand while sitting cross-legged on a polished floor, and listening to the music of sitars.
George and I left Bombay in 1976 without having located any living gods. George was not giving up, however. "You've got to come up to Benares, Gil," he said. The every-twenty-year spiritual festival of the Kumbla Mela was just about to begin, and people said that on occasions such as these there were living gods to be seen on every street corner, and in every country cave, each with wisdom to dispense.
I didn't go. I had my business career to attend to, back in the United States. There was a recording studio to watch over, and American students to send to Europe and to points beyond. I tried to explain this to George months later, on the telephone.
And now it's 25 years later still. The recording studio became well known, and filled itself with rock stars. I am still officiating over the travel of American students to Europe and to points beyond, with great passion and dedication. But George Harrison is no longer teasing me about the rarity of living gods, having taken on some of these trappings himself a night or two ago in Los Angeles.
Beats obsessing about the terrorists, thinking these thoughts.

Dr. Gilbert Scott Markle
Executive Director

*помним*

*Помним*

ПОМНИМ

помним, любим, скорбим

We will always love you, dear George!

Horse to the Water

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