Behind Sad Eyes: The Life of George Harrison

Rating:
Summary: If you're a Beatles or Harrison fan, save your money..
Review: And if you aren't already a fan, I can't imagine you'd be interested in this quick gloss over of Harrison's life.

Honestly, I was given this book as a present. And I read it over two days when I was home sick. The book is an easy read, and isn't poorly written. It doesn't sensationalize or gossip either. Thus the second star on the rating.
But there was almost nothing in this book that I didn't already know. It was same as watching the show "Biography".


If you need this book for your Harrison collection, then look for it in the bargain bin. Otherwise, I'd stay away.


Rating:
Summary: Does this guy have an editor?
Review: FULL OF GRAMMAR ERRORS & WRONG HISTORY DATES. THE BOOK CO. & AUTHOR SHOULD BE IN DISGRACE!!!

Rating:
Summary: George, (...)
Review: I have always liked Harrison, and his great songs! He was always the Beatle that I prefered in most contexts, though McCartney is certainly the the ranking genuis of the genre. But, Harrison was the one that intrigued my curiosity during those wonderful years when music was created, & rated, by merit, rather than hype.
But this book was not as informative as I had hoped prior to the read. It would be a good starting text for the novice, but for those of us that have followed the fabs since the sixties, this work lacks any surprises.
I did enjoy the photos, and the cover shot is the best of the group of biographical works that have come to the market since November 29, 2001. But, read this only if it is among your first books on the subject of George Harrison.

Rating:
Summary: The Eyes are not the only "SAD" thing here!
Review: I have always liked Harrison, and his great songs! He was always the Beatle that I prefered in most contexts, though McCartney is certainly the the ranking genuis of the genre. But, Harrison was the one that intrigued my curiosity during those wonderful years when music was created, & rated, by merit, rather than hype.
But this book was not as informative as I had hoped prior to the read. It would be a good starting text for the novice, but for those of us that have followed the fabs since the sixties, this work lacks any surprises.
I did enjoy the photos, and the cover shot is the best of the group of biographical works that have come to the market since November 29, 2001. But, read this only if it is among your first books on the subject of George Harrison.

Rating:
Summary: This might bug you.
Review: My favorite part of this book is the word *guitar*, which is closely associated with the name George Harrison in the George Harrison Discography on pages 212-231. The Discography actually starts on page 207, with his solo albums in 1968, 1969, 1970, "The Concert for Bangladesh (1971)," 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1987, "Traveling Wilburys: Volume One (1988)," 1989, 1990, and "George Harrison Live in Japan (1992)." There was no need to mention that he played guitar on those albums, or in the famous Beatles group before that, because almost everybody thought that mainly he was there to play guitar. There were a few surprises for me after that: "James Taylor (1969) George sang harmony on the song `Carolina on My Mind,' GOODBYE Cream (1969) George co-wrote and played guitar on the song `Badge.' " (p. 212). Somehow I never noticed that on DONOVAN RISING (1973), "George wrote a verse for the song `Hurdy Gurdy Man' that was not in the original version of the song." (p. 220).

Most of the things that I remember from the book BEHIND SAD EYES were events in the personal life of George Harrison that I hadn't thought much about before. The thing about George and Pattie, Pattie and Eric, with George thinking, "I thought that was the best thing to do, for us to split, and we should have just done it much sooner. But I didn't have any problem about it." (p. 110). In a society that tunes in mainly to the psychological needs of each individual, that kind of thinking is much easier for a writer to identify and portray than the kind of temper exhibited by Ringo after George started singing love songs for Maureen one night, when Ringo and Maureen invited George and Pattie to their home for dinner, and "Pattie, totally mortified at this latest embarrassment, burst into tears and locked herself in Ringo's bathroom." (p. 121). There is no index, and the chapter titles are not much good at locating particular incidents that you might be interested in, but the book is a guide to how certain people see life, and the media have grown on a need to find this kind of information.

Rating:
Summary: Good for an airplane ride
Review: This cursory Harrison biography was clearly cranked out in something of a hurry so that there would be more books on the shelf about Harrison following his recent, premature death. It contains the numerous factual errors and unsupported assumptions that so often plague books written by professional book-writers and journalists who have done some research but are not intimately familiar with the subject matter. We glide through Harrison's complex life at a brisk pace, stopping occasionally to note his generosity or his personal failures and struggles with fame. To its credit, the book is not especially tawdry, and takes some stabs at insight into Harrison's character, though again it would take a deeper Beatles scholar than this to succeed in any such endeavor.

Rating:
Summary: George deserves better
Review: This is a mindlessly bad book, I'm only giving it a generous 2 stars because of the chapters on George's solo career. Amazingly, George has yet to attract a quality biographer or someone who will put in diligent research to capture his essence and character. Shapiro conducted one (you read it correctly) interview and has no understanding whatsoever of the Beatles or their incomparable history together. The errors are contiunous throughout, some of the minor, some of the them not, but their collective weight dooms this travesty.

Everything in the book up until 1970 is merely re-hashed from previous, superior, Harrison biographies. There's nothing new, no novel analysis, nothing. The same trite stories we've heard since 1963 are repeated, with the mistakes intact. Shapiro does improve somewhat after the Beatles demise and George's solo career is not glossed over. Still, there is an absence of any depth throughout. What did George think of Lennon's assassination, how did that tragic event unfold in George's mind? You'll get no answers here, except to say George was paranoid about his security after 1980. What about George's relationship with Clapton after Eric married Harrison's ex-wife, Pattie? Again, nothing.

George Harrison was one-fourth of the greatest musical group in the history of man. That alone makes him a compelling subject, but you'd never know it from reading this dismal book.

Rating:
Summary: Marc Shapiro explores the dark side of "the quiet Beatle"
Review: When a celebrity passes away, that passing seems to serve as permission for some biographers to write about the dark side of the dearly departed. Marc Shapiro carries on this dubious tradition in BEHIND SAD EYES: The Life of George Harrison.

As fans of the "Fab Four" will recall, Harrison was considered the "quiet Beatle," the spiritual one who kept to himself and was content to stay in the background. Like his fellow Beatles, Harrison grew up amid lower-middle class surroundings. He displayed a musical talent that overrode his scholastic career. As a teenager, he hooked up with Paul McCartney and later John Lennon to form the Silver Beatles; once Ringo Starr supplanted Pete Best as the group's drummer, the quartet was on its way to stardom.

The long and winding road to fame had its share of stumbling blocks, along with the perks that fall to those in rock-and-roll. But Shapiro holds Harrison to a higher moral standard. He describes Harrison's rite of passage into manhood during the Beatles' tour to Hamburg in the early 1960s: "As promised, George would regularly write home to let his parents know that everything was all right. Needless to say it was a sanitized version of what had become, for George, a willing descent into debauchery."

This same attitude is seen when Shapiro derides Harrison's use of drugs, which was, unfortunately but almost inevitably, part and parcel of the rock scene. Only Harrison is singled out for these perceived indiscretions. Shapiro depicts Harrison as Machiavellian. For someone who was supposed to be in the background, he is given a lot of influence with having Pete Best replaced by Ringo. Shapiro also tells us that Harrison did not get along particularly well with Paul or John in later years.

To be fair, it was no secret that Harrison was constantly pressing to come out from the shadows of Lennon and McCartney. He was tired, and rightly so, of being thrown a bone, so to speak, with only a song or two on each album. The group's record producers, however, decided that many of Harrison's tunes were less than, well, tuneful.

Shapiro portrays Harrison as a seeker, the one who turned the rest of the band onto Transcendental Meditation. He remained a follower of the faith, with the ebbs and flows of piety the devout often face. But he also writes about the almost soap opera-ish triangle between Harrison, his wife Pattie and Eric Clapton, who eventually won her heart. Mixed in this storyline are the occasional affairs and the seeming indifference towards the love triangle.

Even when Harrison displays his generous side, Shapiro shows that no good deed goes unpunished. Commenting on the ex-Beatle's "philanthropic best" with his involvement in the Concert for Bangladesh, he writes "Unfortunately, the occasion . . . would also expose his weakness as a human being," again holding Harrison up to that higher standard.

As Harrison moves through middle age, Shapiro lightens up a bit, giving him credit for his comebacks both as a solo artist and as a member of the Traveling Wilburys. But the darkness was never far behind. He battled cancer. While recovering from the ordeal he was brutally attacked in his own home by a disturbed "fan" (Harrison was a fanatic about security, especially after the murder of John Lennon). Only the brave intervention of his second wife, Olivia, saved him from almost certain death. Sadly, Harrison's cancer resurfaced; he faced the end with dignity and peace.

BEHIND SAD EYES is Shapiro's attempt to lift the window shade on this mystical life. It might be easier to take if his prose was not so stilted. In his introduction, he relates how difficult this undertaking was: "normal."

And so to the task at hand: to discover the real George Harrison in all his varying shades of light and dark. And it is not an easy life to put in order. George Harrison spent his entire life trying to hide from us and, depending on how one addresses that elusive beast called Fame, he either failed miserably or succeeded to the nth degree.

The author continues to pat himself on the back later in the introduction when he states, "You've been here before, But, you've never been here this way." Shapiro's treatise is full of gossipy tidbits many readers will enjoy; whether his words reach the Beatle's über-fans is another story.

--- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan

Rating:
Summary: Don't buy it!
Review: Why is it that George Harrison has attracted such awful biographies? Marc Shapiro's attempt had me thinking, which is worse, his book or the book written by Elliot J.Huntley (Behind That Locked Door). After much rumination on this pointless topic I believe Shapiro's book is worse. Like Huntley, he has not undertaken any research (other than an interview with Delaney, who somewhat modestly appears to take the credit for writing My Sweet Lord and being the object for Patti Harrison's affections). Whereas Huntley is so overawed by his subject that he rates any of George's contemporaries as being "B list" musicians (see his description of the Concert For Bangladesh), Shapiro does not disguise his contempt for George and at many junctures criticizes George's work and says stupid things such as George work, unlike John's, was inconsistent. The book has nothing new to say, no incisive or imaginative criticism/review of George's work and is, if truth be told, merely a cash in on George's death.