Concert For George subject of new Genesis Publications book (подробности)

"My initial reason for doing the book was that for the concert, a big tidal wave just swept over all of us, and after the concert it was like it was still reaching shore," she says. "It felt like there was still a bit to be said.

"When you watch the DVD, all the images are going by, and it's like a moment in time. With a book, you can hold it and take your time to look at a photo, to look at those eyes looking back at you. You can sit down quietly with a book. That's what I wanted."

The heart of the "Concert for George" book, beyond the dozens of gallery-quality photos, is the anecdotes and other remembrances of Harrison provided by Olivia, Clapton, McCartney, Starr, George Martin, Ravi Shankar, the couple's son, Dhani, and others.

Clapton notes that during rehearsals for the tribute concert, "I thought that if he were here he'd probably say, 'Thanks very much Eric, but I don't really want this.' ... I thought, 'What would I say if he said that?' And I then thought, 'Well I'm doing this for me, actually.' And that's more the truth of it; I needed to do it for him, but it was for me most of all because I needed to be able to express my grief in that kind of way."

In the upstairs office, decorated throughout with Indian-influenced artworks and artifacts, Olivia says George's sense of humor was often overlooked because of his reputation as a spiritually focused musician.

His wit, overshadowed in the Beatles by John Lennon's, still came through from time to time. Years after the Beatles disbanded, he said, "The biggest break in my career was getting into the Beatles. The second biggest break was getting out of them."

And his humility often superseded any displays of pride. Recalls Olivia: "He always said, 'If you're going to be in a band, you might as well be in the Beatles.' "

Before she became Olivia Harrison in 1978, she was Olivia Trinidad Arias, an Angeleno whose grandparents immigrated to Los Angeles from Mexico.

She grew up in Hawthorne, Calif., hometown of the Beach Boys, which turned out to be a major point of interest for George when she gave him a tour of her old neighborhood.

She was working at A&M Records, which distributed Dark Horse releases at the time, and started chatting with Harrison when he'd call about business.

They found they had musical and philosophical interests in common and soon began seeing each other regularly. "I was from outside of his world," she says. "I was shelter from the storm. I was simple, and he needed some simplicity at that point."

She says she never really stopped to think about the implications of getting involved with a musician, much less an ex-Beatle. "You can't really think about it that way, otherwise you're just playacting."

How will she cope when all the projects are completed? Is she simply postponing the feelings of loss with all the activity?

Those are questions she doesn't worry about, and she knows what George would have said on the subject.

"One of his favorite things to say was, 'Be here now,' " she says. His song by that title, from his 1973 album "Living in the Material World," remains one of her favorites, and it's one she plays any time she feels in need of moral support.

"Sometimes he and Dhani would be talking and Dhani would ask, 'Well what if this happens?' or 'What if that happens?' " she says. "George would say, 'Be here now. Be HERE now.' "

GEORGE HARRISON'S WIDOW PLANS ON FINISHING UNRELEASED PROJECTS
Trevor Scott
Web Posted: 3/16/2005 2:10:35 PM
George Harrison's widow, Olivia, is determined to complete all the work Harrison left unfinished at the time of his death. Harrison died in 2001 from cancer at the age of 58. Olivia told the Los Angeles Times that, quote, 'I need a five-year plan just to finish everything he started... He had this extraordinary work ethic. He never stopped. He always had something going.'


Earlier this month she appeared at an Australian launch party for the deluxe $600 limited-edition coffee table book commemorating the 2002 Concert For George tribute show at Britain's Royal Albert Hall. All proceeds from book will benefit the charity founded by Olivia and George Harrison called The Material World Foundation.

Olivia is currently working on re-releasing Harrison's post Beatles Apple catalogue, including a re-mastered version of the legendary 1971 The Concert For Bangla Desh album -- with bonus tracks. Last year Olivia re-issued all of Harrison's post 1976 albums as a box set called The Dark Horse Years 1976-1992. Harrison himself was compiling a multi-disc box set containing outtakes from as far back as 1970 at the time of his death. The Harrison's son Dhani (pronounced 'Danny') has reportedly continued work on the set, which has no release date yet.

Olivia says that Harrison was at ease with his Beatle past at the time of his death, and laughed as she recalled his witticisms: 'He always said: 'If you're going to be in a band, you might as well be in the Beatles',' as well as, ''The biggest break of my career was getting into the Beatles. The second biggest break was getting out of them.''
She went on to say that, 'History has been written. It's not going to be rewritten. He was a great man and a great songwriter and a great singer and just a wonderful man.'
For more information on the The Concert For George book, log on to Genesis-publications.com.

Concert for George - Olivia Harrison & Brian Roylance
20 March 2005

A new book about George Harrison documents an all-star tribute concert to the dead Beatle. Its price? A cool grand. Steve Braunias takes a look at the reverential tome.


Two down, two to go. Although the most interesting half of the Fab Four were first to die, the world will definitely allow itself vast outpourings of grief when the two remaining Beatles, vain Paul and desperate Ringo, kick the bucket. We shall be told about their place in history. We shall hear a great many tributes. We shall be reminded of Beatlemania, of Sgt Pepper, of "Mull of Kintyre". And then it will get interesting, because then we will be offered a range of souvenirs.

We can expect the boxed CD set and the DVD collection. But what else? For poor old John Lennon, the best thing on offer since his death in 1980 has come in the shape of Albert Goldman's biography. Yes, it was vicious, it was most disrespectful, and a lot of it was probably plain wrong. Like Othello, Lennon's ghost would have every right to moan: "Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial." Which is a dreadful shame, but the fact is that Goldman's The Lives of John Lennon is a comic masterpiece.

Not so the new book devoted to George Harrison, who died of cancer, aged 58, in November 2001. Reverent, hushed, sincere, Concert for George is an astonishing kind of souvenir: printed in a limited edition, it costs $1000. Yes. When a book costs a grand, you know it is no longer a book.

Copies numbered 1 to 350 are half-bound in a terracotta shade of leather; copies numbered 351 to 2500 are bound in a silk-screened fabric over padded boards with bronze page edges. The paper stock is an archival quality 200GSM matt art. It is produced by London's Genesis Publications, and can be ordered via the good offices of Hedleys Booksellers in Masterton. The two companies have been down this road before - Harrison's limited edition book I Me Mine, which reprinted his song lyrics, appeared in 1980.

The new Harrison tome is precious, special, an event. It is a collector's item. Its 308 pages, thin on text and big on photos, document the all-star tribute concert for Harrison held at the Royal Albert Hall in November 2002. The stars included Eric Clapton, Jeff Lynne, Ravi Shankar, Monty Python, Tom Hanks, Tom Petty, Harrison's son Dhani, the two surviving Beatles, plus an assortment of old Beatles hands such as Billy Preston (knew them back in Hamburg, played keyboards on "Let It Be") and Klaus Voorman (knew them back in Hamburg, drew the Revolver cover). It's entirely possible the artists played a tolerable racket; their own accounts give you the impression this was one of the most magnificent nights of live music ever performed.

A few quotes are accorded each musician - with the mysterious absence of Paul McCartney. Gary Brooker remembers touring with the Beatles in 1965; he says: "George was the one who would pass a joint. He'd always make sure that we had something to smoke." Jools Holland mentions the time Harrison put a teatowel on his head and said he was Osama bin Laden. We are told that when Bob Dylan once visited Harrison, his host dragged him over to the stereo and played George Formby records until Dylan fled. Terry Gilliam, from Monty Python, says that despite Harrison's vast wealth, "it never stopped him moaning and bitching". Ringo says: "George was shouting or he was loving."

There are a few other illuminating remarks. But only very few. Concert for George is not something you buy to read. Even the great Paul Theroux, who you might reasonably hope would apply his usual cool intelligence to the task of writing the book's introduction, provides a lame, pious eulogy for the dearly departed. There are 450 photographs, many published for the first time. Dhani Harrison looks a lot like his dad. Tom Petty looks like he arrived on stage after someone had dug him up from a really deep grave. But neither is the book something you buy to look at; it's something you buy to possess.

The concert obviously meant a lot to the performers involved. They were Harrison's friends; they adored him, respected him, loved him. You, too, can be part of this intimate soiree by buying one of the available 2500 books. Nice. And it's a good and proper thing to pay respects to Harrison. After all, he was a Beatle. He was also one of the coolest people in the world around about 1966. He wore shades, he went out with the ravishing Patti Boyd, he looked good with a sitar. He could most certainly be a droning bore with his endless talk about karma and all that, but there is plenty of evidence of a sharp wit. And then there are his songs - or, as Olivia Harrison, George's widow, refers to it in Concert for George: "His body of work."

Just how fit and healthy was that body? Does his music, and his music alone, deserve the important mortuary of Concert for George? As a Beatle, his primary role was to play guitar. He was bloody good at that. Probably the most electrifying guitar solo on a Beatles record, however, wasn't played by Harrison; that claim goes to Eric Clapton, on Harrison's song "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". But Harrison was about less, not more. His sharp, elegant playing strokes itself up against countless songs from the Beatles catalogue, from "A Hard Day's Night" to "I Feel Fine" to "Let It Be"; let loose, he made a fabulous din on "Rain", "Revolution", and "Yer Blues".

Lennon and McCartney hogged the songwriting on Beatles records for the first few years. Harrison, the youngest Fab, held back. By 1966, though, he stepped forward, and grew in such confidence that his 1969 classic "Something" has become the most covered Beatles love song of all time. Which leaves about a dozen songs he recorded with the Beatles that stand the test of time, that indicate genius at work. They include the well-known "If I Needed Someone", "Taxman", and "Here Comes the Sun", and more obscure songs such as his two Indian-inspired delicacies, "The Inner Light" and "Long Long Long", and his raucous "It's All Too Much".

As for his solo career, the number of good to great songs written by Harrison shrinks to about half a dozen. It's a curious thing that all the Beatles made their best work in the first two or three years after the band dissolved. Lennon made his masterpiece album Plastic Ono Band, and the best-selling Imagine; after that, the rest wasn't much chop. Ringo made the singles "It Don't Come Easy" and "Photograph"; the rest wasn't any chop at all. McCartney's first two solo albums stand up better than his subsequent work. The same goes for Harrison.

His 1970 release, All Things Must Pass, is loaded with powerful tracks - "What Is Life", "Wah Wah", "Isn't It a Pity", "My Sweet Lord" - which were given the full production treatment by mad, bad Phil Spector. After 1973, and the mystic pleasantries of Give Me Love, a veil of silence is best drawn over Harrison's "body of work".

But his best material had style, grace, attack - and wit, too. An example of his black humour? When the Beatles gave their famous press conferences in America, in 1964, Harrison was asked: "What's this we hear about an annual illness, George?" His reply: "I get cancer every year."


Concert for George is published by Genesis Publications, $1000, available through Hedleys Booksellers, see www.hedleysbooks.com.au

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3222940a4501,00.html

GEORGE HARRISON's widow OLIVIA will sign copies of the book The Concert for George: A Celebration of the Life of George Harrison at Barnes and Noble in New York City on April 9th .

Из рассказа фэна:

Olivia came out alittle after 12:30 and after a few moments she took the stage. She was then interviewed by David Wild who I think works for Rolling Stone , I have seen him in alot of Rockumentary type shows and he definitely was familiar with Georges career.

He asked her alot of questions about the Concert for George, Georges songwriting, spirituality etc. My favorite part was when she was explaining how they had to draw the line at who could perform at the show, Olivia mentioned that Brian Wilson wanted to perform but while George was a big fan of Brian's he really wasnt really a part of Georges life. When your turning down the likes of Brian Wilson you know this was a select group of performers.

She also mentioned that "Isnt It A Pity" was her favorite song at the show (mine too great minds think alike)

After the interview she started signing the Launch sheets that you could put in your book (I understand this is how they did all the signings so far) I had already purchased a Deluxe edition from Genesis (#222) but I went ahead and bought the regular edition (I am a completist) I waited until the line was formed and made sure I was at the end (when nobodys behind you you dont get moved along as fast).

When I got up to her I told her how great the Concert was ,I told her where she could find me on the DVD just look for the guy with the Bruce Springsteen sweatshirt 8th row center. I told her that "Isnt it A Pity" was also my favorite song of the night "The highlight in a night filled with highlights" (god I'm a nerd) We talked about the CFG poster that was auctioned off in Australia (they may put another up for auction) I wish I could remember everything but now it seems like a blur. I asked her if I could get a photo with her she said "If you bought the Deluxe then you get a photo" (I didnt see others getting photos but some may have) she told me she didnt even have a copy of the Deluxe version

Tessa and Brian from Genesis were there and both were extremely nice. It was a great experience.

Then it was back across the Hudson to NJ for Beatlefest I had Billy Preston sign my regular edition copy of the Concert For George book. He signed it "Billy Preston"and underneath his name wrote "Isnt it a Pity"

CONCERT FOR GEORGE, NYC LAUNCH
On Saturday 9th April, the warmest, sunniest day of the year in New York, Olivia Harrision launched the Concert for George limited edition book. Olivia provided an entertaining question and answer session, with David Wilde as the witty interviewer. The event was held at the Barnes and Noble Union Square store. Brian Roylance and Tessa Hodgson were there and they enjoyed meeting several Genesis customers. Also in attendance were Phil MacDonald, who engineered a handful of Beatles' and George Harrison solo recordings, and John Kamen, Olivia's co-producer on The Concert for George DVD. It was also good to see Mandy Newell who worked with Derek Taylor all those years ago.

Tessa and Brian also got the chance to see Spamelot, courtesy of Eric Idle, and laughed their insides out. This show is highly recommended to al

CONCERT FOR GEORGE, NYC LAUNCH

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