The publication of his life story would have made a fitting tribute. It's just a pity I Me Mine doesn't tell it.
Now comes the expanded reissue of his 1980 book, I Me Mine, a casually intimate memoir and collection of lyrics. The book and a meticulously crafted vinyl box set of Harrison’s 12 solo albums.
And with Taylor's proddings, George talks about his childhood in a decent, "upper-working-class" Liverpool family. There were the usual privations ("It was cold in those times, cold. We only had one fire").
But his only real complaints were about school, which he hated ("awful ... That's when the darkness came in"). He left early, with no qualifications, his musical talents unnoticed by teachers. But he'd met Paul McCartney on the school bus and, by the time he was 17, the group they had formed was taking off.
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What happened next, the years of the Beatles, is a story George more or less omits to tell. One minute he's playing gigs with Paul, John and Stuart Sutcliffe in Hoylake; the next it's 1969, the group has broken up, Brian Epstein is dead and George is living with his first wife, Patti Boyd, in "a beautiful Gothic house in Oxfordshire". It's not that drugs wiped out his memory of those years (his powers of recall were extraordinary, says Taylor), but that he preferred to forget. Being in the Beatles was almost as bad as being at school. "There were a lot of things we had to do collectively that didn't grab me personally," he says.
"I am not really Beatle George. Beatle George is like a suit or shirt that I once wore on occasion, and until the end of my life people may see that shirt and mistake it for me." It's been 15 years since Harrison's death, so today we honor the man with 10 tales that shine a light on his life outside the mop-topped artifice of the Fab Four.
He felt like a cog in a publicity machine - and though he might look as though he's laughing and larking about in films such as Help! and A Hard Day's Night, he often felt grumpy. "Roped in on other people's trips", he hadn't the freedom to be himself ("your own space, man, it's so important"). Gradually he found the path to enlightenment through yoga, meditation, gardening, Indian music and motor-racing (spot the odd one out). But to do so meant dumping the past and telling himself the Beatles had only been a blip.
One of the frustrations is not knowing if George changed his mind about this. In 1979, when I Me Mine was being assembled, the emphasis was on his quest for spiritual wisdom, and he's seen entertaining some fairly flaky beliefs ("friends are all souls that we've known in other lives", and so on). But he'd always been a bit of a clown - there was the time in a hotel when he offered his foot, rather than hand, to some friend of a friend desperate to meet him - and in the long run his friendship with Eric Idle probably mattered more than his apprenticeship with the Maharishi. His account of meeting Henry Kissinger, who "looked like an Arab, talked like a German and was tanned all over like Clark Gable", hints at comic observational skills that might have been developed, given time.
Those skills don't get much of an airing in his songs. Reviewers sneered when Paul McCartney published his poems and lyrics with Faber last year, just as they sneered in 1964 at John Lennon's wannabe-literary In His Own Write.
But Lennon and McCartney wrote dozens of songs worth preserving, whereas George's can be counted on one hand: "My Sweet Lord", "Taxman", "Here Comes the Sun", "Something " and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". ("Badge", co-written with Eric Clapton, also deserves an honorable mention.) Eighty songs are faithfully reproduced here, none the less, with notes explaining their origins. George's comments range from the defensive (of "My Sweet Lord", subject of a long law-case for its alleged plagiarism of "He's So Fine", he says: "I don't feel guilty... it saved many a heroin addict's life") to the worse-than-useless ("The melody came to me and I then had to think of the lyrics"). But at least he doesn't pretend to be Shakespeare, and the artlessness is oddly endearing.
Taylor's word for Harrison is "bold". It seems an odd one to choose, for a gentle, straightforward man who said he'd rather stay at home and watch the river flow than go out and have adventures. But courage came through in the last years of his life (the knife attack which he fought off, the losing struggle with cancer), and that is part of the reason why people miss him.
I play a little guitar, write a few tunes, make a few movies, but none of that's really me," George Harrison once said. "The real me is something else." Harrison was many things – including a master of understatement. But he was right to point out that his true character remains elusive. He was one of the most famous men in the world, but he loathed superstardom. He preached piety and simple pleasures, yet he lived in a 120-room mansion and collected ultra high-end cars. His studious facade belayed a brilliant sense of humor, which led him to produce some of the greatest comedies of all time. The songs he wrote focused on both the glory of God and the petty annoyances of day-to-day life.
