George Harrison Entertainment Tonight Interview [Raw Footage] - 22 September 1987

somebody just told me that and now i don't say the same joke as i said on the other one okay good i'm glad well you remember good because it was a good one though it was great and then he said to me you know it's from the rebels which i had forgotten what was the trousers oh oh no i was thinking of another one um they said it's 25 years since emi signed and i said well that time they gave us some royalties then no you didn't tell us that one that's a good one but why do you think i mean you just said there's the 20 years ago the sergeant pepper thing on granada that derek worked on and let's face it george everybody is still fascinated by the beatles yeah let's hope they buy my new album you are one of the four i know but they're into you know a lot of people who just get stuck on something that's a craze and then they don't see that you know it takes all these other bits that make that you know i think a lot of people would you know you if you put out a record and call it the beatles you'd have all these people who'd rush out by regardless of if it was a load of rubbish you know because you know of the name it's like you know michael jackson they said oh let's go and get it because it's him because it's them without you know you i mean the beatles did some good things but but i also did some rubbish too i don't know if i'd agree with you oh yeah my new album's much better than anything the beatles ever did are you tough enough you you you talk about them like they are someone else they are you don't feel like i mean that was you yeah i suppose it was but uh it's so long ago you know it's like a previous incarnation but yet you sound so much more close to when you talk about the days before you were famous you got very enthusiastic about talking about playing the clubs and what that was like well because that was when we were banned when we became the famous fabs it was really all over sort of that aspect of just being a group playing and what we're going to do where we didn't have to care whether we could drink and just you know just be up there being a rock band in our leather suits and uh later we had to be you know we became popular and all this stuff happened were uh we sang the same songs a lot we still had to laugh it was still good fun though but you know the that side of it of playing like as a musician lost the edge there because we just play the same tunes that we play uh recorded go around the world singing the same 10 songs and every year we'd lose one and add a new one and it was a bit it got a bit boring being fab yeah but we i think we all you know those of us here who when you'd only see one show at a time you see we saw we did it every night you know she loves you you think you've lost your lovely god not again what about playing clubs have you considered that at all because you said the whole hoopla of doing a tour is so tough i think what i like to do is play in summer like the holiday inn in minnesota or somewhere you know somewhere where nobody goes or there's just a few old people in the corner who don't know who you are and then you can just be you know then good and green and just play have a few friends and a few beers on the piano and do that kind of thing the pressure you know of people expecting you to do something you know i mean it's it's a wonder we didn't all go bananas really because i mean just say for that instance that prince's trust it was bad enough me and then ringo if you imagine paul that as well people are gonna they're expecting to hear you know whatever i don't know what they're expecting to hear but we could never deliver that you know can't deliver the goods and on one hand you've been so put in a little box and looked at through microscopes and to the point where you could be the most paranoid people in the world afraid to go anywhere and to play guitars with other people and suddenly you have to come back out and just try and be ordinary i mean that's the the thing is try to be just an ordinary person and play a few tunes but they won't let you do that they want you to come out though with flames coming out of your fingers singing all these wonderful things that don't really exist you know it's just all in the concept of what it was well they're as much a part of that as you are and and you're past that and they're past that too i mean my memories of the beatles are as much a part of what i was doing at that time as what you were doing is then and now's now and it sort of doesn't doesn't work anymore i've always said at beetle fest if any of you showed up people would probably actually ignore you because you really don't have anything to do with it you know it's like that we don't have anything to do with it it's like this they've got this attitude like public domain you know as if we're some old thing like mozart who died years ago and so we can all have t-shirts and you know rip them off and sell manuscripts in sotheby's and you know everything that happened to the beatles all these things were forever trying to you know have lawsuits against people beetlemanias and all that stuff it's unfair really because they all have this attitude that you know the beatles were just so big and like like it's like mozart it's just something which we can all have and it's there's only four people it has nothing to do with and that's john paul george and lingard everybody else is in there grabbing and you know yeah you belong to us right okay switch tape probably yeah now as a filmmaker from this perspective looking back on a hard day's night health and let it be which you were a star of you think they were good movies i think hard day's night and help yeah under the circumstances first of all like holidays night we were um you know everybody likes to make a movie but we've just made a few records got popular now we're making a movie they got a writer who met us for like three days and wrote the script and i think the magic about it was at least he got some picked up the idea the vibe of what was happening on the road and translated into a it wasn't brilliant but it was adequate and considering we were all uh pretty useless at acting i think dick lester's you know should take a lot of credit because it was his ability and his experience with um comedy that he'd done before with spike milligan and peter sellers and stuff he had a great sense of humor and he had the great ability to let us be what we were and uh i think that all worked out good and there was plenty of songs catchy little tunes and uh that was fine i think help you know had to step up a bit and it was the big color film but it's still pretty funny even in it's like it's in a slightly dumb way that's why i keep referring to the rattles you know the ruttles to me you know the hard day's night and help is very ruttly and i think they worked out the one thing the other one you mentioned which was really supposed to be just rehearsing to make a record and they were just filming the rehearsal and that turned into the movie you know let it rot as the ruttles was called that you know i didn't like that the scenes in here like on the roof that was quite good and there's a bits and pieces it's okay but most of it just makes me so aggravated i can't watch it because it was a particularly bad experience that we were having at that time and it's bad enough when you're having it let alone having it filmed and recorded so that you've got to watch it for the rest of your life i don't like it like we're living an accident can we do that again could you show me that accident one more time are you going to work on ringo's album if he wants some silly guitar playing how about producing a couple tracks i know i think elton's doing yeah i've i've told elton it's very nice of him to do that and if you you know if i'm around and i'll certainly join in and help him out if there's if you could call it that can you tell us a little bit about your about your you are self-deprecating well you know sure i'll go i'll help them all right i'll make it work i know i got this garden it was all overgrown and it used to be a great garden and so i decided to try and tidy it up a bit basically that's all i did i was an old dilapidated property tried to tidy it up and in the in between all that i discovered all these things called trees and we had all these wow you know there's sort of big ones and little ones and flowery ones and you know piney ones and there's some great stuff happening out there which you never notice because you're always in rooms they're editing tape and you know getting drinking beers and you miss out on all this thing called life how about cars do you race them yourself no did you ever only on the public highway i like cars in the old days when i was young got a car and uh there was space on the road you know you could nip around and uh and i i know a lot of uh racing people from formula one and i'm interested in formula one mainly i did have a few running goes around the racetrack in a formula one car a couple of formula one course but you know you have to do you have to be young to do that really i mean you know the oldest guys out there in formula one well maybe there's a couple pushing 30 now but you know it's a a thing where you have to be so physically together but it's interesting i've found that interesting since i was a kid i much prefer to be an artist where i can just write a little tune and make a record i think that's one good thing about songs you can write in songs you have little lines and songs that actually says what you feel i know that got my mind set on you is the first single but how did you find that song it's been around you know in the back of my head for years it was uh i i got it i think the first time i came to the states in um must have been 1961 i bought the album of this guy called james ray now he had a song which we used to do you know a show before we made our own records we used to do a song called if you're going to make a fool of somebody and uh this this song uh got my mind set on you was on the album written by the same fella who wrote if if uh if you're gonna make a fool of somebody there's a guy called rudy clark i don't really know anything about him except it was a real good song the version that i referred to was a bit strange because it was a very old-fashioned record with a lot of screechy girl singers and you know it was like an old jazzy sort of thing anyway uh the song itself stuck in my head and uh every so often i just sang it to myself and somehow it just came about we cut it i think based upon the drum pattern jim keltner got going on this just had this drum pattern going it sounded good and that song seemed like a cue to do that song so you went for it yeah and now it's the single yeah now i know you're making the video this week in los angeles is there anything you can tell us or is it too soon i think it's a bit too soon yeah we're just only just talking this morning about some ideas for it but hopefully we'll do it by this weekend so the ideas are going to be coming up yeah they're going to have to when i interviewed paul mccartney he said that all of you had actually thought about the combination of audio and video in some form in the 60s oh yeah we always thought it was going to happen i mean it's still not quite like we envisaged until it gets to what would it be called you know when you buy a record and it's actually a video with digital you know that's what it'll be digital uh video recordings like laserdiscs well i don't know it'll probably be on video but with um stereo sound so your record player would actually be a monitor as well and you just the record you buy will be the visual although it's a bit of a problem you know when you make a record then you've got to do a video you know but it's heading that way now i think but it's been very expensive but we always thought that that was going to happen and we always made what what is now videos but we used to make our little 16 mil films you know a long time ago the very first ones in fact you corrected me we invented it you said it was rain and paperback ryder was there well that's what you told me last time i said strawberry fields and pancakes we made some before so yeah it would definitely rain and paperback right i think there might have even been something before that well i know you did some performance we did them because um it was getting difficult to go into tv studios and do our latest single so it's easier to go out and on location and do a little film and give it to the tv station isn't it wonderful that they're doing construction out there now that we've started is that coming out real badly no i knew i knew you'd hear that but what about the construction there's you don't hear that oh good okay well i'm happy about that i counted i listened to the interview we did a few weeks ago and you mentioned growing older four times so i thought you're probably what were the questions of no honestly they were they they were just like well now that we're growing older all of us yeah well we are i mean you can't help i'm not getting hung up about it but for instance this year they've put out all these cds which is all and this film that was made by granada television in england called 20 years ago today so i mean you sit there and watch yourself 20 years ago and you suddenly realize you are getting older you all are you still feel like a teenager yes sometimes when sometimes i don't know maybe um you know when i'm not thinking about anything else you know and i'm just sort of rocking but i wondered if wreck of the hesperus is related to this i suppose it is in a way tell me about that song writing that song well it was uh the song i just it just came to me with that lyric i i don't know maybe i was thinking from uh the point of view that you know people tend to think of you as somebody who's passe bean and god and it was just a sort of tongue-in-cheek kind of thing that you know this was this was an old poem but i was brought up that period they they'd say you know it was a little catch thing they always said you know you look like the wreck of the hesperus he never really knew what he was but you know it sounded good and it sounded like some awful wreck it was a shipwreck and it was a poem an old victorian poem anyway that line just came to me um and i just continued the lyric from there sort of strange lyric with the eiffel tower and there's a lot of town can rock as good as gibraltar i mean it's you know it just gets silly and by the end of it saying i'm not the regular hesperus i feel more like big bill brunsi you know i don't know that to me is some uh i mean as far back as i can remember big bill bruins he was like this big old guitar player you know who was pretty groovy and um i suppose now you know it's like that we all of us are turning into like eric clapton he's like i keep telling my boy he's you know he's you get older he's going to be like that was big bill brunsey and around at our house that's right i mean we're all getting older that's the thing you know everybody's old is my mother everybody who grew up with you is you know older thank god for that eh be awful to be the only one getting old tell me about when we was fat those are the hardest words to hear and of course there are no lyric sheets yet yeah so so you have to listen to it a lot i have listened to it three or four times well it was written as a a little joke a little bit of fun um and i've i wanted to write something that sounded or that it came from that period when we was found and uh it always was had a working title of it was called aussie fab because uh jeff lynn and i started to write it when we were in australia and it was written to be like a fab song so it was called aussie fab so we could remember which song we were talking about and that fab little bit stuck and also as the cellos and things arrived on the backing track so to write the lyrics was just a matter of of finding when it came you know how to get that fab in and it got to when we were fab being the grammatical way of saying it and then um you know mutual friend that you were talking about derek taylor i mentioned it to him and he says when we was fab it you know and i see what he means is he has to be when we was to put it in the past tense and also to make it more of a joke i was going to say to make it funny is the am i mistaken is the riff at the end the the indian rift from within you without you it it's not intended to be um specifically but it does sound a bit like that doesn't it the first four notes sounds like that yeah i was laughing but jeff lynn played the that's a played on an auto harp jeff played that so you see he may have intended it to be similar or may not so we have to ask jeff about that right yeah you're going to call them up and find out for us now all those years ago when you first wrote it was that intended to be the same type of thing or when we was fab all those years ago when you first wrote it because you wrote it no i originally i think i originally wrote it for ringo who was doing an album at the time and i wrote it with slightly different words it had the same chorus but it was more about it was a bit more of an uptight kind of lyric like um you know you did this and you did all that and you know blah blah blah and uh i don't know why uh but what happened but i don't think ringo did the the sessions or i maybe i never finished it or something and then that thing happened with john and and uh straight away i changed it and made it you know more as a thing about john specifically about him was that hard for you to release to to put those feelings out uh not really it was hot it was hard to sing it really because um you know i mean at at that time it was not long after you know his he was killed and uh you know it's sort of a bit a bit difficult to sing at least take one was maybe by the time i didn't don't take eight i was just not really thinking too deeply about what i was saying right we talked a lot about jeff flynn as a producer but we didn't really talk much about him as a songwriter with you in the past you've generally written by yourself i've never actually yeah i wrote i finished some songs off for ringo and i have i think written you know little bits and pieces with other people but uh i've never really uh written songs like somebody was once trying to get me on a couple of albums ago another record producer russ titleman he kept trying to get me to write songs with some other people but i i was not against the idea but i think when you've written on your own for so long it's difficult to just suddenly sit down with somebody i think you need to really know the person and it's all the stuff that doesn't really count in the song that is important if i could explain like um you know it's important that i know what this person feels or if he thinks i'm an idiot or if he thinks that these chords are rubbish or all the fears and paranoias that you may have by just saying here let's do this you know you don't want somebody fall about and say you know what are you talking about i think it's important you get to know each other to a point where you don't have any fear about inhibition so you don't mind making a fool of yourself then you've got all that out the way and you're able to begin and i never really uh came across anybody who where i had the time to write i mean you know sit there i i tried writing with one guy who came to my house with his briefcase and sat down well i've got uh 40 minutes you know and it's sort of you started playing this on the piano and i said well there's a couple of chords but i knew from the start it's not the way to do it i think with jeff it was a matter of i knew a lot of his songs and i could relate to them and i you know into the chord patterns and things like that it was just a question of getting to know him a bit more and it was sort of um not easy but it was definitely fun because you know jeff worked so hard at writing the song we'd get through the first bit and get to the next bit and he'd go back and he said maybe that bit can be a bit better you know and he's a real hard worker at it and um uh you know it made me think a bit more about what we were doing but we've had uh times when it was just fun as well you know we just put a microphone up to write the lyrics it was always fun because we just have a few beers and then just sing anything and see what came out you know the one that i think sounds the most elo-ish is fish on the sand well that is the one song that didn't have anything to do with him you're kidding no there you go so throw me out the window the night before we started the sessions uh the only thing about that that could be yellow is that jeff played a little keyboard uh part in the breaking the lyrics in the middle eight there's a little thing that goes but apart from that it's you know i wrote all the words and all the chords and and even just did it the my arrangement i'm equally as good at picking something up that's the good thing about the production because you know i wanted somebody who'd help me make my record i didn't want somebody who would help me make their record and although there's some nice touches there's a lot of things jeff's input was like you know enormous but he hasn't tried to [Music] swamp me out with all that but you can hear in the back of voices i thought that worked really good his voice of mine mixed together and we did these big um backup sections and i think in some of those you know because the high parts i can get lower now these days than i could back in the old days jeff has got a higher range than me so the very high power harmonies is him and there's a couple of things i can hear where it sounds a bit like you know just reminiscent of because it's him those backup parts right well i mean also i think the song that well this uh the two songs are the one that's called that's what it takes that's what jeff wrote really that whole chorus to that part and we wrote the verses together but the one that's maybe the most uh jeff lean on the record is this is love although at the same time it's it sounds like me too because i mean all the slide guitars and stuff it sounds the whole album sounds like you one minute you you said that you really like his light touch and if you have to stop me just stop me um what about you as a producer do you think you have that same light touch where you're not making your record and you're really bringing them out because you've produced a lot of other people yeah i think i i can produce other people better than i can produce myself it's something about being you know the you can't be in two places at the same time you can you can go into the studio for instance do a part come back listen to it but if you're producing somebody else you're behind the window while they're out there and somehow it's just i can see it clearer i can see what can be done and how they're doing it and um and also maybe because i'm not that attached to it to the from the performance point of view you know it's it's less of a load on the brain when i'm doing myself you know i'm tend to write the songs write the words write the arrangements and and then i'm trying to think of what the sounds like and you know this is taking a lot off of my brain having jeff there because at the same time if i'm gonna be thinking about this he's covering it to make sure the guitars good sound and you know that kind of stuff you want to change tape now okay

Channel: The Beatles Videos

Views: 5,040

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: george harrison, interview, long, raw footage, entertainment tonight, rare, beatles, 1987

Id: mkGcVrvEYRU

Length: 27min 25sec (1645 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 07 2021