The Sky's Gone Out - The Death Of George Harrison

There’s a running decade old gag around my place that just doesn’t seem very funny anymore. You see, about ten years ago or so I chanced upon a sealed vinyl copy of George Harrison’s Cloud Nine; I’d gone around mocking the insipid pop cornpone contained in the jackhammer echo of Harrison’s then hit cover of Rudy Clark’s “Got My Mind Set on You” for nearly as long as that damn song seemed to run, and the rockroll God’s decided that they were going to make me pay. I was involved in one of those record club deals, and well, you know the story: guy forgets to return the monthly card, guy winds up with eminently undesirable “selection of the month”. Well Cloud Nine was my “selection of the month” - and, as it turns out, my albatross.

Anyhow, I’d never opened the thing (holding an odd and inglorious sort of crown - it was the only record amongst my collection to have never even seen a scant seconds worth of needle time) and I would often threaten friends and family with the thing as a sort of Holiday Fruitcake gift in waiting - it became one of those things that you hope to someday in good humor pass along to someone else who really doesn’t want it and wouldn’t know what to do with the damn thing anyways. So it always got a laugh, Cloud Nine did. Sadly, everyone seemed to get the joke.
But it’s not funny anymore. George Harrison is gone, dead at age 58, having left so much of himself to the rest of us - forever.

I have to confess that I wasn’t ever a big Beatles guy. I’d bought into Mott the Hoople’s David Bowie penned quip about the Beatles’ and the Stones’ “revolution stuff” at an early age and was dead set on breaking from any certain past to become a contrarian, a punk. And I wasn’t going to live in a musical past burdened by four hippy lads from Liverpool, England. When Joe Strummer howled with spiteful glee that “phony Beatle-mania has bitten the dust” - I listened, and believed. That was the world I wanted to live in.

It was a myopic vision; one that discounted an entire set of blueprints for rock and roll’s possibilities, and one that ignored everything that made a record like The Clash’s London Calling possible. Joe Strummer knew this even as he belched forth his proclamation; me, well I was too young, naïve, and full of flame to want to know.

But you can’t dig music and not be touched by the Beatles - and thus Harrison’s - legacy, whether once, twice, thrice, or a million times removed. All rockroll branches run down the same trunk and feed from the same roots. Believe it.

So when I sat in my old VW Fox eleven years ago, engine idling to keep out the January cold, making a four-in-the-morning move on a total hottie I’d just swept out of a party I’d been too, caught in that weird netherworld where drink was slipping from my bloodstream and sleep had called, was ignored, and had now given up, I turned to Galaxie 500 for effect. On Fire was the record, and a plaintive, woeful ditty called “Isn’t it a Pity” was the song. As Dean Wareham’s voice cracked, croaked, and ached through a song so beautiful that I’d thought we’d landed on a star somewhere rockroll fate was forever sealed; I wound up with that hottie as the lady of and for the rest of my life.

I never even knew that it was George Harrison’s song.

Later, when age and intrigue allowed, I’d dug up a copy of Harrison’s version of the tune and was just as moved, if not more so. Frank Sinatra once said that Harrison’s “Something” was one of the most beautiful love songs ever written, and that may be so. But Sinatra never heard “Isn’t it a Pity". It is without doubt the most beautiful out-of-love song ever written - and, in turn, in its blues, its solemn ache, and its contemplative regret it also becomes the most profound and honest sort of love song that I've ever heard.

Harrison wrote many fine songs, and folks will always have their own favorites, but if pressed to find the one song that, for me, really defines George Harrison’s person, his complexities, his anxieties, his introspective pains and his pensive joys, “Isn’t it a Pity” is the one I’d turn to - and it’s the one I’ll always send others to.

There’s a decade old joke around my place that isn’t funny anymore to be sure, and tonight I’ll probably go home and cut the shrink wrap off of Cloud Nine and give it a whirl. Not that I expect any revelations to be found, and not that I think I’ll actually turn tide and like the record in any way, but just because some things you need to do - if only out of respect. And when it’s over, and the joke has finally played itself out, I’ll grab myself a beer, put “Isn’t it a Pity” on the stereo, turn it way up, and bury George Harrison in my own special way.

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