My Sweet Lord, George Harrison

March 25, 2007

My parents recently dropped off my cache of LPs.. which had previously been collecting dust in their garage. The sight of all these albums.. with their big fold out images.. made me glad I was born in time to have an active memory of a time when listening to music meant putting these black discs onto a turntable.

Among the LPs in my cache was one beautiful old album: All Things Must Pass by George Harrison. It was not just an album, but a triple album. Two full records and a third record of long jams. Opening the album box I found the poster that came with the album.. and which I had hanging in my dorm room in college:

The poster and album cover are brooding.. although not without a bit of humor either.. with those gnomes on the cover! But no one would gainsay the fact that this is a serious looking album. It is as far away from Sgt. Peppers as one can get.. as if he really believed the lines from "Within You Without You":

When you've seen beyond yourself
then you may find
peace of mind is waiting there
And the time will come
when you see we're all one
and life flows on within you and without you

Those sentiments have always seemed to rest uneasily with the thrust of Sgt. Peppers.

There is plenty of life wisdom on All Things Must Pass.. more than in most serious books. Many times when I am amazed at how human beings find ways to hurt each other, I catch myself singing:

Isn't it a pity,
Isn't it a shame
How we break each other's hearts,
And cause each other pain
How we take each other's love
Without thinking anymore
Forgetting to give back...

There is also the darker musing of "Art of Dying".. unrelenting in its confrontation with the final question.

The best known song from All Things Must Pass is "My Sweet Lord". Lyrically there is not much one can say about the song.. It is simple enough:

My sweet Lord, I really want to see you
I really want to be with you
I really want to see you Lord
But it takes so long my Lord...

It is a pure spiritual cry for closeness to God. The drama in the song, if I can call it that, comes with the backing vocals, which begin with "hallelujah" and after continuing for a while suddenly veer toward the Eastern spiritual interests of Harrison to include Vishnu and Krishna. You could see it almost as a musical bait and switch.. aimed at more conventional religious types.

The song ran into legal troubles because of its close resemblance to "He's So Fine" recorded by the Chiffons in 1963. I tend to agree with the verdict that this is a case of unintentional copying. But the ins and outs of the legal case is not interesting to me.. more notable is that when trying to express something deep inside himself.. a groping after spiritual closeness to God.. Harrison landed unconsciously on the melody of a girl group singing some rather banal lines.

Fine, you might say, he liked this melody.. no big deal! But I think it would be a bigger deal if I could demonstrate that this is not just Harrison borrowing a random tune, but that major rock musicians made a habit of reaching back to just these simple tunes and shallow lyrics to express their spiritual feelings. In their adoption of these classic lyrics they characteristically imparted to them a further layer of meaning. Van Morrison is a great example of the layered use of the R&B past.. What did Jackie Wilson say? And "Stay" as the conclusion to Jackson Browne's "Load Out".. with the high voiced "Oh won't you stay, just a little bit longer?" We hear it so often that we hardly notice.. old standards worked into rock's expressive vocabulary.. and in the process these older words and tunes gain a greater hold on us.

"My Sweet Lord" is an expression of spiritual longing, but it also teaches us to hear spiritual longing in the musical standards of the pop past. We could call it the spiritualization of popular music. It is no secret that Harrison was always interested in this kind of project, writing some of the most introspective lyrics of the period.. but we should expand our notion of this project to include his use of different registers of pop music.