(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Mon 12 May 2025 19:30, UK
There are a lot of headaches that go into a rock and roll tour before the musicians even get into the rehearsal room. A lot of money has to be passed around between the managers, lawyers, and venues before they get the right idea for what a concert should look like, and when an artist finally reaches that first show, it’s usually completely different than what they had initially expected when they started putting the setlist together. And for someone like George Harrison who didn’t love the idea of touring, he needed to have damn good idea before he took to the road.
Granted, The Concert For Bangladesh was far from a horrible way to start his live career. The whole point of bringing out some of his friends to raise money for a good cause was to take the pressure off of him being a frontman, and given how much charisma everyone from Leon Russell to Billy Preston had during the performance, it wasn’t like Harrison had to carry the load of the entire show every time he got up onstage.
When he eventually started playing, though, people stopped to listen to what he had to say. In the audio from those shows, it’s easy to hear the audience gasp when he starts playing ‘Here Comes the Sun’, and while reuniting with Ringo Starr for tunes like ‘It Don’t Come Easy’ were bound to be fun, it wasn’t going to compare to listening to tracks like ‘Something’ finally being heard in a live setting.
Harrison certainly had the flair for playing music again, but his fatal flaw came from overcommitting to performing. So when he finally crashed out during the Dark Horse album, his massive bout with laryngitis made him sound like a husk of what he once was, which makes it downright painful hearing him try to reach the same high notes as ‘What Is Life’ and cracking up live.
The band did know how to work around him better by this point by giving some tunes to Preston to sing, but that didn’t stop the press from mercilessly tearing into him. Harrison didn’t have to deal with any of the fallout until he got home, but after nearly breaking down before he got home, Harrison felt that it might have been time to hang it up if this was the kind of response he was getting.
“I think the public were just — didn’t know what was happening, it was too much for them. Although, the public as a whole enjoyed it. It was always standing ovations — even for the Indian section. But they got on my case, the press — some of them anyway.”
George Harrison
Looking back on the tour again, Harrison felt that it may as well have been his farewell tour based on how little he had fun on it, saying, “I think the public were just — didn’t know what was happening, it was too much for them. Although, the public as a whole enjoyed it. It was always standing ovations — even for the Indian section. But they got on my case, the press — some of them anyway. And I don’t know if I learned anything from that; it would probably be never to go on tour again.”
It’s easy to see why people would have been bored with the Indian segment of the show, but that didn’t mean Harrison couldn’t hit back. While Extra Texture feels like the sad aftermath of Harrison’s touring days, he did take a few cheap shots at the press, even name-checking Rolling Stone for their unsavoury comments about him on the song ‘This Guitar (Can’t Keep From Crying)’.
While Harrison did eventually do a handful of shows after his career resurgence on Cloud Nine, there were never any major tour dates outside of the live shows that he played with Eric Clapton in the 1990s for Live in Japan. It was clear that he had had enough of those days in the spotlight, and he was far more content to tend to his garden at Friar Park than have to worry about what some concert reviewer had to say about his music.
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