Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison by Seth Rogovoy analyzed Harrison’s musical output throughout his life, concentrating on his songwriting as well as his instrumental contributions. As a Beatles fan since the spring of 1980, when I discovered their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, I was caught up in the mania of discovering the group one generation too late. At the age of fourteen I chose George as my favourite Beatle, and have all of his solo albums. (I cannot say that I own the entire post-Beatles oeuvre of Paul or Ringo, yet I have all of John’s which was, regrettably cut short all too soon.) Almost all of Harrison’s Beatle output is analyzed, some songs more in depth than others.
Rogovoy finds common themes of introversion, introspection and isolation in Harrison’s work, and often returns to the genesis of it all in Harrison’s first song he composed, “Don’t Bother Me”. Within You Without You is a thin book of 202 pages, albeit one where each page is filled with text, yet its brevity only emphasized that parts were unnecessarily repetitive. I got the idea that Rogovoy may have compiled the book from a series of independent essays, where he needed to revisit entire themes in separate units. Either that or he was superfluously padding the book with passages in order to flesh it past the 200-page mark.
I believe that readers might be more familiar with Harrison’s Beatles output than with his solo work. In addition to “Don’t Bother Me”, the author spent the most time studying “If I Needed Someone”, the Revolver three, “Within You Without You”, “Blue Jay Way”, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, “It’s All Too Much” and, one of my favourite Harrisongs, “Only a Northern Song”. He gave only title drops to “The Inner Light”, “Long, Long, Long” and “Old Brown Shoe” to warrant an index reference for each. I would have liked to read more about “Savoy Truffle” and “For You Blue”. The last song on a canon Beatles album that the group worked on, in studio, was “I Me Mine” in January 1970, albeit without John present.
Rogovoy spent more time with some of Harrison’s solo albums than with others, yet even if one is only partially familiar with Harrison’s post-Beatles output, the read might be quite boring. I have found that a lengthy discussion about any artist’s album holds no interest if I am not familiar with the work. Harrison’s first true solo endeavour of vocal songs, All Things Must Pass, was analyzed at length. It was a triple album, after all, a culmination of years of songs he had written while a Beatle yet never released. Rogovoy also devoted a chapter to Harrison’s next studio album, Living in the Material World, with an analysis of every song on it. Less attention was given to subsequent albums Dark Horse or Extra Texture (Read All About It).
I was happier than a willow tree to see more text devoted to Harrison’s overlooked 1982 album Gone Troppo than all that I had read about it at the time of its release. And while the Extra Texture album was all but ignored, Rogovoy devoted much ink to its hit single, “You”.
The end of the book examined the prevalence of words denoting sadness in Harrison’s song titles. Harrison, like Lennon, often wore his heart on his sleeve when writing, and title words like “So Sad”, “Tired of Midnight Blue”, “Grey Cloudy Lies”, “Deep Blue” among many others are hard to miss when looking at an artist’s output. Rogovoy reintroduces the idea, raised by others, that Harrison may have been (clinically) depressed. He writes:
“Harrison has often been described as ‘moody,’ a promiscuously loose, casual term, and one probably overused, misused, and abused. Everyone has moods, after all. But the distance between having a moody personality and having a mood disorder is not such a great one, especially when combined with the frustrations Harrison experienced as a creative artist somewhat stifled and stuck inside the greatest show on earth.”
If that is true, then one might expect any “moodiness” to lift once Harrison could finally release his own material after the Beatles went their separate ways. But all the titles I listed above are solo songs, so the underlying theme of sadness or moodiness in “Don’t Bother Me” up till the end, in “For You Blue”, continued.
When song titles, lyrics and release dates are the basis of your book, it was pleasing to know that Rogovoy did not make any mistakes about any of those. I have lamented in past Beatles book reviews how so easily an author could have pulled out the lyric sheet to see just what exactly what words were being sung or who the composer was. Yet Rogovoy made a glaring error as early as page six, referencing Lennon’s murder in 1981, and not 1980.
While I was thumbing through the index I was at first surprised to find no mention of “The Inner Light”. I later discovered that all titles beginning with The and all titles beginning with A were indexed under the initial letter of the (in-)definite article.
The most touching part of the book was in its very last paragraph. Olivia Harrison, George’s widow, said that at the moment of George’s death:
“There was a profound experience when he left his body. Let’s just say you wouldn’t need to light the room if you were trying to film. He just lit the room.”