R.I.P. George. Despite the recent resurgence of interest, it is difficult to convey to those who are not old enough what impact the Beatles had when they burst on the scene just months after JFK’s assassination, ushering in, truly, a new world. Their music and their styling were not just the next new thing in nascent rock ‘n’ roll, but the first shot across the bow in the culture wars of the sixties and the advent of the counterculture. Or, as FmH reader Adam Shinbrot put it:

“…magic. That’s what it was, just magic. If I had to say, to

describe it, I would say it was like being asleep, and then waking up. I

would say there were pure joy and happiness. And love.”

Spare me the agonizing reappraisals of “counterculture”; even if yuppies, bobos and other poseurs made personal mockeries of any alternative commitments, you won’t convince me something world-changing didn’t happen, nor that it isn’t still being lived out today thirty years later. The world, for those receptive, was immeasurably broadened and, with quiet, steadfast George Harrison’s saddening death, perhaps more emphatically than when John Lennon was killed, now contracts irrevocably. All things must pass…

Obituaries: [NY Times] [Wash Post] [LA Times] [BBC] [Salon] [CNN] [Rolling Stone] [The Guardian]. And BookNotes has compiled a far broader set of Harrison links.

There'll come a time when all of us must leave here

Then nothing sister Mary can do

Will keep me here with you

As nothing in this life that I've been trying

Could equal or surpass the art of dying

Do you believe me?



There'll come a time when all your hopes are fading

When things that seemed so very plain

Become an awful pain

Searching for the truth among the lying

And answered when you've learned the art of dying



But you're still with me

But if you want it

Then you must find it

But when you have it

There'll be no need for it



There'll come a time when most of us return here

Brought back by our desire to be

A perfect entity

Living through a million years of crying

Until you've realized the Art of Dying

Do you believe me?

— George Harrison (1970)