Day 300: George Harrison – Living in the Material World
300 whole days of this! That’s 300 more albums than when I started – if I keep this up, I’m going to be a music quiz wizard. Or probably not a wizard, but maybe my quizzing will be good enough that I win a quiz here and there but I won’t be so good that other patrons groan when they see me. I think it’s a humble and achievable dream.
Album cover courtesy of Apple
Today I’m giving myself two gifts to celebrate the big day: one is that I’ll listen to my boy George Harrison. The second is that I’ll keep this short today. I also did a George Harrison album on day 200, so maybe I’m building a bit of a habit of a hundredth day Harrison.
Living in the Material World was released in 1973 as a follow up to my all-time favourite album, All Things Must Pass. That one had been a massive hit and he’d scored another recent win by holding the Concert for Bangladesh charity event at Madison Square Garden, which together with the CD release raised about 12 million to UNICEF in the long term.
Despite seemingly doing very well in life, George Harrison was wrestling with a duality to his personality, which Ringo described in the documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World by saying, “He was a bag of beads and a bag of anger.” At one hand, he’s a devoutly spiritual man, but on the other, he enjoyed a life of fast cars and drug excesses.
The theme of the album is the juxtaposition between being a spiritual person and living in the material world as a famous man. It’s also espousing his worldviews of unity and love – some might think it’s utopian waffle, but not me, it makes me happy. It’s not as good as All Things Must Pass, but that’s an extremely high bar to clear. Instead, it’s a great album in its own right. Living in the Material World gets quite a lot less attention than its predecessor, but to me it still features George Harrison at his peak on songs like “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” and “The Light That Has Lighted the World”, which he originally intended to give to Cilla Black.
It’s not quite a 10, but it’s not far. From another artist it might be a 10, but knowing what it’s measured against, I’ll still give it a very reasonable 9.5/10.
Also, I was searching for my earlier George Harrison write-up and found that I’ve mentioned him in 15 posts. 5% of my reviews mention George Harrison. That’s insane, I need to find something else to talk about.