By Albert Stern / BJV Editor

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.' - Kurt Vonnegut

Fifty-plus years after the band’s break-up, is there really anything new to write about The Beatles? The best a reader might hope for in yet another book about the band is that the author put the story together in a way that moves you back to the music with fresh ears. But that’s not how most books about the band proceed – since it is so easy to get tangled in the weeds of Beatle lore and Beatle love, Beatles history has become the playground of the obsessive and the nudnick, both of whom root in the minutia. Inevitably, the answer of how The Beatles make you appreciate being alive exists within the songs and each individual listening to them. If you’ve never read one word about The Beatles, you’re still doing just fine.

In his new book, Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison, Seth Rogovoy – long the best cultural writer working in our region – defies all odds and succeeds in providing something fresh about The Beatles. He not only understands what George Harrison contributed to the band’s sound and spirit, he explains it in a way that when you relisten to the recordings, you hear ‘the George’ in songs in ways you probably would not have noticed before.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney were towering figures who wrote the majority of The Beatles’ hits, but as Rogovoy shows, music and lyrics cannot define the sound and feel of a song. While there have been enough truly awful covers of Beatles tunes that should make that point apparent, it’s easy to assume that the songs came out as they did because the songwriters wanted them to sound that way. Given that Harrison and Ring Starr’s contributions were sometimes undervalued by critics, it’s possible to overlook that what The Beatles created was the product of a true collaboration among four creative musicians, abetted by visionary producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick.

Rogovoy chronicles how, in addition to his distinctive guitar breaks and solos, Harrison came up with many of the intros to Lennon and McCartney compositions that make the songs so instantly arresting and the outros that made their wind-ups so satisfying and enduringly perfect. Best is his chapter on “The Chord” that opens and closes “A Hard Day’s Night” – “Rather than a hook or a riff,” Rogovoy writes, “Harrison devised a single chord, an unusual combination of notes that were not easily identifiable and that, as finally recorded by the group, was fleshed out by George Martin on piano and Paul McCartney on bass.” Apparently, despite much study, “efforts to deconstruct the chord defy analysis.” One may have listened to the song a million times without considering the chord’s uncanniness – after reading Rogovoy, you won’t hear it the same way again.

Rogovoy also demonstrates Harrison’s influence as a visionary who infused Indian classical music, the sonic capabilities of the Moog synthesizer, and the jangle of the 12-string guitar into The Beatles’ musical vocabulary, and then into pop music more widely. He’s also very insightful about the strategies Harrison employed as a songwriter, although Rogovoy’s analysis did not make me enjoy his contributions to The Beatles’ records any more than I had previously. As a matter of personal taste, I’m put off by message songs and, anyway you cut it, George’s songs for at least the first three-quarters of The Beatles are preachy as all get out, not to mention kind of prickly (which Rogovoy acknowledges). I always greeted their slots on the albums the way I might an opinionated relative who always has to be invited to a family gathering, but whose harangues I endure only to be polite. After having George’s early songs hocking mier keyn chaynik for 50 years, I am in no rush to be preached to again.

But by the end of The Beatles’ run, George found his way as an exemplary songwriter, culminating in his masterwork for the band, “Something,” which appears on Abbey Road, the band’s next to last album. (A bit surprisingly, in 2021, Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun,” also from that album, was the most streamed Beatles song on Spotify.) Rogovoy tells you what you need to understand about The Beatles break-up as it related to Harrison – stories covered well and exhaustively by other writers – and then writes beautifully about the eruption of pent-up creativity that led to the greatest of all the post-Beatles recordings by any of its members, All Things Must Pass. If the Phil Spector-produced 3-LP recording once seemed overstuffed to me, now it just seems magical from start to finish – I don’t want it to end.

Rogovoy captures the essence of that album’s pinnacle, “What Is Life”:

There is catchy, there is memorable, and there is transcendent. The opening riff of “What Is Life” is transcendent in its shape and its urgency, and that perhaps is what accounts for the feeling I get when I hear it, the feeling that it has been around forever. It is as if George had tapped into some universal wavelength…

When I listened to the song again for the first time after reading Rogovoy’s appraisal, the joy of the music washed over me in a way it hadn’t in years. Because of the sclerotic nature of radio programming since the “Classic Rock” era of the 1970s, great songs have been overplayed to the point where it’s a challenge to hear what makes them so arresting. Again and again in Within You Without You, Rogovoy’s insights push a Reset button that allows a song you’ve heard a million times – like “What Is Life” – to once again make you appreciate being alive, at least a little bit.

As Rogovoy acknowledges, after All Things Must Pass, “Lightning was not going to strike again, at least not in the same place or even in the same neighborhood and it was time to listen to Harrison with new ears and, if not with lowered expectations, at least on his own terms.” The remaining albums he recorded were uneven, but Harrison made contributions to other artists’ work as a producer and sideman (although Rogovoy doesn’t single out my favorite, his scorching slide guitar on Badfinger’s “Day After Day”). Rogovoy is also good at showing how Harrison extended his cultural impact by producing some excellent movies, including Monty Python’s classic comedy, Life of Brian.

Within You Without You is an entertaining read that is marred by lax editing as it draws to a close. Information is repeated, bogging the narrative down in redundancy. One lapse is particularly baffling – Rogovoy’s account of Harrison’s last recording, Brainwashed, wraps up before the part in which he tells the story of The Traveling Wilburys, the supergroup comprising Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Bob Dylan. That collaboration produced some of Harrison’s most appealing work since All Things Must Pass, songs in which the charm and cheek Harrison conveyed in interviews was perhaps most fully on display. Rogovoy’s writing remains strong throughout – a more thoughtful editorial effort would have made the book even better.

But that’s a quibble. The Berkshires’ own Seth Rogovoy has done a great job in capturing the musical voice of ‘the quiet Beatle.’

Editor’s Note: A brief personal aside – my mother’s cousin, David Braun, was George Harrison’s lawyer in the 1970s, handling litigation against his former manager, Allen Klein, which Rogovoy discusses in his chapter on “My Sweet Lord” and also the lawsuit brought because of that song’s similarity to the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine.” Per The ABA Journal 2019 article “Lawyers, Songs & Money”: “During litigation, Harrison admitted he had known of the Chiffons’ song, but denied that it had influenced him. Harrison turned to his lawyer, famed music attorney David Braun of Hardee, Barovick, Konecky & Braun, for help. ‘He impressed me as a very down-to-earth guy,’ says Joe Santora, head of litigation at Braun’s firm who ended up trying the case…Harrison testified on his own behalf and even brought his guitar to court to show how he had composed “My Sweet Lord.” Santora recalls the New York courtroom being packed to the rafters as if it were Yankee Stadium. “George’s testimony was perfect,” Santora says. “It saved him. It kept the judge from calling him guilty on intentional infringement.” Instead, Harrison was found liable for subconsciously infringing the Chiffons, which lowered his damages considerably.”

David Brownstein was an only child whose family lived in the same apartment for a time with my mother’s family, the Denenbergs, in the Bronx in the 1940s. He was considered "one of the most powerful lawyers in the music industry during its heyday" by Variety. He represented Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, George Harrison, The Band, and Michael Jackson, was co-producer of the film The Last Waltz, and served as president of Polygram Records.We were very proud of Cousin David.