Extract: George Harrison - Behind the Locked Door

Following the completion of the White Album, and the conclusion of recording sessions in Los Angeles with new Apple signing Jackie Lomax, in late November 1968 George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd departed for Woodstock in upstate New York. They were heading for Bob Dylan country.

Harrison had first fallen for Dylan early in 1964. The Beatles had played his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, over and over again in their rooms in the George V hotel in Paris, and were quickly seduced. On their second trip to America in August of that year they had met him for the first time, smoking grass together in the Hotel Delmonico on Park Avenue.

Writing and playing with Bob definitely gave him an extra sense of validation

Less than 12 months later Dylan had already mutated from reluctant folk prophet to harrying electric hipster with the release of “Like a Rolling Stone”. Harrison was paying close attention; the song's “how does it feel?” refrain seemed to capture something of his growing ambivalence to fame as The Beatles dragged themselves around the United States in August 1965 for the second summer in a row.

Harrison's admiration for Dylan was characteristically intense. His habit of quoting aphorisms from his songs as though they were scripture, often prefaced with a humble “as the man says”, would be a lifelong one. By comparison, the work of The Beatles always seemed to him just a tad juvenile.

His personal relationship with the man behind the words was lubricated by a love for Music from Big Pink, the 1968 album by Dylan’s former backing group The Hawks, now rechristened The Band. Named after the house the musicians shared in the Catskills, the record was the antithesis of everything that was currently in vogue: there was nothing heavy, nothing psychedelic, nothing groovy about the warm, suspended-in-time rusticity of Music from Big Pink. Featuring soon-to-be classic originals like “The Weight” alongside strange, funny and portentous new Dylan songs, this was instead a freshly-minted strain of mythical North American music, stately, spare and intimate.

Harrison, already disillusioned with The Beatles’ increasingly fractious and dislocated working methods, headed to Woodstock wanting to know more. “He came to visit with me and met a couple of the other guys,” says The Band's guitarist and principal songwriter Robbie Robertson. “He wanted to see what was real. Like, ‘What do they do up in those mountains?’ He wanted to hang out and have some of this rub off on him.”

Indeed, the frill-free (not to say thrill-free) sessions for Let it Be, which began in Twickenham a little over a month after his visit, were a clear attempt to steer The Beatles in a more organic, rootsy direction. “I think Let it Be was very influenced by The Band: more pared down, much simpler, and that was in part George’s influence,” says Jonathan Taplin, The Band’s road manager at the time, who later worked with Harrison on the Concert for Bangladesh. “Even though I know those sessions were not comfortable and not fun, that was him saying, ‘This is where we should go’.” Robbie Robertson adds: “I just recently got a message from Donald Fagen. He was listening to Let It Be – Naked and he said, ‘Oh my God, were these guys ever influenced by The Band?’”

Going to Woodstock was in part a reconnaissance field trip, but also a much needed breath of fresh air. “It was kind of an escape from Beatledom for him,” says Taplin. “It was quite different from what was happening in London. In Woodstock it was much more grounded, very family-orientated, kids all around.”

During Harrison’s visit Robertson was, he says, “really under the weather, so I hooked it up for him to stay at [Dylan manager] Albert Grossman’s house. I also called Bob and said, ‘George is here, he’d really like to visit with you.’ So George then did go and spend some time with Bob, but he didn’t know if he was even going to see Bob when he came.”

It was an awkward meeting, partly because at the time Dylan and Grossman were at loggerheads, partly because the Beatle and his host were, in the words of former Apple employee and Harrison's friend Chris O’Dell, “both shy people and very private” - and partly because, well, “Bob was an odd person,” says Pattie Boyd. “When we went to see him in Woodstock, God, it was absolute agony. He just wouldn’t talk. He would not talk. He certainly had no social graces whatsoever. I don’t know whether it was because he was shy of George or what the story was, but it was agonisingly difficult. And [his wife] Sara wasn’t much help, she had the babies to look after.”

Overleaf: "The first couple to get their clothes off and screw wins..."

The Harrisons were invited to Thanksgiving dinner at Dylan’s house in Byrdcliffe on November 28, where the guests included author Mason Hoffenberg, who had co-written Candy with Terry Southern. It was, says Taplin with admirable understatement, “kind of stiff and formal,” until after dinner Hoffenberg suggested that we "get all the boys over on this side, and all the girls over on this side. The first couple to get their clothes off and screw wins." “It was funny enough, it broke the ice,” says Taplin. “It had been such a puritan Thanksgiving, all these children, and the adults wandered into this big room and Mason made everyone laugh, and it got a bit looser.”

Dylan later told his neighbour Bruce Dorfman quietly that “it wasn’t such a hot visit after all". Harrison begged to differ. He was profoundly influenced by the trip, during which he wrote “I’d Have You Anytime” with Dylan as an attempt to get him to open up: the words – “Let me know you/ Let me show you... / Let me into your heart” – are a direct and disarming plea for friendship.

Listen to an early take of "I'd Have You Anytime"

“We were both shy,” Harrison said. “I was nervous in his house and he was nervous as well. We fidgeted about for two days and only relaxed when we starting playing some guitars.” He also wrote “All Things Must Pass” in Woodstock, seeking out the simple, soulful spirit that informed “The Weight”, a song “which had a religious and a country feeling to it, and I wanted that."

According to Boyd, despite the somewhat strained atmosphere, “George loved it. He loved that he was with Dylan because he adored his music and so he was very jolly." She adds pointedly: "He was totally free from the people he thought were holding him back.”

It was the beginning of an often distant but deep and lasting appreciation. When Dylan and The Band played the Isle of Wight festival in August 1969 “we all went down there together,” says Boyd. “I could see then that they were very fond of each other, and they had great fun together.” While there, between seven-a-side games of tennis and checking out the festival, Harrison wrote the simple country song “Behind that Locked Door”, another attempt to draw Dylan out from his emotional reticence. It worked. By the end of the trip, says Chris O’Dell, “truly they were friends, they both liked each other a lot.”

When Harrison visited New York in late April and early May 1970 he spent 48 hours making music with Dylan, first at his new townhouse at 94 MacDougall Street in the West Village, then the following day at Columbia’s Studio B. The repertoire included a solemn stab at “Yesterday” and numerous Dylan compositions, from old classics (“Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right”) to songs intended for New Morning, the album he was currently working on. They also attempted several oldies and oddities, among them “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, “All I Have to Do Is Dream”, “Matchbox” and “Cupid”. Many of the recordings were jokes or brief snippets, but on his return to London Harrison recorded three of the songs – “I’d Have You Anytime”, “If Not For You”, and “I Don’t Want to Do It” – during the sessions for his first solo album proper, All Things Must Pass. Another collaboration from New York, the lightweight “Working on a Guru”, recently surfaced on Dylan’s Another Self Portrait. (Pictured above left: Harrison in 1970)

The following year Harrison played every one of his friendship cards in order to coax Dylan out of live semi-retirement to perform at the Concert for Bangladesh. As the instigator and organiser of rock’s first major charity event, he was in charge of crisis management, which included preventing a terrified Dylan heading for the hills on the eve of the show. “Bob always liked to hedge his bets,” says Taplin with a droll chuckle.

“The night before the show was a bit tricky,” Harrison recalled. “We went down to Madison Square Garden where they were setting it up. [Dylan] stood on the stage and it suddenly was a whole frightening scenario. Bob turned to me and said, ‘Hey man, I don’t think I can make this. I’ve got a lot of things to do in New Jersey...’ I was so stressed, I said, ‘Look, don’t tell me about that. I’ve always been in a band, I’ve never stood out front, so I don’t want to know about that.’ I always just tried to be straight with him, and he responded. But right up until he came on stage I didn’t know if he was going to come.” Says Chris O'Dell: "That was George really going out on a limb – it could have failed miserably, he had to push his own boundaries really far, to be the key person in a concert, and to believe that people like Bob Dylan, who he really respected, would be willing to do it and go on stage for free."

Watch Harrison and Dylan rehearsing "If Not For You" before the Concert for Bangladesh

Beatle or not, Harrison never completely shook off his reverence for Dylan. Almost 25 years after they had first met, when the pair teamed up in 1988 as part of the Traveling Wilburys he would surreptitiously film Dylan playing piano and listen back to it at night. “I think George frightened Bob,” said fellow Wilbury Tom Petty. “At the end of the first day, he said, ‘We know that you’re Bob Dylan and everything, but we’re just going to treat you and talk to you like we would anybody else...’”

A key relationship until the very end of his life, its origins in 1968 proved genuinely catalytic in terms of Harrison's metamorphosis from Beatle George to solo superstar. “Writing and playing with Bob definitely gave him an extra sense of validation,” says Pattie Boyd. His Thanksgiving trip to Woodstock offered a glimpse of the kind of nourishing, mutually fulfilling creative life he craved, and would strive to create during All Things Must Pass. But he wasn’t out of the woods yet. A few days after visiting Dylan and The Band, Harrison returned to a British “winter of discontent” to play out the final act in The Beatles’ story.

• George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door by Graeme Thomson is out now, published by Omnibus Press. It is available from Amazon and all good book shops
• Find out more about George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door here and here