The Uncarved Blog

Olivia and Dhani Harrison accept award for George after Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne induct George Harrison Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2004.

Here is a partial transcription of Olivia’s acceptance speech. Very beautiful and wise! Olivia is an exceptional person!

Here I go again. I can talk about George, you know, forever. But uh, I won’t. There was a quote by the Indian poet Tagore that George read to me one day. He said, “Blessed is he whose fame does not outshine his truth.” And here we are in the Hall of Fame. But the inductees are not chosen because of their fame, but because they expressed their truth through their music. George said that he tried to write songs that would, uh, still mean something years from now. And I think it’s safe to say that in spite of his immense fame his truth will never be out-shined or forgotten. (applause) Good.

Olivia went on to say that had George been there that night he would have thanked a lot of people. But she did thank one person in the room that George knew the longest in his life—”someone who looked after him, and all of them, from the time they were 13, for George, the end of his life, and that’s the mysterious Neil Aspinall.” And she thanked Neil for holding it together, otherwise the phenomenon (of the Beatles) might not have happened or stayed together as long as it did.

Seven years later, with Olivia’s help, Martin Scorsese’s film, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, premiers at the Sondheim Center for the Performing Arts in Fairfield, Iowa. Also see: George Harrison: The not-so-quiet Beatle, article by Philip Goldberg in LA YOGA Magazine.

See George Harrison – The Last Performance (John Fugelsang), a rare and wonderful interview on VH1, where George and Ravi Shankar came in to talk about an album he had produced called, Chants of India. George also talked about a concert he gave for the Natural Law Party, and the need to educate students on how to raise their consciousness. He answered questions about his concert for Bangladesh, the first benefit concert of its kind; and how he introduced the Beatles to Transcendental Meditation when they met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who was going to be speaking at the Hilton Hotel. He unexpectedly played some music, including a new song, Any Road, with the line, “If you don’t know where you’re going any road will take you there,” which came out on his posthumous album, Brainwashed.

I later found this sweet video clip of George posted Nov 29, 2019 by @GeorgeHarrison, the official Twitter feed for the Estate of George Harrison, on the 18th anniversary of his passing. Olivia Harrison described that moment: “There was a profound experience that happened when he left his body. It was visible. Let’s just say, you wouldn’t need to light the room, if you were trying to film it. He just…lit the room.” George was a great soul and we remember him today with much love and affection.

Tags: Dhani Harrison, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Neil Aspinal, Olivia Harrison, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Beatles, Tom Petty

This entry was posted on May 11, 2012 at 2:18 am and is filed under Music, Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.