I was watching a pretty good documentary about the Beatles, which was full of never-before-seen footage of recording sessions and television appearances. One old clip showed George Harrison performing "Within You, Without You", one of his terrible Indian-influenced, droning sitar things (it's on "Sergeant Pepper's"). He was standing in a circle of sitar and tabla players, all of whom were wearing wooden masks of Hindu gods - I remember seeing Hanuman, the monkey-faced god and Ganesh, the elephant-faced god. Was it blasphemous, in India, to impersonate deities like that? I wasn't sure and, anyway, the genuinely shocking thing about the performance was the fact that George was wearing brown face-paint and a tuxedo, to make himself look like an Indian waiter. That's the 1960s for you, I thought.
Notes for Freudian Interpretation
Earlier that evening, before the dream, Ellen and I had had dinner at Ford's house. He'd just come back from visiting his mother in Wales and didn't want to cook, so we ordered in curry from a takeaway. It was, incidentally, completely delicious, although I ate too much, as is often the case with takeaway Indians.
Ford's kitchen stereo is refusing to play CDs at the moment, so the radio was on while we ate, not that we were listening to it with any great attention. The programme that we were ignoring was about the making of "Segreant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and had lots of short bits of the songs in various pre-finished states. I don't think I heard "Within You, Without You", but it's not impossible. I remember thinking of George Harrison just once, in the context of Beatles who were dead compared to Beatles who were not dead.
There's a pair of recurring nonsensical thoughts that often pop into my head when I think of anything to do with the Beatles, and, as ever, they popped into my head that night, too: What will we do with the last Beatle? and Will what we do differ depending on whether it's Paul or Ringo?
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