George Harrison with his niece, sister Louise Harrison, and brother Peter Harrison in Benton, Illinois, Middle and Below: George in New York City (1963)
The Beatles and Me On Tour by Ivor Davis Excerpt #3
The column was to be delivered every Thursday at noon, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). I naively imagined that, as the deadline approached, the highly compensated Harrison would come knocking on my door for an intimate tête-à-tête, spewing forth astute opinions, witty asides and observations.
I hadn’t reckoned on Rocker Mean Time: the fact that after the insanity of each show, the band would head back to the hotel, order room service – usually steak or burgers or egg and chips – down Cokes and whiskey, go to bed around four o’clock in the morning and sleep until mid-afternoon to prepare for the next concert or press conference or trip to the airport. With GMT anywhere between four and seven hours ahead of us – depending on where we were in the States – it made my deadline virtually impossible to keep.
What’s more, in the midst of all the frenzy, Harrison didn’t have much to say for himself. So I quickly made an executive decision: I would concoct my own version of what had happened on the tour for the first couple of columns. Indeed, those first stories that I wrote were totally fabricated – I didn’t even bother to run them past George, fearful he would hate them and grab them up, never to be seen again.