Song: Innocent Memories of an Acoustic Guitar

Author: Li Liwei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: Standardized with acoustic guitar accompaniment, vividly telling the moving stories of songs, bands, and individuals through illustrations and text. Eternal names remembered: John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Don McLean. Magical melodies of the human world: "Vincent," "Norwegian Wood," "Hotel California," "American Pie." MP3 disc included with the book, a dual enjoyment of words and music. Most Chinese people's understanding of Harrison began two or three years ago with the popularity of Haruki Murakami's novel "Norwegian Wood." Fans of Murakami's style, due to their superficial understanding of English, mistook the old Beatles' song "Norwegian Wood" for a musical version of "Norwegian Wood" and eagerly searched for the song. Many people learned about Harrison, who was not initially as famous, due to this misunderstanding: Harrison ingeniously used a mystical Eastern instrument—the sitar—in "Norwegian Wood," casting a "Eastern mysticism" hue over Lennon's simple voice from a Western perspective. —The reserved Harrison was long fascinated by this "Eastern mysticism." He led all members of the Beatles to fly to India to study yoga with a guru and engaged in several days of meditation-like practices. This trip to India made Harrison even more captivated by Eastern mysticism—but in the eyes of those who had rationally reflected on religious issues, what Harrison was obsessed with was more akin to sorcery than religion. Later, it was said that the so-called "master" was actually a pervert—there is no evidence that this claim had any impact on Harrison, but it is said that there was indeed a sect in ancient Indian religions that advocated indulgence and considered it a necessary path to enlightenment. These anecdotes awkwardly highlighted Harrison's image, and in actual performances, he was almost always silently standing behind Lennon and McCartney. In the 1960s, when the hippie culture flourished, he seemed more like an observer than a participant. Throughout the decade, Lennon's radicalism and McCartney's sweetness were all witnessed by the progression of the times through the chords of Harrison's guitar: five months after the single "She Loves You" became the UK's top-selling record, two million people gathered in Washington to listen to Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech—"I Have a Dream"; 14 days later, the Beatles' another single "I Want to Hold Your Hand" earned the same honor as "She Loves You"; two months later, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Simple love, reckless drugs, complex politics, and pure slogans all intertwined, making the radical Lennon arrogant, the sweet McCartney fatalistic, the silent Harrison reclusive, and the entire society bewildered. Like the other members of the Beatles, George Harrison's "true" death date should be presumed to be December 31, 1970. As a helpless "Let It Be" topped the charts in both the UK and the US, the legal procedures for the Beatles' disbandment began. Leonard Bernstein's account of late 1970 is: "It was the last week, the Beatles no longer existed. In this week, my heart was agitated, I cried, I recalled a wonderful era, a golden era, a wise era." Although memories are inherently "gilded," Bernstein's words indeed resonated with many. People also saw that a few months before the Beatles' official disbandment, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died of drug overdoses. Disasters followed one after another, and an era truly came to an end. Andy Warhol wrote in "Popism," "In 1964, everything became young." This sentence is increasingly understood by fewer and fewer people.