One of the common threads throughout George Harrison’s life was always the sounds of Indian music. He may have found his calling in rock and roll, but his heart was always in the sounds of Eastern culture, falling in love with the style when he first started work on The Beatles’ second film, Help. For all of the great music that he could get out of the sitar, Harrison left his final performance on his Indian instrument for his supergroup, the Traveling Wilburys.
Even for a band that was made up of living legends, though, there was no set structure to how either of the band’s albums would go. These were just a bunch of rock and roll dads coming together to jam half the time, so most of their mentality was about trying to find something that they all enjoyed playing, even if it was just 12-bar blues.
That’s not to say that Harrison didn’t have his shining moments in the group. As much as every band member may have been hoarding their best material for their respective solo careers, songs like ‘Heading For the Light’ are the signature charm that Harrison was always known for, taking the basics of his usual rock and roll sound and throwing different odd chords into the mix.
By the time Roy Orbison passed away, though, there was no real need for the band to make another album. Never one to turn down a dad joke, The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3 was slightly more meandering than the first album, featuring songs that feel like either half-finished ideas or the occasional song used to keep the good times rolling.
Out of all the filler on the album, the song ‘The Devil’s Been Busy’ is a nice piece of lighthearted spiritualism, with Harrison talking about the devil lurking in the shadows everywhere on Earth. Even though Harrison had traded in his usual guitar chops for his signature slide guitar, the breakdown features Harrison matching his guitar solo note-for-note with a sitar.
This was the kind of Indian music that most had been sorely missed from his prime, not being seen since the deliberate Beatles pastiche ‘When We Was Fab’. Although Harrison would have one more solo album left in him with Brainwashed, he would take on his last album with Jeff Lynne and no more Indian instruments.
Make no mistake, Harrison was still indebted to his Indian roots on songs like ‘Marwa Blues’, but the majority of the album is dominated by either acoustic guitars, the occasional guitar solo, and his new favourite instrument from the back half of his career: the ukulele. Even when creating his final mantra to the world in the final moments of the album, the Indian instruments aren’t played by him, with musician Bickram Ghosh brought in to provide a gentle tabla underneath everything.
Harrison may have only used Indian instruments sparingly throughout the last part of his career, but you didn’t need to hear a tabla or a sarangi to know that he was still indebted to that style of music. This was a man who was forever a student of music, and by the time he reached his older age, the slide guitar allowed him to speak in the same way that Ravi Shankar could when he played sitar.
