Walking in the Valley A weekly column for those who live and walk in Silicon Valley by Barbara Dahlgren

When music legends die it affects their fans in different ways. I still remember my girl friend mourning over a year after the death of Elvis Presley. She just kept telling me, "You don't understand. You don't understand." I guess I didn't. Her fantasies about meeting and having a relationship with him were shattered. She like many others just couldn't let go. Elvis just gyrated himself into everyone's heart and remains there today for many.

George Harrison's death this week probably doesn't fall in the same category but to many it's like the end of another era. Not as shocking as the murder of John Lennon, Harrison's lost battle with cancer will leave a void in the music community just the same. It dashed all hopes of the Beatles ever getting together again with perhaps Julian Lennon standing in for his father which many had hoped for. Harrison was known as the "quiet" one of the Beatles but his contribution as lead guitarist for the "Fab Four" should not be underestimated. He wrote some of their more unusual classics like "Here Comes the Sun," "Something," and that one about the weeping guitar. He was also polled as the most popular Beatle with American audiences.

Even after the Beatles broke up, Harrison penned such songs as the controversial "My Sweet Lord" (controversial since it embroiled him in a lawsuit because it sounded like the Chiffon's hit, "He's So Fine") and my personal favorite, "I Got My Mind Set On You." That one's not considered a classic but it is the one my daughters played over and over and over and over and over and over again when they were teens. After listening to it that many times, I guess I should have hated it but I didn't. And the video was so cute!

I still remember when the Beatles burst onto the American scene in the mid 60's. All that floppy, moppy hair! "I wanna hold your ha-a-a-a-and. I wanna hold your hand." We were crazy about them. Who knows what that special quality is that makes certain performers legends? Many times it isn't that they are more talented than others but they have that certain indefinable something "extra" that captures the hearts of lots of people.
Then they have more than everything they've ever dreamed of……fame, fortune, following. However, that doesn't seem to give them fulfillment. They still seem to have a void in their lives. With newfound fortune some try to fill that void by "excessing" on sex, alcohol, or drugs. When that doesn't work, they look for meaning to life.

George Harrison led the Beatles on that spiritual search to India where he introduced them to transcendental meditation. He later became linked with the Hare Krishna movement. He was fascinated by mysticism and reincarnation. He said, "I don't know what as. You go on being reincarnated until you reach the actual Truth. Heaven and Hell are just a state of mind."

A statement released by his family at his death said that George Harrison "left this world as he lived in it, conscious of God." He often said, "Everything else can wait but the search for God cannot wait." One has to wonder if he found what he was searching for. Did he find a God that gave him what he wanted or one that gave him what he needed? There is a difference.

If you are on a search for God I urge you to start with the Bible. It may not be as mystically intriguing as other forms of religion but with prayer, it might lead you to the one you are looking for. Let's leave singing, "My Sweet Lord!" George would have wanted it that way.

©December 2001

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