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Such confusion would end with the band's acrimonious breakup, announced in 1970. For Harrison, the split opened the door to artistic liberation. He had been piling up songs for months--years--songs that couldn't be squeezed onto Beatles albums, brimful as they were with Lennon and McCartney's efforts. Now, in a work that is the very definition of magnum opus, Harrison poured forth the three-disc set All Things Must Pass. (A 30th-anniversary reissue earlier this year only confirmed that this was Harrison's masterpiece.)
The bulky boxed set went to No. 1 in 1971, propelled by such hits as My Sweet Lord and What Is Life. Harrison had found a new spiritual mentor, Srila Prabhupada of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, and Hindu sentiments and sounds permeate the record, further spurring sitar sales and causing many listeners to investigate Eastern religions. In the early aftermath of the Beatles demise, Harrison, the revelation, rivaled Lennon or McCartney as a pop icon, and Shankar realized his friend might be the perfect front man for a good cause. In August 1971, Harrison and friends Dylan, Starr, Leon Russell and Eric Clapton staged two concerts at New York City's Madison Square Garden to raise money for the flood-and famine-ravaged Indian subcontinent. The Concert for Bangladesh established Harrison as a pioneering rock philanthropist, and set a model for future celebrity fund-raising efforts like Live Aid, the We Are the World record and the Concert for New York City, starring McCartney, at Madison Square Garden six weeks ago for victims of the World Trade Center attacks.
With George now front and center, his fans got to know him better. It became evident that the quiet Beatle was, in fact, possessed of the same dry, sarcastic, Liverpudlian wit that Lennon was known for. (During the Beatles' recording session with producer George Martin back in 1962, he asked them, "Is there anything you're not happy about?" It was George, not John, after all, who famously answered, "Well, there's your tie, for starters.") Harrison, with individual success, seemed more at ease, and his geniality throughout the 1970s saw his image evolve to that of the happy mystic.
Clapton, along with Dylan, became one of Harrison's best friends, and it's rather astonishing that this friendship was not destroyed when Patti became Mrs. Clapton in 1979, two years after she and George divorced and a year after George married the American Olivia Arias. By the late 1970s Harrison was as much entrepreneur as musician. He had started his own record label (Dark Horse, in 1974) and his own movie-production company, HandMade Films, which he set up to help his pal Eric Idle finish his Monty Python film Life of Brian. Other HandMade productions included the 1981 fantasy Time Bandits and the 1986 noirish drama Mona Lisa, which launched actor Bob Hoskins. Harrison's cinema dabblings also included a cameo in Idle's faux rockumentary All You Need Is Cash, about the Rutles--the "Prefab Four." According to George, the parody told the Beatles story "much better than the usual boring documentary."