On Friday, September 29, 2000 at 12:00:00 AM UTC-7, Maxwell Edison wrote:

Cool article. Kind of a shame George would not want to perform his own songs just because they would be perceived as Beatle tunes. Glad to see he has
come around, tho, and played many of the songs he wrote for the Beatles during his tour of Japan.
Lisa <ba...@azstarnet.com> wrote in message
news:39D307AC...@azstarnet.com...

Just a little something for y'all's delectation.

Lisa
----------

Rolling Stone, December 19, 1974

George Harrison: Lumbering in the Material World
by Ben Fong-Torres

Holy Krishna! What kind of an opening night for George Harrison is
this? Ravi Shankar asks for silence and no smoking during his music. Silence is very important, he says, because music is eternal, and out of the silence comes the music. Something like that. But, instead, out of
the audience comes this piercing death cry, followed by a rain of war whoops. After a few numbers, people start shouting, "Get funky!" and
"Rock and roll!"

In the press box at PNE Coliseum in Vancouver, one reporter is guessing that the Sanskrit letter for Om, illuminated in shadowboxes at either
end of the stage, is actually the Indian dollar sign. Another insists
it means "No Smoking."

Harrison, meantime, is hoarse from the beginning and strains through
each song. Billy Preston eventually perks up the show with two numbers
in the second half, but the night sputters to a conclusion with more
Indian music, more cries for rock and roll and, in the end, Harrison receiving a perfunctory encore call. He performs "My Sweet Lord," and
out of the silence comes the silence-a still and seated audience with
only the front section clapping along.

"I hated it," said Pat Luce the next morning. Pat Luce wasn't a paying customer. She's a publicist with A&M Records, on the tour for
Harrison's Dark Horse label, which A&M distributes. "We've had a lot of conferences after the show," she said. "They're having a rehearsal
today. George has to rest. He's been rehearsing every day and
recording every night to get the single out. Last night everyone
was-they weren't down; in the framework of the show, there is a fabulous show; they know it's a good band.

"But, one, it's too long; two, Ravi's got to be one set. And three,
George has to shut up."

In San Francisco, producer Bill Graham gazed through an office window at the unceasing rain and shook his head very slowly. On the wall behind
him hung memorabilia from his two other big tours of 1974-Bob Dylan and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He fingered the felt-tip pen dangling
from his necklace and worried about anything he might say.

He'd been up till four that morning, in fact, agonizing about what to
tell the press. He was clearly upset with the tour; he had a sheaf of
notes on his desk covering the shows in Vancouver, Seattle, and now,
last night, in San Francisco. But he should be talking to George, not
the press, he said, and so far he'd only spoken with Tom Scott,
Harrison's saxophonist and musical sounding board, and Denis O'Brien, Harrison's business manager. Ordinarily, explained Graham, he talked
freely with Harrison, "except on things artistic." He wasn't sure he
should step out of line, as technical producer of the tour, and
criticize the artistic and musical structure of the show.

So specific thoughts were off the record. But if he was going to talk
at all, it had to be straight. "I could say to you, 'We're working on things,' you know. 'George is in great spirits!' It's like the
football team that's lost forty-three games in a row, and you say, 'How
do you feel, coach?' 'Well, my spirits are up and we're still in
there!" Graham smiled vaguely at the metaphor. "But we all know that
the plays ain't working, and we're looking for a new quarterback."

He recalled the return of Dylan and the reunion of CSNY. Their
audiences. Graham has a sense for audiences. "At the beginning of each show, I think the public has the same feeling-yes, that wonderful aura.
I think with Bob Dylan the public loved what they got. With CSNY they
got three-and-a-half hours of music and were pretty well satisfied.
With George Harrison, they would definitely have wanted more of George Harrison.

"That's my criticism of George, out of a deep respect for his great
talent and great ability. I think what the public leaves with is a continuing respect and reverence for what he has done, and a..." Here Graham chose his words carefully. "...perhaps a feeling of
bittersweetness about not having gotten just a bit closer to what their expectations were. I don't know. They didn't get to go back in the
time machine enough."

On the Dylan tour, Graham, the backstage showman, had lit up a fancy
Cuban cigar for every show well done. I asked him whether he'd smoked
any so far on this tour.

His eyebrows perked up. "Ah, but that's the point. There's no cigars!"

I realize the Beatles did fill a space in the sixties, and all the
people who the Beatles meant something to have grown up. It's like with anything. You grow up with it and you get attached to it. That's one
of the problems in our lives, becoming too attached to things. But I understand the Beatles in many ways did nice things, and it's
appreciated, the people still like them. The problem comes when they
want to live in the past, and they want to hold onto something and are afraid of change.
-George Harrison at his Los Angeles press conference, October 23rd,
1974

The last time I saw George Harrison in the flesh as a Beatle, he was a standout. The group was on a stage covering second base at Candlestick Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, the night of August 29th, 1966.
San Francisco was the last stop of a nineteen-city American tour.
JPG&R, all in lacy white shirts and mod green jackets that matched the outfield grass, had strolled out of the first-base dugout, waving
casually at a mad crowd of twenty-six thousand, and laughed through
eleven songs in thirty minutes flat.

And I remember how George stood out from the other three that evening.
He wore white socks.

As things turned out, the Candlestick Park show was the last concert the Beatles ever did. "We got in a rut," Harrison told Hunter Davies, their biographer, years later. "It was just a bloody big row. Nobody could
hear. We got worse as musicians, playing the same old junk every day.
There was no satisfaction at all."

The next month, George and his wife, Patti, were off to India. Having
idly picked up a strange, twin-bowled instrument called a sitar on the
set of Help!, he was interested in studying under the great Indian
composer and sitarist, Ravi Shankar.

It was five more years before Harrison returned to the stage, at the
behest of Shankar and for the benefit of the people of Bangladesh, East Pakistan. He was the host, dressed all in white, gathering friends like Billy Preston, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, and Bob Dylan around him.

And it was there, at Madison Square Garden, that Harrison tasted the
desire to tour again. "He was definitely inspired after Bangladesh,"
said Billy Preston. "He wanted to do it again, right away. But it took
some time. Bangladesh was an exceptional show because everybody was
there. He had to do a lot of thinking on this one, because he had to
get out there and be the one."

There were other delays for Harrison: the fusses over the profits from
the Bangladesh benefit and album; the McCartney-sue-me, we-sue-Allen
Klein blues; various sessions with friends like Harry Nilsson, Preston,
and Starr; the Living in the Material World album and the creation of
Dark Horse Records. One of Dark Horse's first releases was Shankar
Family and Friends, which featured Shankar conducting a fifteen-piece Indian orchestra, sometimes joined by rock and jazz instruments. Ravi Shankar, it turned out, was a major reason for Harrison's return to the stage.

"I have always been very eager to bring out such a number of good
musicians from India," said Shankar, who has composed music for small orchestras for some thirty years. "George heard a few tapes I had of
things with groups and he was impressed and was telling me for almost
seven years that I should bring something like this over. And I said, 'Well, you must also take part in it.' And it's only last year we
became more confident."

Last February Harrison visited Shankar in India to plan the tour. In
the spring he began to gather his backup. First he chose Tom Scott, saxophone player behind Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Billy Preston, and
John Lennon, and in front of his own band, the L.A. Express. Having
studied Indian music at UCLA with a Shankar disciple, Harihar Rao, Scott was invited to play on the Shankar Family album last year.

When his L.A. Express accompanied Joni Mitchell to London this spring, Harrison called and asked him to join the tour.

George then picked drummer Andy Newmark, formerly with Sly Stone, and bassist Willie Weeks. Newmark and Weeks had played with Ronnie Wood (of
the Faces) on his solo album, as had Harrison.

Finally, Harrison chose second guitarist Robben Ford, from the Express, Billy Preston and percussionist Emil Richards, another Harihar Rao
student who worked on Ravi's LP. Meanwhile, Scott rounded out his horn section with Chuck Findley and Jim Horn. Both men performed at the Bangladesh benefit.

In October Harrison arrived in Los Angeles to begin rehearsals and to finish his own album, Dark Horse, begun a year ago in London. He chose
to squeeze both projects-plus a single, also called "Dark Horse"-into a three-week period. He promptly lost his voice, and, at a press
conference on the eve of the tour, announced as much, adding, ho ho,
that he might very well go out the first few shows and do instrumentals.

That might not have been a bad idea. Harrison did, in fact, start each
show with his mouth shut, presenting himself as just one of nine band members, playing a well-arranged, tension-and-release number called
"Hari Good Boy Express." But when, on the opening night in Vancouver, Harrison broke into "The Lord Loves the One," he sang off key, and the voice, in its first flight, instantly sounded tired. The performance
earned minimal response, as people yielded easily to distraction,
studying the "Dark Horse" banner unfurled high above the stage, or the hand-painted, rainbow-colored tour shirts worn by Willie Weeks and Jim Horn, or Harrison's hair-shag cut, medium long, blown dry-or his denim overalls and Hush Puppies.

(Billy Preston wound up covering for him, singing high parts of songs. Later, Preston said Harrison was resigned to the arrangement. "He feels
a little bad about it, but there's nothin' he can do about it, he's been working so hard.")

In any event the first U.S. tour by a former Beatle was underway, "and
for a long time," Jeani Read, pop critic for the Vancouver Province
wrote later, "all I could think about was Dylan a few months ago,
singing all his songs wrong for the people who wanted to hear them the
way they were used to hearing them. Because Harrison sang most of his
songs wrong, too. Except the painful difference was that Dylan was in complete control of what he was doing."

Wrote Don Stanley, of the Vancouver Sun, "He attempted to storm through
the material, a la Dylan's recent magnificent tour, and ended up agonizingly hoarse."

(Dylan attended the two concerts November 12th at the Forum in Los
Angeles, and he visited with Harrison between shows. During the encore,
he zipped out the back doors into the parking lot, accompanied by his
wife and several friends. He stopped to say that, yes, he enjoyed the shows.)

Through Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Long Beach, and Los Angeles, Harrison sounded the same, and so did the reviews. In San Francisco,
Phil Elwood of the Examiner: "Never a strong singer, but a moving one, Harrison found that he had virtually no voice left and had to croak his
way through even the delicate 'Something.'"

By Los Angeles, at the first of three shows at the Forum, more than Harrison's voice seemed to be cracking. After an eight-second
response-more a yawn than a hand for a new song called "Maya Love," Harrison told the house: "I don't know how it feels down there, but from
up here, you seem pretty dead." Later, his voice breaking, he angrily lectured someone in the audience who'd screamed out a request for "Bangladesh":

"I have to rewrite the song. But don't just shout Bangladesh, give them something to help. You can chant Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, and maybe you'll feel better. But if you just shout Bangladesh, Bangladesh, Bangladesh, it's not going to help anybody."

Finally, after he'd cooled down a bit, Harrison apologized for the way things seemed to be going.

The next night, Harrison played two shows at the Forum with less-than-packed houses. Forum manager Jim Appell estimated the first
crowd at 9,000, the second at 11,000. The Forum seats 18,000.

Most of the people who'd forked over $9.50 to see Beatle George expected
a Beatle show; a rubber soul revue, a long and winding memory lane.
Even if they'd kept up with Harrison these past few years and knew
better, they still wanted a Beatle.

George, from the outset, refused. At rehearsals, during the first run-through, it took two hours and eighteen songs before George would do
a Beatles song-"In My Life" from Rubber Soul. The way Tom Scott told
it, Ravi Shankar had to go to Harrison to urge him to consider audience expectations, "and give the people a couple of old songs; it's okay."

"George says people expect him to be exactly what he was ten years ago," said Shankar. "That's the problem with all the artists, I suppose.
Frank Sinatra or anyone popular for many years. People like to hear the
old nostalgia."

"George," said Tom Scott, "is one of the few guys with the prestige and
the resources to do something good and is willing to do it and put his
neck on the line. By that I mean presenting a show with so much new material when people expect him to do a Beatles."

"Something good" meant Harrison's presentation of Shankar and his new music, and it meant his insisting on being just one of the guys on
stage, playing humble host to the others, giving individual spots to Preston and Scott.

But it also meant a dismaying refusal to acknowledge his past, and the
fact that if he hadn't been a Beatle, he might not be doing a $4 million tour inside of seven weeks. And Harrison went further. He tampered
with the past. So you had Harrison singing, "Something in the way she
moves it," turning the lover's tribute into a lecherous shout. And: "I
look at you all/See the love there that's sleeping/While my guitar
gently smiles." And, on a song written by John Lennon (who was the only former partner to send flowers to the opening show): "In my life...I
love God more."

"George didn't want to do 'Something' at all," said Billy Preston, describing the rehearsals. "I knew he was gonna have to do it, and he started rebelling against it by doing it a different way, rewriting the lyrics. But at least he's doing the song."

Harrison may have the right to change lyrics-his own, at least-but how would you like it if Frank Sinatra came out for a
once-more-in-a-lifetime shot and sang, "I did it...His way"? Or if
Dylan on his tour had proclaimed, "The answer, my friend, is coming from within/The answer is coming from within"? To a dedicated nostalgia
freak, the slaughter of such secular cows can be pretty frustrating. Or pretty silly.

There were other problems: The shows suffered from sound mixes that
buried many instruments, and from poor structuring. The Vancouver
concert, for instance, included two appearances by Ravi Shankar's orchestra, which, for many in the audience, was at least one too many. Introducing "our little pal" Shankar and orchestra for their second set, Harrison seemed to note the lack of excitement in the air. He put in an urgent plug for Indian music: "I'd die for it," he said, and tapped his electric guitar-"but not for this." After the opening night disaster, a lackluster hotel gathering turned into a series of meetings with Ravi,
Tom Scott, Billy Preston, and Harrison. Shankar suggested a
restructuring of the show. "It was just showbiz," said Scott. "No one wanted Ravi to come out to a hostile audience."

Even with Shankar condensed into one power-packed set, the rest of the concert left a lot of songs to be desired. Of a total twenty-three
tunes in two-and-a-half hours, only eight were familiar Beatles or
Harrison songs: "Something," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," "Sue Me,
Sue You Blues," "For You Blue," "Give Me Love," "In My Life," "What Is Life," and "My Sweet Lord." From Seattle through Los Angeles, the shows generally went like this: "Hari Good Boy Express" (the instrumental), "Something," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Preston's "Will It Go
'Round in Circles," and "Sue Me, Sue You Blues." Then, with less than
half an hour gone, Harrison introduced Shankar and orchestra for seven straight numbers, followed by intermission. And in the second half, whatever hits there were had to be sorted from a puzzling pile.
Harrison kicked off with "For You Blue" and "Give Me Love," which in several performances was the first song whose introduction was
recognized by the audience. Then an instrumental, a directionless jam spawned during rehearsals at the A&M sound stage, called "Sound Stage of
My Mind," followed by "In My Life," with strong brass where there used
to be gentle guitar. Then a jazzy, jamlike number from Tom Scott called "Tomcat," "Maya Love," with guitar lines reminiscent of "Sue Me, Sue You Blues," and the most consistent high point of each concert: Billy
Preston with his hits, "Nothing from Nothing" and "Outta-Space."

After "Dark Horse," Harrison announced his last number, "What Is Life,"
and returned for "My Sweet Lord," speeded up, unrecognizable except for
the lyrics, and weighed down by exhortations from George to go to the
god of your choice.

"Krishna/Christ/Krishna/Christ/Krishna/Christ," he chanted over and
over, adding a mention now and then for Buddha and Allah.

On paper, without mentioning the drive of Andy Newmark's drumming, the color of Emil Richards' percussion work, the solidity of Willie Weeks' bass, the vocal (and sweeping keyboard) help rendered by Billy Preston,
the exuberant rock and blues guitar of Robben Ford, and the brilliant
horn work of Tom Scott, the concert sounds pretty dreadful. But it
wasn't quite that bad.

For one thing, before each show there was a mood of expectation. Everywhere, one could still detect faint traces of Beatlemania. A 20-year-old woman outside the Seattle Center Coliseum spotted Harrison arriving and ran into a crowd screeching, "I saw him! I saw his
glasses! I saw his nose!" A younger woman, in a George Harrison
T-shirt, cried uncontrollably in the front row in Vancouver. And, at
the Oakland Coliseum, a crowd of four or five dozen fans stormed past a puny link of three security guards and rushed up to the stage to help George with his heavy load during "Give Me Love."

Also there was the appealing sincerity of George Harrison himself, blissed-out and beaming while committing all manner of ghastly, anti-show-business mistakes-overintroducing Ravi Shankar or Billy
Preston, imploring the audience to "have a little patience" for the
Indian music before they've even heard any.

Some critics called it "The Billy Preston Show," and they weren't far
off. When Preston, in a natty, sequined suit and mushroom-cloud Afro,
began to move behind the instruments arrayed around him-a clavinet, a Hammond B-3 organ, ARP and string ensemble synthesizers and a Wurlitzer piano-all the pent-up hell of a boogie-hungry horde broke loose.

Preston gave the crowds what they couldn't get from Harrison: hit rock
and roll songs, done faithfully, in full voice. So it was Billy who got
the audience up on its feet, up on the chairs. In San Francisco, it was Billy who at long last triggered a welcome surge toward the stage.

George, through all of this, looked grateful, pointing at Billy,
shouting his name, while Preston pointed and shouted back: "George Harrison! Back on stage!"

In Vancouver most of the audience were polite for Ravi Shankar and his fifteen-member troupe. A little itchy, maybe, and possibly thinking
they'd rather be scoring a hot dog or hearing more Harrison,
but-polite. It was in Seattle that Shankar and his orchestra finally
broke through. The song was "Dispute and Violence," introduced by
Harrison with the note, "otherwise known as jazz."

Like many of Shankar's pieces, "Dispute and Violence" was a sometimes loose, sometimes tight fusion of various forms of Eastern and Western music-folk, classical, and spiritual Indian; rock, jazz, and even
big-band swing. There was Indian scat-shouting, trilling and jabbering, representing dispute; squeaking reeds and flutes and a Don Ellis brass
for measures of violence; and Andy Newmark's drums, Emil Richards' kitchenware percussion, and Alla Rakha's tabla setting a steady battle tempo. Shankar at the podium, arms flailing, index fingers dipping and pointing, took it all to a victorious, symphonic, last-stomp halt.

Two young men behind me jumped up to join in the resounding ovation.
They would not stand up again until the end of Preston's two numbers. I asked them what they liked about "Dispute and Violence."

"It's the beat," said the first one. "I saw him a year ago, with just a small group, two or three, I wasn't expecting anything like this."

"It's beautiful," said the second. "You hear every different type of
music there is in the world."

"If you were gonna talk to God," remarked the first, "that would be the way." The man said he was 19 and had come to hear Beatles songs.

Three other songs stood out in the Shankar set. "Cheparte," meaning
spicy or "hot stuff," received standing ovations following a rousing
battle between the veteran Alla Rakha on tabla and T.V. Gopalkrishnan, a younger man, on the mridangam-a barrel-shaped drum he struck with his
hands at both ends. The two sat side by side, and overhead lights
switched between them as they took their solos, slapping and hammering
away at different pitches until they joined together. The crowd whooped like it had just heard a ten-minute, heavy-metal drum workout.

"Zoom Zoom Zoom" introduced the audience to singers Lakshmi Shankar and
her daughter, Viji. Both recipients of India's highest musical honor,
the President's Award, they stood at each side of their in-law
conductor.

Lakshmi stood still, arms crossed in front of her, and with her three-octave voice glided easily through "Zoom Zoom Zoom." The lyrics
had a taste of Brazil '66 and her voice reminded one of Norma Tanega,
for those who remember "Walkin' My Cat Named Dog."

Shankar's one turn at the sitar was reserved for a song called "Anurag" ("Love"), and even this one was a surprise, a hot-beat number featuring interplays between his instrument and two violins, with Ravi fingering decidedly bluesy figures, then conducting, from his perch, several
solos, among them the tabla tarang, a group of twelve waterbowls, and
the santoor, an instrument that resembles an autoharp and is played with delicate mallets. Again, the sound was symphonic and dynamic. I heard
the number performed five times and never once thought of hot dogs.

"I have always been-what is the word?-"dilemma'?-to my listeners the
last thirty years," remarked Shankar one day in San Francisco.

"By the time they form an opinion that I am doing this, I am doing something else. So it's puzzling for them, and that's why I have been criticized more than anyone-sacrileging Indian music or jazzifying
Indian music, breaking the tradition, all sorts of things you might have heard yourself. But I keep my base very strong."

On the tour, all of Shankar's songs were about five minutes, for many a relief from the long ragas he plays at his own concerts. He wrote (and edited) many of them specifically for the Harrison audience, he said.

"And none of the songs are, in the Indian sense, classical. They are different, because, imagine, with all those impatient kids, if I sat
down and started playing for a half hour. And it wouldn't blend
together; the wholeness of the show wouldn't be there.

"It's only lately that I've been hearing a bit more of rock music," he said. "I find that there's a lot of great things in that music, but I personally believe that 50 to 75 percent is the loudness of it."

Shankar, in recent years, has avoided huge rock concerts and festivals,
for reasons that transcend technical difficulties. "After I went to Woodstock and one or two others, I thought maybe I should not go any
more. It has changed from the atmosphere at Monterey to, maybe not violence, but too much drugs. And I thought maybe there's no use in my going, because it's not my type of music."

In the summer of 1967, less than a year after the Candlestick Park
concert, Harrison, then 24, came back to San Francisco with his wife, to have a look at the hippies who'd blossomed out of the Haight-Ashbury district.

This year, he was back. Before the tour he had decided that several concerts would be benefits, and he had heard about the plight of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. Opened the year of Harrison's first visit, the Free Clinic survived the district's
speed/rip-off/deterioration phase, and, like the Haight itself, had recently grown. The medical clinic is now only one of eight concerns,
the others including a Women's Needs Center, a therapy program for
heroin addicts, and a vocational rehab center. This year, federal revenue-sharing money marked for 1975 was diverted by Mayor Joseph
Alioto, and after two months of applying for grants and of trying to set
up a rock benefit, the clinic was almost resigned to shut down the
medical sector, which last year spent $67,500 to treat ten thousand patients. Harrison donated net profits from his first San Francisco
concert to the clinic. A week after the show, the clinic's medical director, Dr. Elizabeth Anthony, said the donation would be $66,000.

The day after the benefit, Harrison, along with manager O'Brien,
publicist Pat Luce, adn Olivia Arias (a representative of Dark Horse) visited the clinic for about a half hour, just before a concert. His
party toured the facilities and, in a back room, chatted with several
staff members. He gave them gifts, among them a Dark Horse necklace and pieces of embroidery, and asked for a Free Clinic T-shirt.

"He said he hoped to start a ripple with other musicians doing the same kind of things," writer Amie Hill, a clinic volunteer, said later. "The doctors gave him a plaque, and-I didn't hear this, but someone told me
he said, 'Don't thank me; it's not me, it's something else over us that acts through people like me. I'm just an instrument.'"

After the visit, back in the limousine, something kept nagging at George Harrison. It was the plaque, and all the gratitude of the Clinic
workers. He really meant it when he said not to thank him, that he just wanted to help cause a ripple.

He turned to Pat Luce as the car headed toward the freeway for the Cow Palace. "I'd like to get that out somehow," he told her. "Do you think Rolling Stone might want to do an interview?"

George Harrison, it seemed, had gone to as much trouble as he could to avoid interviews during the tour. He had done a press conference in Los Angeles and helped prepare an official press-kit interview ("Tell us
about Dark Horse Records"; "Tell us bout the group Splinter that you recently produced for Dark Horse Records"; "Tell us about your new
album").

But now he wanted to talk. Luce set up a dressing-room visit between
shows at the Forum. We waited through the visit by Dylan and watched Harrison's father and brother mingling with the musicians in a room decorated with Indian bedspreads on all walls.

Finally, just a half-hour before Harrison had to return to the stage, we met. He was friendly, direct, strong willed, tugging at his fingers now
and then, digging into me with his blue eyes. Behind him, Olivia Arias smiled knowingly at all his remarks.

More than anything else, Harrison was thinking about his concerts, and about the response so far. He spoke with more earnestness than the
anger and impatience his words, on paper, might imply.

"This show is not just by chance we all bumped into each other in Vancouver. I mean, that's how some people come and review the show, as
if it was simple just to get it there. I mean, we went to great length
and great pain and through a lot of years of life and experience to be
able to be grateful to even meet each other, let alone form it into a
band and then put it on the road.

"There's a lot more to it than just walking in and shouting if you're
drunk or-you know, the people have to think a little bit more. The
audience has to sacrifice a little bit of something. They have to give
a little bit of energy. They have to listen and look, and then they'll
get it, they'll get something good. They think it's going to be this or that, then that itself is the barrier which stops them enjoying, and if
you can just open your mind and heart, there's such joy in the world to
be had."

I was tempted to speak for those who, once their ears were open, heard a destroyed voice doing rearranged songs. But that could wait. I asked
him to evaluate the shows so far.

At every concert, he said, something good has gotten across to the audience. "There's been bad moments in each show, but I mean it doesn't matter, because the spirit of everybody dancing and digging it. And if
you get fifty drunkards who are shouting, bad-mouthing Ravi or whatever, and you get seventeen thousand people who go out of there relatively

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)