As a member of one of popular music’s most important foundational groups, George Harrison sat at the very centre of the music industry. Over the course of his career, he engaged in numerous collaborations and developed life-long friendships with the likes of Bob Dylan. One of Harrison’s lesser-known friendships was with Hall & Oates member John Oates, who he first met during the 1970s.
George Harrison was an obsessive. His fascination with Indian classical music, for example, found an outlet in his lessons with Ravi Shanker, who taught The Beatles to play the sitar in the 1960s. Harrison was also ever so slightly obsessed with, somewhat counter-intuitively, F1. The race track was a social space for George, who was good friends with revered driver Jackie Stewart. In fact, it was Stewart who introduced Oates to Harrison. “George and I had become friends through our mutual love of Formula One racing,” John told Leo Weekly. “I’m a bit of a fanatic when it comes to cars, and I mostly knew him from that other context.”
After bonding over a shared love of cars, George invited Oates to Friar Park, his Victorian neo-gothic mansion in Henley-on-Thames. During a conversation with Tom Cridland, Oates explained that they talked about anything but music. “We talked about cars and stuff,” Oates said, “Which I think was refreshing for him, you know, that our friendship wasn’t going to be based on, ‘Hey, let’s play-let’s write a song together.’ Which I’m sure he was inundated with.”
Oates continued: “What was really cool was when he was living in Los Angeles, and we were recording in 1978 or 1977, we were recording an album called Along the Red Ledge, and I’d kept in touch with him, and he invited Daryl and I over to his house to watch The Rutles movie. George produced it, and he was very proud of it. It was so funny to go to his house and watch this send-up of The Beatles and with him describing all the stuff… It was so very surreal.”
Eventually, Oates and George did end up recording a song together. After asking Harrison if he wanted to come and play on Along The Red Ledge, he arrived at the studio and added some guitar to ‘The Last Time’. “We said, ‘Hey, George, we’re making an album. Would you like to play on it?’ He was like, ‘Oh, yeah yeah, but I just want to be in the band,” Oates told Cridland.
Continuing, he added: “‘I don’t want any special treatment – I just want to come down and play with the band.’ So that’s what he did. He came down, and I played acoustic guitar, and he was so happy to be in the band and not be like, you know, put on the spot. ‘OK, George, come on, you got to do your classic slide guitar solo,’ you know? He loved it, he hung around all day with the band, shot the s***, and you know, played, and it was great. He was a really amazing person, and I miss him.”
