The Beatles always took pleasure in trying new things during every facet of their career. If they had spent time honing their craft in only one area, there was a good chance that would have never grown past trying to make Another Hard Day’s Night after their first blockbuster brought them to the top of the food chain. That meant moving into new territory on every project, but no one anticipated them embracing Eastern culture when they first started to spread their musical wings.
While fans had their first hint of where things were going during the Rubber Soul era when George Harrison began using a sitar, it was a much different beast once they heard something like ‘Love You To’ from Revolver. What started off as a passing fancy for Harrison had become a lifelong devotion, and while he loved artists like Ravi Shankar for his expertise on the instrument, there was a spiritual element to everything that appealed to them as well.
So, when the band was in a state of free fall after Brian Epstein’s death, they needed something else to help guide them. Even looking back, Paul McCartney said that the band realised that they had lost their spiritual centre during this period of their career, and all roads pointed to India when hearing about the teachings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
While Harrison was the first one to adopt Eastern beliefs into his music on ‘Within You Without You,’ this was when the rest of his bandmates started to understand what he was talking about. There was a spiritual aspect of the band that had yet to be tapped into, and if they managed to practice transcendental meditation, perhaps they could discover both a new side of themselves and a new way of creating music.
So what made the Beatles visit India?
During the documentary Living in the Material World, McCartney mentioned the guru being the prime reason for going on a spiritual retreat to India, saying, “There was this little guy on TV with a very high voice, and we liked him. He was a funny little character who was going to save the world, and we were rife for saving.” Then again, every one of the Fabs had their own agenda for going over there.
Ringo Starr only stayed a few weeks before going back home, but both McCartney and John Lennon had a heightened sense of awareness over there, eventually penning some of the most beautiful songs of their career, whether that was McCartney working away on ‘Blackbird,’ or Lennon developing the fingerpicking technique that led him to work on ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Julia’.
Despite the fact that it helped their creative process, Harrison was always frustrated with the band coming there for the wrong reasons. He had said numerous times that they were not there to write the next album, and by the time he returned, he was easily the most spiritual member of the group, even chastising his bandmates in Get Back by saying that they were supposed to be there to find out who they really were.
Although the sense of calm they had in India may have helped them through some of the turbulent times during the last years of their career, Harrison was still the one willing to live out the practices throughout his life. Lennon may have turned his back on them during his Plastic Ono Band era, and it was unclear whether McCartney took all of them to heart, to begin with, but Harrison finally understood that his music was his way of communicating with God from that trip.