George Harrison Had to ‘Punch’ a Doctor out for Mistreating His Mother
George Harrison said he had to “punch” a doctor out for mistreating his mother, Louise, in her last months. The Beatle had enough on his plate in 1970; he didn’t need a doctor carelessly taking months off his mother’s life.
George Harrison had the support of his mother from the very beginning of his music career
When George was 10, Louise gave him money to buy a beginner’s guitar from a boy at school.
From the day that George came home and asked for his first guitar, Louise supported her son. She encouraged him musically and let him leave school to travel to Hamburg, Germany, with The Beatles.
When the band played at The Cavern Club, she always cheered them on in the front row. After The Beatles became famous and Beatlemania exploded, Louise found that the only way she could support her son from home was to support his fans.
Soon, excited girls started visiting George’s house. Louise sometimes invited them inside for tea. She answered fan mail and communicated with fan clubs.
In Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison, Joshua M. Greene wrote, “Each week she traveled to Beatles Fan Club headquarters in Liverpool to pick up batches of promotional photos.
“Then she returned home and stayed up late answering fan mail longhand, often writing two thousand letters per month. Shelves along one wall of their new home displayed gifts sent from around the world.”
In a 1968 interview, Louise said, “He has a good laugh about it, especially when he reads some of them, they say, ‘Dear Mum,’ you know, he says, ‘Who’s this then?’ [Laughs].”
George was good-natured, but Greene wrote that he wasn’t impressed with his mother and her fan mail.
The author wrote, “Why she had insisted on always answering fan letters was beyond him. It was naive.
“To her way of thinking, a letter from a stranger halfway around the world deserved a personalized response and maybe even a snippet of lining from one of her son’s old coats. It never seemed to occur to her that the letter might have been sent by a stalker, or that someone had found their home address and chose to invade their privacy.”
Suddenly, George had to compete for his mother’s love with his own fans. For her support and loyalty, the United Beatles Fans of Pomona, California, gifted Louise and George’s father, Harold, with a gold plaque.
George said he had to ‘punch’ a doctor out for mistreating his mother
Years later, while her son began making his first solo album outside The Beatles, All Things Must Pass, Louise became ill. It was not a great time in George’s life.
He’d recently left The Beatles for good, and his marriage to his first wife, Pattie Boyd, was crumbling. George’s producer, Phil Spector, also entered the hospital for various ailments. Despite everything that was going on, George experienced one of his most creative periods.
However, visiting his mother in the hospital was still hard. Finding out that her doctor had mistreated her was even worse.
In 1987, George told Timothy White for Musician Magazine, “When I was making ‘All Things Must Pass’ in 1970, not only did I have Phil Spector going in the hospital and all this trouble, besides organizing the Trident Studios schedule in London with Derek & the Dominos–who many forget got their start on that record–but also my mother got really ill.
“I was going all the way up and down England to Liverpool trying to see her in the hospital. Bad time. She’d got a tumor on the brain, but the doctor was an idiot and he was saying, ‘There’s nothing wrong with her, she’s having some psychological trouble.’
“When I went up to see her she didn’t even know who I was. [voice stiffing with anger] I had to punch the doctor out, ’cause in England the family doctor has to be the one to get the specialist. So he got the guy to look at her and she ended up in the neurological hospital.
“The specialist said, ‘She could end up being a vegetable, but if it was my wife or my mother I’d do the operation’–which was a horrendous thing where they had to drill a hole in her skull.”
The former Beatle wrote a heartbreaking song while Louise died
George told White that his mother briefly recovered for seven months after her operation. His father, Harold, was also hospitalized for ulcers during that period.
“So I was pretending to both of them that the other one was OK,” George said. Then, George had to run around a lot to get All Things Must Pass finished. During the hectic time, George wrote a heartbreaking song called “Deep Blue.”
“I made it up at home one exhausted morning with those major and minor chords,” George told White. “It’s filled with the frustration and gloom of going in these hospitals, and the feeling of disease–as the word’s meaning truly is–that permeated the atmosphere. Not being able to do anything for suffering family or loved ones is an awful experience.”
Louise didn’t live much longer after her operation. However, her memory lived on in George and even his fans.
