George Harrison’s ‘Any Road’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

George Harrison died fifteen years ago today.

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For nearly a decade before his death, George Harrison had been working slowly on a new solo album while dealing with a cancer diagnosis, surgery and treatments, a remission, and then, a new cancer and its eventual metastasization. He was also stabbed 40 times in a house invasion about two years before his death.

So George Harrison’s late 1990s was a period in which the “material world,” as he once called the here and now, appeared to be a genuinely unpleasant place, one that no longer wanted him around, but he retained a sharp wit about it anyway. Asked about his attacker, Harrison said that he “clearly wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys.” (The attacker suffered from untreated schizophrenia and was found not guilty of attempted murder by reason of insanity.)

Working on his music through all of this, Harrison finished enough tracks to have a rough cut of a full album, but he finally ran into the ultimate deadline when cancer was found in his brain and he was given weeks to live. He wrote out instructions for his son, Dhani, and musical collaborator, Jeff Lynne, and they produced his final work, the farewell album Brainwashed, which they released a year after his death, in 2002.
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Today in History: Nov. 29

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Erwin Schrödinger published a paper titled “The present situation in quantum mechanics” on this date in 1935 in which he presented a thought experiment in a joking way that involved a box that contained a vial of poison, some radioactive uranium, a Geiger counter … and a cat. Happy birthday to Schrödinger’s cat, always simultaneously dead and alive.

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The New York Yankees signed free agent outfielder Reggie Jackson to a five-year, $2.96 million contract 40 years ago today.
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Today in History: Nov. 28

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“This is how I made 500 friends and 15,000 enemies.”—Truman Capote

Truman Capote spent the summer of 1966 toting around a classic marble-covered composition book in which—he told everyone and anyone he met—he was compiling a list of names to invite to his grand party, to be held that fall in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. “Maybe you’ll be invited, and maybe you won’t,” he told anyone and everyone he met that summer.

Those who made the cut received the invitation at top in the mail.

Fifty years ago tonight, Truman Capote threw his party of the century, his “Black and White Ball,” with more than 500 of the country’s most famous and powerful writers, artists, journalists, and politicians in attendance. It was an old-fashioned masked ball, perhaps the last major one in memory. The men wore tuxedos and masks and the women ball gowns and masks.
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