While former Beatles bassist Paul McCartney and drummer Ringo Starr have enjoyed lengthy careers well into the mid-2020s, six decades after they got their start together as half of the Fab Four, their bandmates have not been so lucky. John Lennon died by gun attack in 1980. George Harrison died of cancer in 2001. Their deaths were pivotal moments in global musical history, without a doubt.
But even more than that, their deaths marked significant and tragic milestones in the lives of their former friends and colleagues. That emotion remains years later, as proven by Ringo Starr’s tearful testimony about George Harrison’s last words to him in the 2011 documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, by Martin Scorsese.
Ringo Starr Recalls George Harrison’s Final Words
If one were to embark on the strange and macabre practice of comparing deaths, John Lennon’s was easily far swifter than George Harrison’s. Better? Impossible to say. But quicker? Yes. Lennon died after Mark David Chapman shot him multiple times mere steps from the musician’s front door of his apartment building, the Dakota, in New York City. He was pronounced dead by the time he got to the hospital. It was brutal and violent, but it was swift.
Harrison’s death was far more protracted, slow, and arduous. The “My Sweet Lord” singer just barely survived a vicious knife attack by a man who broke into his home. The attacker stabbed him 40 times and punctured a lung before Harrison’s wife incapacitated the burglar. Two years before the attack, Harrison’s doctors diagnosed him with throat cancer. Those close to Harrison believed the attack might have caused his illness to come back after treatment. By 2001, he received a second cancer diagnosis, this time of the lungs. The summer of that year, Harrison was being treated for a brain tumor at a Swiss cancer clinic.
“I went to see him, and he was very ill,” Ringo Starr recalled in the 2011 Harrison documentary. “He could only lay down. While he was being ill and I’d come to see him, I was going to Boston ‘cause my daughter had a brain tumor. I said, ‘Well, you know, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go to Boston.’ He goes—it’s the last words I heard him say, actually—he said, ‘Do you want me to come with you?’”
Starr wiped tears from his eyes as he relived the painful memory, adding, “God. So, you know, that’s the incredible side of George.”
A Touching Snapshot Of A Special Relationship
Although the Beatles’ final years were often marred by interpersonal tension and clashing egos, not every member of the Fab Four had beef with everyone else. George Harrison and Ringo Starr stayed relatively close in the years that followed the Beatles’ breakup. They both helped each other with their burgeoning solo projects. As the affable and quiet Beatles, respectively, it’s no wonder that Starr and Harrison would have found a way to maintain a relationship.
Even when the Fab Four was still together, Harrison seemed to go the extra mile for Starr. After a particularly contentious recording session for the “White Album” caused Starr to walk out and temporarily quit the band, the rest of the group sent Starr a telegram asking him to come back. When Starr acquiesced and arrived at the studio, he found that Harrison had decorated the entire room and Starr’s drum kit with fresh flowers. “That was a beautiful moment for me,” Starr said.
George Harrison died of cancer at 58 years old on November 29, 2001, just months after he last saw Starr.
Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
