As a kid, it can be difficult to know what your parents do besides being your parents, and George Harrison’s son was no exception. Dhani Harrison, the only child of the former Beatle and his wife, Olivia Harrison, was born on August 1, 1978. The Fab Four broke up eight years earlier. Dhani’s dad, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr were all pursuing their own familial and professional endeavors separately.
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So, when Dhani was a child growing up on George’s estate, Friar Park, he didn’t know that the man raising him used to be one of the biggest rock stars in the world. He knew he must have had a job, of course. But that job was far more mundane than what the “Something” songwriter actually did to earn his fortune.
George Harrison’s Son Thought His Dad Worked a Noble But Mundane Job
Following his short but tremendous tenure as a member of the Beatles, George Harrison continued to pursue a solo musical career. But he also took time to enjoy his other passions, ones that required (or perhaps demanded) less ego and drama. In his memoir, I Me Mine, Harrison described himself as a gardener. “I’m really quite simple. I don’t want to be in the business full-time; I plant flowers and watch them grow.” He continued, “I don’t go out to clubs and partying. I stay at home and watch the river flow.” (The river in question being the Thames in England.)
And indeed, that’s how Dhani Harrison first remembered his father. “My earliest memory of my dad is probably of him somewhere in a garden covered in dirt, somewhere hot, a tropical garden, in jeans, khakis covered in dirt, just continuously planting trees,” he recalled in the 2011 documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World. “That’s what I thought he did for the first seven years of my life.”
After those first blissfully ignorant seven years, Dhani experienced taunting from his classmates in an unusual way. A group of children chased Dhani around the schoolyard while singing “Yellow Submarine,” a song that Dhani had likely heard before but didn’t understand his connection to. When he realized they were singing the song at him because of who his father was, Dhani angrily asked George why he never mentioned being in the Beatles. “He said, ‘Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that,’” Dhani remembered.
Dhani Harrison Once Received a Frightful Drum Lesson From His “Uncle” Ringo
After George Harrison’s son became aware of what his dad actually did for a living (when he wasn’t fulfilling his passion project of being an arborist), the rest of Dhani Harrison’s upbringing made a lot more sense. While other kids were leaving school and going home to their parents and maybe their parents’ friends or other relatives, Dhani came home to find ELO frontman Jeff Lynne or Bob Dylan sitting in the living room. And, of course, his “Uncle” Ringo Starr just so happened to be one of the most notable drummers of the 21st century.
Dhani’s transition into music was natural and not something that George pushed onto his only child. However, when Dhani began experimenting more heavily with a small Pearl drum kit he had at their home, he did get a not-so-helpful nudge from his father’s former bandmate. “I always used to give lessons to kids, you know, because kids love to make that noise,” Starr once recalled. “Dhani comes in and I said, ‘Dhani, come on. Play the drums.’” But the sound of Starr confidently bashing away at a kit must have scared Dhani, because as Starr described, the young boy “ran out of the room screaming.”
George Harrison’s son might have had a few alarming experiences when learning more about what his father and his bandmates did for a living. But it must not have frightened Dhani Harrison too much, as he has become a prolific musician in his own right as an adult. Like father, like son, so they say.
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