The following decade after the break up of The Fab Four, the four musicians didn’t really see each other. Because of it, George, Paul, and Ringo only met John a few times before he was assassinated in 1980. John was on friendly terms with everyone before he died.
While there was a need for time to resolve the relationship with Paul, George and Lennon didn’t have problems with each other. It is revealed that John and George kept in touch in the 10 years between the split and John’s death. But despite that, there sure was bitterness between the two during their final years as a band.
The singer and guitarist George Harrison died at the age of 58, 21 years later his friend was assassinated. Here is a recollection of George’s recorded interviews on the last time he saw Lennon. Back in 1979 in an interview with Rolling Stone, George recalled.
“Paul and Ringo I see from time to time.”
“I haven’t seen John for a couple of years. I get postcards from him – it sounds like the Rutles [smiling], but he keeps in touch by tapping on the table and postcards.”
The exact date of the last meeting between George and Lennon is not known. Two years after John was assassinated, Harrison recalled in an interview. It was on Swedish TV. It was in 1990. He also recalled what happened to him when he first heard the news about his friend. He said, “Well, at first I thought he maybe just got wounded. It’s hard to accept or to believe at first. But it’s no different really to anybody having news about anybody they know. The shock I’m sure a lot of people were just as shocked as I was about John Lennon or about your prime minister for that matter. It is all nasty business when people get shot.”
Also, in an interview with Good Morning Australia, he discussed the shock he felt. He recalled,
“First of all it was obviouly such a shock. Because assassionation is something which up until that time hadn’t really got down to that level. It was always presidents and leaders.”
“I wouldn’t think that someone who is a Pop star was important enough to kill. It’s a terrible thing. I don’t think anybody is important enough to kill. But I could see why those assassinations with political leaders and stuff, just extremists. Obviously if can happend to him it can happen to anybody who gets up on stage or walks out of a car. It was a bit scary from that side.”
Back to the Swedish TC interview, he added,
“I was in New York at his house at the Dakota, He was nice. He was just sort of running around the house making dinner.”
“He was actually playing a lot of Indian music, which surprised me, because he always used to be like a little bit (annoyed) when I was playing it. So he had hundreads of cassettes of all kinds of stuff. He grew into it.”
During the interview, the interviewer also asked how that incident changed Harrison’s life. He recalled and said, nothing much. It hasn’t he said. The things that followed is,
“It hasn’t, because if we would have still been in a working relationship it would have changed it more. The thing is I haven’t seen him for so long. I mean, for all I know he could still be there now, because I didn’t seen him for two years, anyway. Occasionally maybe I would send a postcard. It’s knowning that he is on the other end of a telephone if you do wanna call. That’s the difference.”
“Now you need the big cosmic telephone to speak to him. I believe that life goes on. So to me, I can’t get sad. I’m sad by I can’t go and play guitar with John. But then I did that anyway. I did that for a long time. We will all meet again somewhere down the line.”
Listen to Harrison’s tribute to Lennon from his 1981 album “Somewhere In England”. It was the song ‘All Those Years Ago’. It also featured Ringo on drums and Paul on backing vocals.