A typescript letter signed, 1982

Pattie Boyd: George had persuaded [Eric] to come out of Hurtwood Edge briefly to perform in the concert for Bangladesh that he had organized in Madison Square Garden, New York. Ravi Shankar had inspired it. He had told George about the catastrophe in Bangladesh: three million people had been killed in the war with Pakistan and ten million had fled to India, where they were starving. He said he was thinking of doing a concert to raise $25,000 for the UNICEF fund to help the refugees and asked whether George might be able to help. George was immediately fired up and, with the Beatles’ ethos that “if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it big and make a million” still pumping in his veins, decided to stage a major extravaganza—the first-ever pop concert for charity. With the help of an Indian astrologer to select the most favorable day, he settled on August 1 as the most favorable day for him to make a major impact. He then rang his friends and pulled together the most incredible collection of musicians—Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Ravi Shankar, and Eric Clapton.

In a 2021 article for GQ magazine, Graeme Thomson notes that while the concert itself was a clear triumph, the aftermath was all muddy water – providing a far from simple lesson that charity and music might be natural bedfellows, but factor in two governments, the taxman, the recording industry and a shady manager and you have the makings of a very different kind of catastrophe. Harrison's next task was to prepare the live album and concert film for release, while ensuring that the money raised made it to those in need as quickly as possible, the latter complicated by both Columbia and Capitol expecting a cut of the album sales, despite the charitable cause. Ultimately, Capital backed down and the box set album was released in the US on 20 December 1971 and the UK on 10 January 1972, spending six weeks at number 2 on the Billboard 200 chart and becoming Harrison’s second number one album in the UK. His trials were not yet over, however, as a dispute with the IRS would rage on for years. As the concert had been put together so quickly, the selection of a tax-exempt charity was not declared upfront and as such, although Unicef was chosen as the charitable distributor of funds after the event, the tax man still wanted their cut. As Harrison makes clear in this letter, the dispute was not resolved, and the funds not released, until ten years later in 1982.