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The next day a group of ten or eleven devotees went to Apple Studios. There was Yogevara Prabhu, me, Mukunda, Yamuna, a few other devotees. We spent the whole day there. That's when we really saw the genius of George Harrison in the way he worked in a recording studio. He was constructing a song from bits and pieces. He was asking Yamuna to sing it over and over again; and he kept recording it. "Govindamadipurusath "-that was Yogesvara, me, Jayahari. There were also others singing; I cannot remember everybody. If I am not mistaken, it was about six people standing and singing. George Harrison brought in an orchestra of six or eight people to play string instruments, and he played the guitar. He was mixing it and balancing it. He had thirtythree tracks to mix it together. It was very, very exciting. We saw he was a creative man, an artist. His paintbrush was his creative mind, and the canvas was his thirty-three tracks and the actual mixing. I remember he had hired musicians. At one point he looked at me and said, "Come over here; bring your instrument." We sat down next to each other. He picked up my lute, looked at it a little bit and gave it back. Then he picked up his guitar and started fingering something. Then he asked, "Can you do this?" I did it. He played another motif and asked me, "Can you do that?" It worked really well because the instrument was made for doing sounds like that. He saw that was like a piece of cake on this instrument. Then he decided to record me playing. They had previously recorded Syamasundara playing the esraj, the Indian violin. Then he had me play the lute. I did it two or three times. I was blown over by the whole thing-George Harrison sitting down and asking me to do this. What really impressed me was that he was really a gentleman. Very polite in the way he talked to people. He didn't have to draw things out from people or make them feel in any way imposed upon. At one point we all sat down and had some lunch, with vegetarian sandwiches. Then his wife came in. It was a really pleasant day. The next day we came back again to hear what he had done. We were all very impressed by his work. Then he refined it more and more before he released it. The recording of the Govinda prayers was a sincere effort of the devotees to glorify Krsna and Prabhupada. It was a very transcendental experience. It convinced me that Krsna consciousness was definitely taking over the world. George Harrison had such an impact on the young people in the world, at least the young people I knew. Srila Prabhupada heard this recording for the first time a little later, when he was in Los Angeles. Devotees say that he actually cried and said, "Play that every time for the greeting." 13