We Made the Official Music Video for George Harrison's "Be Here Now." The Book Behind It Changed Everything.

In 2024, The Newton Agency directed and produced the official music video for George Harrison's "Be Here Now 2024 Mix," released in honor of the 50th Anniversary of Living in the Material World. The project was made in collaboration with the Ram Dass Love Serve Remember Foundation, executive produced by Dhani Harrison and David Zonshine. Mathew Charles Newton directed. Leah Marie Newton art directed, drew the illustrations in the video by hand, and handled animation, all pulled directly from the original artwork inside Ram Dass's 1971 book, Be Here Now.

VFX, animation, and editing by Christopher Fodera. Additional animation by Leah Marie Newton.

Before we talk about the project, we have to talk about the book.

The Book

If you've spent any real time in Los Angeles, you've probably come across Be Here Now. It shows up at estate sales, at vintage stores on Sunset, on coffee tables in Silver Lake apartments, tucked into bookshelves in homes where someone, at some point, was trying to figure something out. That's where Mat and I first found our copy, at a vintage store, early in our relationship. It sat on our coffee table for years. We would flip through it here and ther. Never thinking too much about why we kept it there. It just belonged.

Be Here Now was published in 1971 by the Lama Foundation in New Mexico. Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert, was a former Harvard psychologist who, after years of academic success and experimentation with psychedelics alongside Timothy Leary, traveled to India, met his guru Neem Karoli Baba, and came back a different person. He came back with a new name, a new way of seeing, and a book that was unlike anything published before it.

The book was made at the Lama Foundation ashram. The founders, Steve and Barbara Durkee, along with a small group of collaborators, meditated every morning from five to eight, then worked in silence, hand rubber-stamping each page letter by letter while artists sketched illustrations around the type. The finished pages were photo-reduced and sent to Japan to be printed on rice paper and hand-stitched. The result was something that felt less like a book and more like an object you were supposed to sit with.

The second and largest section is a free-form collection of metaphysical and spiritual reflections surrounded by illustrations, a continuous free-verse poem that speaks directly to the reader. More than two million copies have been sold. It has never gone out of print.

The aesthetic is completely its own. Dense, hand-drawn mandalas. Flowing letterforms. Sacred geometry. Hindu iconography pressed into every page alongside Ram Dass's personal reckoning with identity, ego, and what it means to be present. It helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga with an entire generation in the West and has been described as a countercultural bible. Steve Jobs cited it. Wayne Dyer cited it. It is one of those books that arrived at the exact right moment and never really left.

Why George Harrison Wrote the Song

Harrison wrote "Be Here Now" in Los Angeles in 1971, nearly falling asleep in bed with a guitar. The song was inspired by the first section of Ram Dass's book, a story called "The Transformation: Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D., into Baba Ram Dass," which described Alpert's shift from Western academic to devoted follower of a Hindu guru. That journey mirrored Harrison's own. For Harrison, the present moment meant his identity outside the public's perception of him as a Beatle, a role he had grown tired of years before the band broke up. The song was never really about nostalgia. It was about refusing it.

Harrison recorded it at his Friar Park home in late 1972 with Klaus Voormann on upright bass, Jim Keltner on drums, Nicky Hopkins on piano, and Gary Wright on harmonium. It is one of the quietest, most meditative things he ever recorded.

Why This Project Meant Something to Us

When we got the call to make this video, we didn't have to do a lot of research to understand what we were working with. We already knew the book. We already knew what it meant to people, to us, to the particular kind of person who keeps it on their coffee table without always being able to explain why.

The brief was clear: feature the original illustrations from the book, made with the blessing of the Ram Dass Love Serve Remember Foundation. So that's what we did. Leah drew every single one by hand, in the spirit of how the originals were made, and we built the video around them.

We understood the assignment. We grew up in Southern California. We've been in the rooms where this book lives. When Dhani and Olivia Harrison trusted us with their father's music and this project, we took it seriously.

The 50th Anniversary release of Living in the Material World was lovingly overseen by Dhani and Olivia Harrison and remixed from the original tapes by triple GRAMMY Award winner Paul Hicks.

Watch the video below.

Credits Official Video for George Harrison "Be Here Now 2024 Mix" In collaboration with the Ram Dass Love Serve Remember Foundation Executive Producers: Dhani Harrison and David Zonshine Creative Director and Commissioner: Kelly Mahan Director: Mathew Charles Newton Art Director: Leah Marie Newton Production Company: The Newton Agency Producers: Mathew Newton and Leah Marie Newton VFX, Animation, and Editor: Christopher Fodera Animation: Leah Marie Newton