GEORGE HARRISON
Overlooked in The Beatles’ early days, he has since been reappraised as one of the great stylists.
As ‘the quiet Beatle’, George Harrison was always that group’s secret weapon. Lennon and McCartney wrote most of the Fabs’ hits and sang their way into your heart, but it was sullen George who gave the songs their transcendent guitar moments. Witness the supple elegance of his solo in Till There Was You, his Carl Perkins–channeling double-stops on All
My Loving, or the plangent chiming of his Rickenbacker 12-string on everything from A Hard Day’s Night to If I Needed Someone. He plied his magic even without a guitar. What would 1965’s Norwegian Wood be without Harrison’s lysergic sitar lines buzzing sinuously beneath Lennon’s tale of adultery, auguring the coming psychedelic era and driving up demand for sitar players on pop recording sessions.
By 1966, however, he was overshadowed by his flashier guitarist contemporaries. He lacked Beck’s dazzle, Clapton’s blues virtuosity and Hendrix’s alien sex-god mojo. That autumn he did the unthinkable: he gave up guitar to study sitar with Ravi Shankar. From then until summer 1968, Harrison picked up a guitar only when Beatles recording sessions required it. Playing sitar changed the guitarist in him. Its demanding technique taught him to slow down his fret hand, use larger string bends and tune in to the source of his innate sense of melody.
When he returned to guitar in June 1968, having decided he was too old to master the sitar, Harrison was a much different player. His fretwork was brawnier, his lines tougher and his tone more cutting. Part of that was down to Lucy, the cherry-red 1957 Gibson Les Paul his pal Clapton gave to him. It was also due to the skills he’d honed on his sitar sabbatical.
By the time he copped his liquid slide technique from a young countryrock guitarist named Delaney Bramlett in early 1969, George Harrison, guitar hero, had arrived. Fifty years on he remains the guitarist of choice for melody-minded players like Johnny Marr, John Frusciante and Dave Grohl, the latter having paid tribute to Harrison’s slide style on Oh, George on the
Foo Fighters’ debut album. “He was always my favorite,” Grohl says. “And always will be.”
Listen to this: Octopus’s Garden (The Beatles, Abbey Road, 1969)