Beatles FAQ

Until 1968 wives and girlfriends stayed away from Abbey Road during business hours. This unwritten rule  was unilaterally abandoned by John. The new arrangement was to have “Yoko literally in the middle of the recording session...sitting on the amps" as Paul later put it.

When he was thirteen, George was admitted to hospital with what turned out to be a minor kidney problem. As with Ringo, a spell on the children’s ward was the catalyst for obtaining his first musical instrument.  To cheer up his sick son, Harry Harrison agreed to buy a classmate’s Dutch Egmond flat-top acoustic guitar. Dutch Egmond Acoustic — George Harrison’s first guitar What George would later describe as a ‘cheapo, a horrible little guitar’ had a selling price of £3 ($4). This was a large sum for a poorly paid bus driver, though it would prove an inspired long-term investment.  In 2003 it was sold for $800,000 at auction. Progression The 'cheapo' Egmond proved very difficult to master. Louise Harrison observed her son's painful struggle with it. George tried to teach himself [the guitar]. But he wasn’t making much headway. ‘I’ll never learn this,’ he used to say. I said, ‘You will, son, you will. Just keep at it.’ Early progress was also hampered by an ill advised exper...

Throughout his life George celebrated his birthday on February 25th. 

George Harrison and Paul McCartney first met while at secondary school.

George in the room above the Bambi Kino cinema George Harrison was seventeen when he first arrived in Hamburg in August 1960. Though legal the age limit for performers was eighteen  club owner Bruno Koschmider was initially unconcerned.  It was when The Beatles jumped ship to work at the bigger Top Ten that Koschmider found his conscience stirred. He then informed the police of his shocking discovery. Those devious Englishmen had an underage performer in their ranks . pen & ink sketch of Hamburg club owner Bruno Koschmider (1926-2000) The police duly deported Harrison on November 21. The guitarist spent his last night teaching John Lennon his parts before reluctantly packing a " crappy suitcase and things in boxes, paper bags with my clothes in, and a guitar." Homeward bound The logistics of getting home proved challenging, as George related in Anthology: Astrid and Stuart dropped me at Hamburg station. It was a long journey on my own on the train to the Hook of Holla...

Tabla - traditional Indian instrument

The Beatles famously brought LSD to public attention. Less well known is that George Harrison became rapidly disillusioned about the effects of the drug on young people exposed to it. His last LSD trip was in the late summer of 1967. In Anthology , George confirms Derek Taylor's earlier revelation it that was a trip of the legal type that  changed his perspective.  In August 1967 he made an impromptu personal visit to Haight Ashbury, San Francisco. This was the epicentre of the supposed cultural revolution but what greeted was sordid and threatening.  We were expecting Haight-Ashbury to be special, a creative and artistic place, filled with Beautiful People, but it was horrible - full of ghastly drop-outs, bums and spotty youths, all out of their brains .    Source With the crowd building, Taylor began to fear for their physical safety: Read full story - 3 minute free read on Medium

I n February 1964 The Beatles arrived at  Kennedy Airport on their first official visit. For three of the four member of the group their first experience of the USA was the sight and sound of thousands of screaming fan. Only George Harrison had crossed the Atlantic Ocean before, on a solo visit five months earlier. In September 1963, The Beatles were given a short break in their manic schedule. While the others holidayed in Europe, George Harrison travelled to rural Illinois to visit his older sister, Louise,. Accompanied by his brother, Peter, George flew to New York and then on to St Louis. Louise then drove her brothers to her new family home in Benton, Illinois (pop.7,000). George with his siblings and niece in Benton, Illinois On the day of his arrival in Benton, The Beatles reached Number One in the UK record charts with She Loves You. But in the USA they had not yet charted and were almost completely unknown in America. There were no fan awaiting him at either airport and th...

Photo by Saubhagya gandharv on Unsplash George Harrison’s first serious attempt at an ‘Indian’ composition had the unpromising working title of “Granny Smith”. George revealed his 'difficulty with words' in an interview with Maureen Cleave for the London Evening Standard in February 1966. He wishes he could write fine songs as Lennon and McCartney do, but he has difficulty with the words. “Pattie keeps asking me to write more beautiful words,” he said. He played his newest composition… ’Love me while you can: before I’m a dead old man…’ George was aware that these words were not beautiful. Evening Standard readers may have had the impression that “Love You To” was a love song celebrating George’s recent marriage to new Pattie (Boyd). The couple had, after all, just returned from honeymoon in the (then) impossibly glamorous Barbados. Perhaps more pertinent, however, was another Maureen Cleave’s observation from the same interview. Indian music and culture, she noted, “has give...

Indian restaurant scene from Help! (1965 The first time George Harrison saw a sitar was on the set of Help in April 1965. A group of Indian musicians had been recruited to add an authentic Indian ambience to the restaurant scene. They played a  a Beatles medley ('Another Hard Day’s Night')   using  sitar, flute, tabla, ghunghroo and tanpura.  These session musicians performing Beatles songs in an Indian style were also being employed for comic effect but to his surprise, Harrison found himself entranced by the sound. ‘George was fascinated by the instruments they used,’ John Lennon later reported. He wanted to hear more and over the next few months Harrison began researching traditional Indian music.  Ravi Shankar The Beatles guitarist discussed his new interest with David Crosby, who toured the UK with The Byrds in August 1965. Crosby told him about Ravi Shankar, then virtually unknown outside India. Crosby also lent Harrison a Shankar LP that he ‘carried in hi...

During their early musical education, The Beatles steered clear of classical music. Paul tells how his father 'a jazzer' would pointedly turn off the radio when a classical piece was broadcast. His son metaphorically followed suit, as did his bandmates. It was not for them. Bach - but not as he wrote it George had, however, learned one classical 'party-piece' at an early age. He did not know the title but had the vague idea that it was by Bach. George then taught this partial, inaccurate version of  Bourrée from the E Minor Lute Suite, to Paul. Here it is played according to original score: In 1968 McCartney used the Bourrée as a starting point for what would become one of his most admired compositions. Would Bach have been due a Chiffons-style copyright infringement payday if he had had hung around for another 240 years? It seems very unlikely. McCartney acknowledges that Bach provided the 'original inspiration' for Blackbird - but argues that musically he took...

In 1954 twelve-year old Paul McCartney notices a younger boy with a guitar on his bus journey to school.

In June 1966 the great Indian musician Ravi Shankar visited George Harrison at his Surrey home - and played for the assembled Beatles. Two months later they recorded George's composition I WANT TO TELL YOU.  Harrison later explained that the song expressed 'an avalanche of thoughts that are so hard to write down or say' and Ian Macdonald spots the 'underlying Hindi outlook in the lyric - a karmic reference to time in the final lines ... confirmed by a descending melisma in the fade out'.  Neil Innes - who later collaborated with George Harrison on the celebrated Beatles spoof mockumentary  The Rutles   - happened to be in Abbey Road Studio as they were recording. He tells the story here: