GEORGE HARRISON ANTHOLOGY
Guitar Recorded Version

A comprehensive collection of over 25 of Harrison's best songs, including: All Things Must Pass • All Those Years Ago • Got My Mind Set On You • Here Comes The Sun • My Sweet Lord • When We Was Fab • While My Guitar Gently Weeps • and more.

$19.95 (US)
Inventory # HL 694798

BEST OF THE BEATLES FOR ACOUSTIC GUITAR
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by Wolf Marshall

Remembering George

George Harrison hated school in Liverpool. He picked up the guitar as a teenager and then met an older kid named Paul McCartney on the bus. If it wasn't for that, the history of pop music might be very different today. But as it was, even though George dropped out of school, he soon found his band on the road to stardom, first as the Quarrymen, then the Silver Beatles, and then, of course, the Beatles. George was too young on their first trip to Hamburg and they got sent back. Not that it mattered, for they were soon packing the Cavern Club and every other venue they played. And even though he dropped out of school, he discovered that he had a thirst for learning - a thirst that led him on journeys of self discovery in distant lands.

George hated Beatlemania too. By 1965 the Quiet Beatle (though his friends attest that he was quite talkative) had had enough of the madness. Not that he could really do anything about it at that point, but the seeds of his future transformation were already being sown. He met a swami in the Bahamas while filming Help! who gave him a book which he didn't really read until a couple years later. He started getting a taste for Indian music, and picked up a cheap sitar upon which he painstakingly picked out the melody to John Lennon's "Norwegian Wood" on that most amazing LP, Rubber Soul, the album that marked the Beatles' transition from pop sensations to something much deeper.

George was the lead guitarist, and songwriting didn't really come easy to him at first. He explained it by saying that some people, like Paul and John, viewed songwriting as a craft, but for him, it was expressing something that he was feeling at that moment. Which would explain his very first song, "Don't Bother Me," written when he was sick in 1963. Okay, not a real gem, but it was the Beatles, and it rocked. His songwriting developed fitfully over the years. "Taxman" on Revolver in 1966 - the album that was really the second half of Rubber Soul - showed he had some real chops. And he was in league with the best songwriters in the world; it was no wonder that some of their greatness rubbed off on him.

His guitar playing? He began in the style of guys like Chet Atkins and Chuck Berry, playing his big old Gretsch Country Gentleman, but as the decade progressed he drifted towards the sitar, having bought a good one in India, and then received some lessons from sitar master Ravi Shankar. "Love You To" on Revolver was the first Beatles tune that he wrote purposely for the sitar. Later, "Within You Without You" on 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band would be a full-blown Indian music piece with tablas and everything else, and the haunting lyrics that began, "We were talking - about the space between us all" which revealed his new Eastern spirituality. He had begun meditation (and yoga in an attempt to be able to hold the sitar without pain) and explained the song as saying that they "had entered the 'All You Need is Love' consciousness after the LSD period," that he was getting a little better at the sitar, and that he was beginning to write songs using unusual scales.

The sitar thing was not to last, however. He soon realized that he had started 15 years too late, that there were a hundred other guys better than him and he was just a beginner, and he was, after all, a guitarist. But his guitar playing and songwriting were now infused with the sensibilities of his newfound Indian influences. The musical world was now changed; Monterey Pop, Hendrix, Cream - all the new sounds and influences now swirled around him. Hendrix and Clapton were his friends, and influences. Though he still received little respect for his songwriting within the band, his abilities were maturing right along with the rest of them.

On The Beatles, known to history as The White Album, George brought in Eric Clapton to play the lead on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," not just for his guitar playing but because the presence of a guest in the studio put the others on best behavior. The song was written after he picked out a book at random, opened to a random page, and wrote a song about the words he saw. The words were: "gently weeps."

And then there were those two songs on the Beatles' final album, Abbey Road. Just as John and Paul were doing, George seemed to be saving the best for last, or trying to get it all in before it was too late. "Here Comes the Sun" and "Something" were instant favorites and became enduring classics, the latter covered by, and highly praised by, Frank Sinatra - Frank Sinatra, the same guy who had never concealed his distaste for rock music.

George jumped into his solo career with vigor, now freed to fill entire albums with his own creations. He was the first solo Beatle to have a hit, with "My Sweet Lord" in 1970, the song that would soon cause him no end of legal troubles, for he learned that he had unintentionally taken the same melody to the old Chiffons song, "He's So Fine." Through the '70s he released All Things Must Pass (recently remastered and reissued), Living In the Material World, Dark Horse, 33 1/3, and Extra Texture, and they produced a few hits and gems, such as "Give Me Love," "You," and "This Song." He looked back on his Beatles days with humor, as in the Monty Python parody The Rutles, which he helped create, and with nostalgia, as in his tribute to John Lennon, "All Those Years Ago," and his late '80s song, "When We Was Fab."

In the late '80s George formed his own band, a true "supergroup" of famous artists representing several decades of rock 'n' roll history. The band, The Traveling Wilburys, was made up of Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne (leader of the Electric Light Orchestra), Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison -- all his buddies. Calling themselves Lucky, Lefty, Otis, Nelson, and Charlie T. Wilbury (you figure out who was who), they released a hit album, Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, with a couple of successful songs: "End of the Line" and "Handle With Care." The project had a definite good-time, relaxed feel to it, as if the guys were just out to have some fun. Orbison unfortunately died shortly after the album's release, but the group carried on without him for their second album, Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3, whose title begged the question of what became of Vol. 2.

In later years George fled the public spotlight and tended his garden. Though he survived being stabbed by an intruder in his own home, he succumbed to cancer on November 29, 2001. In "All Things Must Pass," George sang:

All things must pass
None of life's strings can last
So - I must be on my way
and face another day.
Now the darkness only stays at night time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
No it's not always going to be this grey.
All things must pass.