George Harrison All Things Must Pass Torrent Kickass

And, growing out of his devotion to the sitar, Harrison also developed a smooth, elegant slide guitar technique that showed up on the group's last three albums. And he developed a personal friendship with blues virtuoso Eric Clapton, which would have a profound effect on both their careers - additionally, Clapton fell in love with and later married Harrison's then-wife, Patricia Boyd Harrison, who was also the inspiration for several of the best-known songs of the period by either guitarist. He also wrote some clever, very personal psychedelic-style songs. His interest in the sitar yielded a pair of beautiful songs, 'Within You, Without You' and 'The Inner Light,' that were effectively solo recordings. In the wake of that decision, Harrison's playing and songwriting grew exponentially. This was also the period in which the band, to Harrison's relief, agreed to give up doing concerts, which had become futile attempts at performance. By 1966, Harrison was writing music for the sitar, starting with the exquisite 'Love You To' from Revolver. Harrison subsequently developed a friendship with sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar that lasted for the rest of his life and his fame as a Beatle, in turn, helped to transform Shankar into the most well-known Indian musician in the world. And he made his first acquaintance of the sitar, an Indian instrument whose sound fascinated him. It was a situation that he came to loathe.ĭespite these problems, Harrison grew markedly as a musician during those years, even writing a handful of songs, including one near-classic, 'If I Needed Someone'.' He also played a key role in popularizing the Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar, which became a staple of American folk-rock, especially in the sound of the Byrds. He was also the one who was most concerned with pure musicianship - one of his idols was the classical guitarist Andrés Segovia - and knew that the quality of his playing was lost on those screaming concert audiences. He was the member least comfortable with the sheer masses of people that their music inspired to frenzied outbursts. Harrison was known as 'the quiet Beatle' but 'the reluctant Beatle' might have been more accurate, in some respects. Additionally, his aspirations as a songwriter were thwarted by the presence of Lennon and McCartney, both natural and prodigious composers whose output left little room for songs by anyone else. The group's studio sound was characterized by very prominent rhythm guitar, and on many of the Beatles' early songs, his lead guitar was buried beneath the chiming chords of Lennon's instrument. The Beatlemania years, from 1963 through 1966, were a mixed blessing for Harrison. At 15, he was allowed to sit in with the Quarry Men, the Liverpool group founded by John Lennon of which McCartney was a member by 16, he was a full-fledged member, and was playing lead guitar when they became the Beatles. Harrison developed his technique painstakingly over several years, learning everything he could from the records of Carl Perkins, Duane Eddy, Chet Atkins, Buddy Holly, and Eddie Cochran. George Harrison was one of millions of young Britons inspired to take up the guitar by British skiffle king Lonnie Donegan's recording of 'Rock Island Line'.' But he had more dedication than most, and with the encouragement of a slightly older school friend, Paul McCartney, he advanced quickly in his command of the instrument. And yet, for all of that, and a journey through life that took him to musical horizons he scarcely could have imagined at his start in Liverpool, Harrison was also one of the humblest of superstars - in his last decade, he still preferred to describe himself as 'just an old skiffle man.' Later on, as a songwriter with the Beatles and subsequently as a solo artist, Harrison used his celebrity and his musical sensibilities to try and raise the awareness of millions of listeners about issues much bigger than music, especially the life of the spirit, and the living (and dying) situations of people in parts of the world that not a lot of westerners usually thought about. In his most obvious contribution to music as lead guitarist for the Beatles, George Harrison provided the band with a lyrical style of playing in which every note mattered.

George Harrison All Things Must Pass Torrent Kickass