George Harrison

A master musician, a film producer and actor, best known as the lead
guitarist and occasionally lead vocalist of
The Beatles, George Harrison was born
February 25, 1943, in Liverpool, Merseyside, England. He was also the
youngest of four children, born to Harold Harrison and Louise Harrison.Like his future band mates, Harrison was not born into wealth. Louise
was largely a stay-at-home mom while her husband Harold drove a school
bus for the Liverpool Institute, an acclaimed grammar school that
George attended and where he first met a young classmate,
Paul McCartney. By his own admission,
Harrison was not much of a student and what little interest he did have
for his studies washed away with his discovery of the electric guitar
and American
rock-‘n’-roll.There were a lot of harmonies in the Harrison household. He had a
knack of sorts for it by age 12 or 13, while riding a bike around his
neighborhood and hearing
Elvis Presley’s
“Heartbreak Hotel”, playing from a nearby house. By the age of 14
George–who was a fan of such legends as , Harrison, who grew up in the
likes of listening to such rock legends
Carl Perkins,
Little Richard and
Buddy Holly–had purchased his first guitar
and taught himself a few chords.McCartney’, who had recently joined up with another Liverpool
teenager, John Lennon, in a skiffle
group known as The Quarrymen, invited Harrison to see the band perform.
Harrison and Lennon had a few things in common, such as the fact that
they both attended Dovedale Primary School but didn’t know each other.
Their paths finally crossed in early 1958. McCartney had been egging
the 17-year-old Lennon to allow the 14-year-old Harrison to join the
band, but Lennon was reluctant; as legend has it, after seeing
McCartney and Lennon perform, George was granted an audition on the
upper deck of a bus, where he wowed Lennon with his rendition of
popular American rock riffs.The 17-year-old Harrison’s music career was in full swing by 1960.
Lennon had renamed the band The Beatles and the young group began
cutting its rock teeth in the small clubs and bars around Liverpool and
Hamburg, Germany. Within two years, the group had a new drummer,
Ringo Starr, and a manager,
Brian Epstein, a young record
store owner who eventually landed the group a record contract with
EMI’s Parlophone label.Before the end of 1962, Harrison and The Beatles recorded a song, “Love
Me Do”, that landed in the UK Top 20 charts. Early that following year,
another hit, “Please Please Me,” was released, followed by an album by
the same name. “Beatlemania” was in full swing across England, and by
early 1964, with the release of their album in the US and an American
tour, it had swept across the States as well.Largely referred to as the “Quiet Beatle” Harrison took a back seat to
McCartney, Lennon and, to a certain extent, Starr. Still, he could be
quick-witted, even edgy. During the middle of one American tour, the
group members were asked how they slept at night with long hair.From the get-go, Lennon-McCartney were primary lead vocalists. While
the two spent most of the time writing their own songs, Harrison had
shown an early interest in creating his own work. In the summer of 1963
he spearheaded his first song, “Don’t Bother Me,” which made its way on
to the group’s second album. From there on out, Harrison’s songs were a
staple of all Beatle records. In fact, some of the group’s more
memorable songs–e.g., “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Something,”
which was the only Beatle song ever recorded by
Frank Sinatra–were penned by Harrison.However, his influence on the group and pop music in general extended
beyond just singles. In 1965, while on the set of The Beatles’ second
film, Help! (1965), Harrison took an
interest in some of the Eastern instruments and their musical
arrangements that were being used in the film. He soon developed a deep
interest in Indian music. He taught himself the sitar, introducing the
instrument to many western ears on Lennon’s song, “Norwegian Wood”” He
soon cultivated a close relationship with renowned sitar player
Ravi Shankar. Other groups,
including The Rolling Stones, began
incorporating the sitar into some of their work. It could be argued
that Harrison’s experimentation with different kinds of instrumentation
helped pave the way for such ground-breaking Beatle albums as
“Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”.Harrison’s interest in Indian music soon extended into a yearning to
learn more about eastern spiritual practices. In 1968 he led The
Beatles on a journey to northern India to study transcendental
meditation under
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.Having grown spiritually and musically since the group first started,
Harrison, who wanted to include more of his material on Beatle records,
was clearly uneasy with the McCartney-Lennon dominance of the group.
During the “Let It Be” recording sessions in 1969, Harrison walked out,
staying away for several weeks before he was coaxed to come back with
the promise that the band would use more of his songs on its records.However, tensions in the group were clearly high. Lennon and McCartney
had ceased writing together years before, and they, too, were feeling
the need to go in a different direction. In January of 1970 the group
recorded Harrison’s “I Me Mine.” It was the last song the four would
ever record together. Three months later, McCartney announced he was
leaving the band and The Beatles were officially over.After the breakup of The Beatles, Harrison pursued a solo career. He
immediately assembled a studio band consisting of ex-Beatle Starr,
guitar legend Eric Clapton, keyboardist
Billy Preston and others to record all the
songs that had never made it on to The Beatles catalog. The result was
a three-disc album, “All Things Must Pass”. While one of its signature
songs, “My Sweet Lord,” was later deemed too similar in style to
The Chiffons’ 1963 hit “He’s So Fine,”
forcing the guitarist to cough up nearly $600,000, the album as a whole
remains Harrison’s most acclaimed record.Not long after the album’s release, Harrison combined his charitable
work and his continued passion for the east when he put together a
series of ground-breaking benefit concerts at New York City’s Madison
Square Garden to raise money for refugees in Bangladesh. Known as the
“Concert for Bangladesh”, the shows, which featured
Bob Dylan,
Leon Russell, and Ravi Shankar, would go on
to raise some $15 million for UNICEF, produced a Grammy-winning album,
a successful documentary film
(The Concert for Bangladesh (1972))
and laid the groundwork for future benefit shows like “Live Aid” and
“Farm Aid”.Not everything about post-Beatle life went smoothly for Harrison,
though. In 1974, his marriage to Pattie Boyd, whom he’d married eight
years before, ended when she left him for Eric Clapton. His studio work
struggled, too, from 1973-77, starting with, “Living in the Material
World”, “Extra Texture,” and “33 1/3,” all of which failed to meet sales
expectations.Following the release of that last album, Harrison took a short break
from music, winding down his own label, Dark Horse Records–which he
had started in 1974, and which had released albums by a number of other
bands–and started his own film production company, Handmade Films. The
company produced the successful Monty Python film
Life of Brian (1979) and would go
on to make 26 other films before Harrison sold his interest in the
company in 1994.In 1979, he returned to the studio to release his self-titled album. It
was followed two years later by, “Somewhere in England,” which was still
being worked on at the time of
John Lennon’s assassination in
December of 1980. The record eventually included the Lennon tribute
track, “All Those Years Ago,” a song that reunited ex-Beatles
Paul McCartney and
Ringo Starr, along with
ex-Wings members
Denny Laine and
Linda McCartney. While the song
was a hit, the album, its predecessor and its successor, “Gone Troppo,”
weren’t. For Harrison the lack of commercial appeal and the constant
battles with music executives proved draining and prompted another
studio hiatus.A comeback of sorts came in November 1987, however, with the release of
the album “Cloud Nine,” produced by
Jeff Lynne (of
Electric Light Orchestra). The
album turned out several top-charting hits, including “Got My Mind Set
On You”– remake of the 1962 song by
Rudy Clark–and “When We Was Fab,” a
song that reflected on the life of Beatlemania, with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, who was dressed up as a walrus, but was a camera shy, in
February 1988. Later that year Harrison formed
The Traveling Wilburys. The group
consisted of Harrison, Lynne, Roy Orbison,
Tom Petty and
Bob Dylan, and spawned two successful albums.
Buoyed by the group’s commercial success, Harrison took to the road
with his new bandmates in 1992, embarking on his first international
tour in 18 years.Not long afterwards he was reunited with McCartney and Starr for the
creation of an exhaustive three-part release of a Beatles
anthology–which featured alternative takes, rare tracks and a John
Lennon demo called “Free as a Bird,” that the three surviving Beatles
completed in the studio. The song went on to become the group’s 34th
Top 10 single. After that, however, Harrison largely became a homebody,
keeping himself busy with gardening and his cars at his expansive and
restored home in Henley-on-Thames in south Oxfordshire, England.Still, the ensuing years were not completely stress-free. In 1997,
Harrison, a longtime smoker, was successfully treated for throat
cancer. Eighteen months later, his life was again put on the line when a
deranged 33-year-old Beatles fan somehow managed to circumvent
Harrison’s intricate security system and broke into his home, attacking
the musician and his wife Olivia with a knife. Harrison was treated for
a collapsed lung and minor stab wounds. Olivia suffered several cuts
and bruises.In May 2001, Harrison’s cancer returned. There was lung surgery, but
doctors soon discovered the cancer had spread to his brain. That autumn,
he traveled to the US for treatment and was eventually hospitalized at
the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA. He died November 29, 2001,
at ex-bandmate McCartney’s house in Los Angeles, at aged 58, with his
wife and son at his side.Just one year after his death, Harrison’s final studio album,
“Brainwashed,” was released. It was produced by Lynne, Harrison’s son
Dhani Harrison and Harrison himself, and
featured a collection of songs he’d been working at the time of his
death. Dhani finished putting the album together and it was released in
November of 2002.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Richard Collins II (brothergaryii@gmail.com) (qv’s & corrections by A. Nonymous)