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The Beatles · S2 E1
George Harrison
A fourteen-year-old kid from Speke auditions for John on the top deck of a Liverpool bus, playing Raunchy note-perfect. John thinks he's too young. Paul insists
The upper deck of a Liverpool bus, early 1958. A fourteen-year-old kid picks up his guitar and plays "Raunchy" note for note while John Lennon watches, trying not to look impressed.
The quiet kid from Speke grew up to write one of the most beloved melodies in the Beatles catalog. George composed "Here Comes the Sun" in Eric Clapton's garden on a spring morning, skipping a tense Apple Corps business meeting. Listen for the way the warmth builds slowly, just like George's arrival into the band.
Here Comes the Sun (1969)
George wrote this in 1969, sitting in Eric Clapton's garden with an acoustic guitar. The Moog synthesizer part was one of the first times a synth appeared on a Beatles record. The time signature shifts between 4/4 and groupings of 11/8, but it feels so natural you barely notice. It has become the most-streamed Beatles track on Spotify, a fact that would have amused George, who spent his career being underestimated beside Lennon and McCartney.
“I spent hours and hours just looking at my first guitar, thinking about it. When I wasn't playing it, I'd carry it around the house with me.”
— George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology, 2000
TAP TO REVEAL: What was the song that got George into the Quarrymen?
Why did John Lennon initially resist letting George Harrison join the Quarrymen?
Something (The Beatles)
George Harrison's "Something" from Abbey Road (1969). Frank Sinatra called it "the greatest love song of the past fifty years." The kid who had to audition on buses and in empty rooms eventually wrote a song that made Sinatra weep.
12 Arnold Grove
The tiny terraced house in Wavertree, Liverpool where George Harrison grew up. Two rooms up, two down, and a mother who let him play guitar as loud as he wanted.
George is in, and the Quarrymen now have three guitarists and a rotating cast of whoever can hold a drumstick. Next: a Liverpool art student named Stuart Sutcliffe walks into John Lennon's life, and the band starts becoming something else entirely.
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