George Harrison played as if notes cost money. Few guitarists in rock played with less waste. He reached for the one line a song actually needed, and in doing so he gave rock two of its signature sounds.1 The first was the bright twelve-string jangle of the Rickenbacker he carried through A Hard Day’s Night, the chime that the Byrds and a decade of folk rock were built on. The second came later and was unmistakably his: a vocal, crying slide guitar, the sound of “My Sweet Lord”, bending through a melody as though the instrument were praying. The quiet Beatle, it turned out, was the seeker, the one who carried Indian music and Hindu devotion into Western pop, invented the celebrity benefit concert, and spent his life writing his way toward God.
Influences and inheritance
The youngest Beatle was the one who practiced. Harrison fell for the guitar as a boy and worked at it with a single-mindedness the others never quite matched, learning fingerstyle rockabilly off Carl Perkins and Chet Atkins records until he could play their parts cold.2 That rooted, country-inflected picking sits under everything he did, even after two larger forces redirected him. India came first: hearing a sitar on a film set in 1965, he sought out the master Ravi Shankar the next year and studied with a seriousness no pop star had brought to a foreign tradition, and his curiosity about an instrument became a lifelong devotion to Hindu spirituality. The bottleneck slide came later, taken up around 1970 and shaped into a personal sound, all sustain and ache. By the end his playing carried more of the world in it than any of his bandmates’.
The two guitars and the sitar
His lead playing runs on economy and melody. He rarely showed off, preferring the phrase that served the song, which is why his solos are among the most singable in rock — the wound-tight break on “Something” is itself a melody you can hum. The same restraint is what the bright Rickenbacker jangle of the early records depends on, the chime ringing precisely because nothing crowds it. When he took up the bottleneck slide around 1970 he found his most personal sound, a sustained, singing cry he would ride from “My Sweet Lord” through the Wilburys.
Set apart from all of it is the sitar. Harrison did not dabble in Indian music; he studied it. After threading the instrument through “Norwegian Wood” in 1965 — the first sitar on a Western pop record — he apprenticed himself to Shankar and went deep enough to write “Love You To” and “Within You Without You”, where the raga is the structure itself.3 No Western pop musician had taken a foreign tradition that seriously.
The third Beatle
For most of the band’s life Harrison was rationed to a song or two per album while Lennon-McCartney filled the rest, and he spent years as the junior writer, learning in their shadow. He used the time. The bite of “Taxman” opened Revolver; “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, with Eric Clapton brought in to play the lead, gave the White Album its gravity; and by Abbey Road he had written the two best-loved songs on it, “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something” — the latter a ballad Frank Sinatra took to calling one of the finest love songs of the century, and the most covered song the Beatles ever made after “Yesterday.”4 By the end the rationing looked like a mistake: there had been three great writers in the band all along. The full story lives in The Beatles.
The solo years: the dam bursts
When the band ended, the backlog came out at once. All Things Must Pass (1970) is a triple album, the overflow of songs the Beatles had passed over, and it made him the first of the four to top the singles chart alone, on the strength of “My Sweet Lord” and its new, praying slide guitar. Co-produced with Phil Spector in a cathedral of reverb, sprawling and devout, it is widely judged the finest album any of the four made alone — and the spiritual triumph carried a sting, when a court later ruled that “My Sweet Lord” had unconsciously lifted its tune from the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine”, the case that wrote “subconscious plagiarism” into law.5
In August 1971 he did something no one had: he organized two benefit shows at Madison Square Garden for the refugees of the Bangladesh war, pulling Shankar, Bob Dylan, Clapton, Ringo Starr, and Billy Preston onto one stage. The Concert for Bangladesh invented the celebrity benefit concert; every Live Aid and telethon since works from the template he drew that night.6 He kept the devotion in front on Living in the Material World (1973), his second American number one, and then hit a wall: a hoarse, poorly received 1974 tour, the plagiarism judgment, and a run of records where the preaching crowded out the songs.7
He found a second life off the stage. In 1978 he founded HandMade Films to rescue Monty Python’s Life of Brian after its backers took fright at the subject, then bankrolled a string of British movies through the 1980s; Terry Jones called it the most expensive cinema ticket ever bought.8 The musical comeback came in 1987, when Cloud Nine, made with Jeff Lynne, put him back on top with “Got My Mind Set on You”. Out of those sessions grew the Traveling Wilburys, the loosest of supergroups, where Harrison wrote and traded verses with Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Lynne as an equal among heroes. After a lifetime as a Beatle, he sounded, finally, like a man having fun.
The end was violent and then quiet. On the next-to-last day of 1999 an intruder broke into his home and stabbed him in the chest, and Harrison and his wife, Olivia, fought the man off. Cancer had been at him for years, throat then lung then brain, and it killed him on November 29, 2001, at fifty-eight, his family saying he met it chanting and unafraid. A last album, Brainwashed, finished by his son Dhani and Lynne, arrived the next year, devout to the end, the work of a man who had spent his life rehearsing for exactly this.9
Legacy
Harrison left rock more than his quiet reputation suggested. His slide guitar became a permanent color in the music, its singing tone copied for decades after. The Concert for Bangladesh turned the benefit show into one of the ways popular music does good in the world. And the Indian music he carried west — the sitar, the drone, and the spiritual seriousness behind them — opened pop to a tradition it had never touched, and to the idea that a rock record could be a form of prayer.
The reappraisal of his songwriting finished arriving only after he was gone. Rationed and underrated inside the Beatles, then mocked in his preachy mid-1970s stretch, he is now heard plainly for what he was, the author of “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” and the devotional sprawl of All Things Must Pass. The sermonizing could still wear, and the weakest solo records sink under it; but at his best the devotion and the melody were a single thing, and a pop song became, without strain, a way of pointing past itself.
Footnotes
-
How the Rickenbacker 360/12 revolutionized the sound of ’60s guitar, Guitar World (accessed June 26, 2026); ‘All Things Must Pass’: George Harrison’s Spiritual Journey, uDiscoverMusic (accessed June 26, 2026). Harrison received an early Rickenbacker 360/12 in 1964; its “jangle,” prominent on A Hard Day’s Night, shaped the folk-rock sound the Byrds built on. His slide guitar, introduced on “My Sweet Lord,” became his most distinctive solo-era voice. ↩
-
George Harrison, AllMusic (accessed June 26, 2026). Harrison’s early style drew heavily on the fingerstyle rock and roll of Carl Perkins and Chet Atkins. ↩
-
How Ravi Shankar’s sitar changed George Harrison and The Beatles forever, Far Out (accessed June 26, 2026); The Spiritual Quest of George Harrison in Hinduism, Learn Religions (accessed June 26, 2026). Harrison played sitar on “Norwegian Wood” (1965), the first such use on a Western pop record, became a student of Ravi Shankar in June 1966, and described the music as a route to a “spiritual connection” with India; he embraced Hindu devotion and the Hare Krishna movement from the late 1960s. ↩
-
While My Guitar Gently Weeps, The Beatles Bible (accessed June 26, 2026); 4 of the Most Covered Beatles Songs of All Time, American Songwriter (accessed June 26, 2026). Eric Clapton played the uncredited lead on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”; “Something” is the Beatles’ second most-covered song after “Yesterday,” and Frank Sinatra repeatedly praised it as one of the finest love songs ever written. ↩
-
All Things Must Pass (album), The Beatles Bible (accessed June 26, 2026); Remember When: George Harrison Was Found Guilty of “Subconsciously” Plagiarizing “My Sweet Lord”, American Songwriter (accessed June 26, 2026). The triple album All Things Must Pass (November 1970), co-produced with Phil Spector, made Harrison the first Beatle with a solo No. 1 single (“My Sweet Lord,” in the UK and US); a 1976 court found that song to have subconsciously plagiarized the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine.” ↩
-
George Harrison’s Crowning Moment — The Concert For Bangladesh, This Day In Music (accessed June 26, 2026). The two August 1, 1971 shows at Madison Square Garden, organized by Harrison and Ravi Shankar with Dylan, Clapton, Starr, Preston, and Leon Russell, pioneered the all-star benefit-concert model. ↩
-
US album release: Living In The Material World, The Beatles Bible (accessed June 26, 2026). Living in the Material World (1973) was Harrison’s second US No. 1 album; his 1974 North American tour, sung with a damaged voice, was poorly received and began a mid-decade commercial decline. ↩
-
How George Harrison saved Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Gold Radio (accessed June 26, 2026). Harrison and Denis O’Brien founded HandMade Films in 1978 to finance Monty Python’s Life of Brian after EMI withdrew; Terry Jones called it the “most expensive cinema ticket” ever bought, and the company sustained British film through the 1980s. ↩
-
Cloud Nine (George Harrison album), Wikipedia (accessed June 26, 2026); ‘Brainwashed’: George Harrison’s Poignant Final Album, uDiscoverMusic (accessed June 26, 2026). Cloud Nine (1987), co-produced with Jeff Lynne, returned Harrison to No. 1 with “Got My Mind Set on You” and led to the Traveling Wilburys (with Dylan, Petty, Orbison, and Lynne, 1988). After a December 1999 home invasion in which he was stabbed, Harrison died of cancer on November 29, 2001; Brainwashed was completed posthumously by his son Dhani and Jeff Lynne in 2002. ↩
