“Great stuff, isn’t it?”: The solo George Harrison considered one of the greatest
Every guitarist will want to serve the song before anything else when they start playing. Even though it’s hard to resist the urge to fly off the handle and play whatever you like, the essence of a song comes from someone taking the basics of the tune and twisting them around ever so slightly to make them sound exciting and new again. George Harrison already had his guitar solos down to a science both in and out of The Beatles, but he thought that the key to any great lead break existed well before Beatlemania began.
Because looking through Harrison’s influences, there were already plenty of guitar heroes to choose from. Chuck Berry had practically kicked down the door for what someone could do with a lead guitar on ‘Johnny B Goode’, and despite Elvis Presley using it as a glorified prop half the time, Scotty Moore did have some tasty licks sprinkled throughout every one of The King’s classic recordings.
And if we’re talking about Harrison specifically, it’s impossible to leave out Carl Perkins. Despite being the guy responsible for writing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, his country-adjacent approach to the instrument caught Harrison’s ear the first time he heard it, eventually incorporating that signature twang to tunes like ‘All My Loving’ and ‘What Goes On’.
But the desire for the band to break out of the standard rock and roll formula was Buddy Holly. Whereas many artists were mining the same blues formulas everyone else had tried, Holly didn’t care what conventional song structures were supposed to sound like. If it caught his ear, it didn’t take long for him to put a melody around it, and ‘Peggy Sue’ is the textbook example of that.
When we reach what’s practically the bridge of the song, hearing a tune that’s been in A major quickly throw in an F major chord is disorienting the first time anyone hears it. But it made all the sense in the world with Holly’s melody, and looking at how The Beatles used different chords, this gave them the freedom to think outside the box a little bit more whenever they played.
All Harrison cared about was that guitar solo, which could be considered an anti-guitar solo in some circles. Despite only playing rapid-fire versions of the chords for the verse, the solo builds anticipation in exactly the right way, with the quiet guitar maestro telling Guitar Player, “Yeah, that’s great stuff, isn’t it? That’s still one of the greatest guitar solos of all time.”
Even when Harrison was studying Indian harmony and working outside standard rock and roll, he still had that simplistic mentality to his solos. He could certainly shred with the best of them when he wanted to, but considering his muted role on later Beatles classics and in his solo career, he still came back to those same basic lead lines that everyone could appreciate
That’s because it wasn’t about trying to play flashy for the hell of it. Harrison wanted to make a statement, and through Holly, he understood that people could say what they wanted with two or three notes just as well as they could with 20.
