The Beatles song credited to George Harrison and John Lennon: “We made it up right on the spot”
As teenagers, John Lennon and George Harrison first crossed paths when Harrison auditioned for The Quarrymen. Little did Harrison know that this audition would set him on a journey that would lead to creating musical history alongside Lennon and the rest of what would become The Beatles.
Despite Lennon being three years older than Harrison, the two shared an instant connection on both a personal and musical level. While they had a deep, intuitive understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses as artists, they were never songwriting partners. Once The Beatles took off, Lennon handled the songwriting alongside Paul McCartney, while Harrison concentrated on honing his craft as a guitarist.
It was a prize-winning formula that suited everybody. At this stage, Harrison had no yearning to pick up the pen and was content complying with their methods. He shared a close musical relationship with Lennon that lived long after The Beatles’ split. However, the only Beatles song solely credited to the pair was recorded in 1961 before the band achieved a modicum of success.
Harrison once revealed that he preferred working on material with Lennon over Paul McCartney due to the creative freedom he gave him. The late guitarist said, “There came a time when Paul had fixed an idea in his brain as to how to record one of his songs.”
He added: “It was taken to the most ridiculous situations, where I’d open my guitar case and go to get my guitar out, and he’d say, ‘No, no, we’re not doing that yet.’… It got so there was very little to do, other than sit around and hear him going, ‘Fixing a hole …’ with Ringo [Starr] keeping the time.”
From the beginning, Harrison and Lennon understood each other almost telepathically. For the most part, the duo were tuned into the same frequency, making them the perfect guitar pairing. This synergy is evident from The Beatles’ first professional recording, ‘Cry For A Shadow’, the only song solely credited to the duo in the band’s back catalogue.
The recording took place during one of their lengthy residencies in Hamburg. These stints allowed The Beatles to cut their teeth on the live music circuit, performing half a dozen times a day and honing their skill sets. Due to the vast number of shows they performed in Germany, it’s a miracle they found time in their hectic schedules to record ‘Cry For A Shadow’. During this particular spell in Hamburg, they felt hamstrung due to being employed as the backing band for the British rock ‘n’ roll singer Tony Sheridan. However, Harrison and Lennon channelled this frustration into ‘Cry For A Shadow’.
Harrison once recalled of the track’s creation: “In Hamburg, we had to play so long, we actually used to play Apache…but John and I were just bullshitting one day, and he had this new little Rickenbacker with a funny kind of wobble bar on it. And he started playing that off, and I just came in, and we made it up, right on the spot.”
‘Cry For A Shadow’, an instrumental track, never appeared on a Beatles album but eventually was released as a standalone single in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania. Significantly, it is one of only two songs released by The Beatles to feature Pete Best on drums. As ‘Cry For A Shadow’ was an impromptu recording, it has little deep meaning attached. Nevertheless, it perfectly captures the incredible chemistry that existed between Harrison and Lennon, as well as their ability to bounce off each other in a musical setting.
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