The botched gig that made George Harrison join The Beatles: “I couldn’t do it”
Not every gig is meant to be a showstopper from beginning to end. Every artist knows how to have peaks and valleys during every set, but during The Beatles’ salad days, they were lucky to have a decent platform to play on half the time. It didn’t matter as long as they could play their asses off, but one of the biggest trainwrecks actually gave them a reason to bring George Harrison into the mix.
Granted, it’s not like the rock and roll show had been perfected by the time the Fab Four started touring around the country. The whole point behind their first gigs was to deliver the same amount of euphoric energy that their albums seemed to deliver, but before they could even put together a few tunes for the Ed Sullivan Show, it was trial by fire every time they walked out onstage as the Quarrymen.
Aside from the band’s inability to hold on to a drummer for too long, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were already becoming a tour de force at the front. Neither of them stood out as the standout frontman since both of them sang lead on tunes, but whenever they got onstage, there were already hints of that sort of charisma that would become a staple of their sound once Please Please Me started storming the charts.
But they knew their own antics could only get them so far. After claiming for years that they didn’t need a drummer because “the rhythm was in the guitars,” it was clear that they needed some fresh blood when it came to soloing. Which is strange considering how much effort both of them put into Beatles records when playing lead, whether that’s McCartney’s ‘Taxman’ solo or Lennon making that bluesy break on ‘Get Back’.
They certainly were capable of making great solos, but no matter how much they tried, Harrison was obviously the better player. He may have been a bit young for the rest of the band, but there was a certain spark that happened when he played that didn’t exist with every other band, almost having a country-tinged taste to his playing half the time.
But the real deciding factor was when McCartney decided to take a guitar solo and ended up royally fumbling it in front of a crowd, saying, “For my first gig, I was given a guitar solo on ‘Guitar Boogie’.I could play it easily in rehearsal so they elected that I should do it as my solo. Things were going fine, but when the moment came in the performance I got sticky fingers; I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ I was just too frightened; it was too big a moment with everyone looking at the guitar player. I couldn’t do it.”
Even though Harrison eventually worked wonders during their early years, each guitar-toting Beatle developed into their own individual style when they reached the studio. Lennon could usually get by on his rudimentary approach to playing, but McCartney was far more clinical in what he could do, like punishing his guitar on the back half of the song ‘Too Many People’ on RAM.
Still, there’s no chance that the band could have ever succeeded without Harrison’s lead breaks filling out everything. No matter how much his age may have bothered Lennon in the beginning, the Fab Four always contributed an equal amount to their appeal and had Harrison only been a sideman during his time with the group, they would have been stuck in their Liverpool stomping grounds forever.
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