The musician who opened up George Harrison’s world: “He’s opening up new worlds”
Among many of the achievements credited to The Beatles, one of the most overlooked is their outrageous invention of chord progressions.
Jazz, classical, and blues techniques were bundled into one to revolutionise pop music, while regularly shifting between major and minor chords. Within that, they paired some of the most complex and difficult to execute progressions in modern music, all with relative ease.
‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ has roughly 27 different chords in it, while ‘I Am The Walrus’ has eight in the introduction alone. Once the band realised that there were very few limitations in terms of what they could pair together, there was simply no stopping them from arranging songs that sounded frightfully easy while being dangerously hard to play.
Sure, music had undergone plenty of reinvention before they rose to dominance in the 1960s, but really, for a good decade before that, no one was flipping the script on the 12-bar blues. The Beatles were happy to follow suit at the start, buying into a trend that was proven to work, but then they started listening a little closer to Buddy Holly and realising that there was a whole lot more to be achieved in songwriting.
“One of the greatest people for me was Buddy Holly,” George Harrison explained, “Because, first of all, he sang and wrote his own tunes, and was a guitar player. But it was the first time I ever heard… A to F sharp minor, fantastic. He’s opening up new worlds.”
It was one Holly song in particular that really pushed open the door to that new sonic world. Songwriting tactics such as throwing an F major into the bridge or using the flattened sixth proved that pop arrangements could follow twists and turns as opposed to treading the well-beaten path. All of those wild and unpredictable Beatles segues can be traced back to the band’s early love of Buddy Holly.
“If you listen to The Beatles’ stuff, we were putting all those kinds of things in,” McCartney confirmed, “[In the bridge of ‘Peggy Sue’], where did that F come from? You got to put the record on again”.
From ‘Love Me Do’ all the way to ‘Let It Be’, that shift into the F chord was a trusted tool for The Beatles who took on Holly’s songwriting mantra and into the stratosphere. The lineage didn’t stop with their break-up either; everything that came after, particularly in the 1970s, be it prog-rock, psych-rock or punk rock, was influenced by The Beatles in one way or another and, by proxy, Holly.
Ultimately, Paul McCartney and John Lennon would have likely found a way to reinvent music in one world or another. But Holly’s influence on Harrison may prove the most interesting, for it was the quiet Beatle who was often resigned to the supporting role in the group. But with ‘Peggy Sue’ and the change to the F chord, Harrison slowly realised that he too could write songs and influence music as much as his bandmates were.
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