The 1950s singer George Harrison called his greatest inspiration: “He was opening up new worlds”
George Harrison always had a much different perspective on pop music than every other hopeful songwriter.
He had seen firsthand what two of the greatest writers in the world looked like, and even if he had to fight his way into getting a few songs on Beatles records, he was going to make sure that he honed his craft to the point where none of his songs could really be picked apart that often. He needed to put everything he had to impress the audience, but he could still acknowledge when the right singer could knock him out with just the right kind of delivery.
But a lot of Harrison’s songs were never meant to be all that flashy. He didn’t have the most versatile voice out of the Fab Four, and while he did manage to write one of the best love songs of all time in ‘Something’, the power doesn’t come from him doing massive vocal runs. It comes from the conviction that he feels whenever he’s singing the tune. You believe every word he says, but rock and roll isn’t always about that kind of musical passion.
When Harrison was growing up, the biggest names in the world were the wild men who tried to set the world on fire with their music. Every single rock and roll star coming out of America seemed larger than life, and even if Harrison claimed that his one musical root was hearing Elvis Presley sing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ as a kid, that was nothing compared to the kind of wildness that you would hear out of Little Richard or Chuck Berry.
Then again, Harrison’s idols weren’t the ones that needed to call attention to themselves. As it turns out, the quiet ones are usually drawn to fellow quiet ones, and people like Carl Perkins were happy to fade into the background just as much as Harrison did. The guitarist knew how to pick his battles whenever he made any of his songs, and that left a huge impression on Harrison when he started to sculpt his own solos. But there aren’t many artists who were the complete package like Buddy Holly was.
Which is strange because he didn’t necessarily look the part of a rock and roll star. Any other rock and roll band would have needed someone who looked a little bit cooler, but given his laid-back demeanour and that trademark hiccup in his voice, it was impossible to ignore him whenever he sang ‘Peggy Sue’. Harrison was already knocked out by his guitar chops, but he was equally blown away by how Holly sang.
No one had heard that kind of voice on the radio, and Harrison felt that Holly’s technique was what he was always after, saying, “I think one of the greatest people for me was Buddy Holly. He sang, wrote his own tunes, and was a guitar player. It was the first time that I heard A to F# minor. I just said, ‘Fantastic.’ He was opening up new worlds.” And it wasn’t just the way that he sang, either.
Every member of The Beatles were shocked that someone like Holly could have written his own material, and if he could manage to write a tune that sounded as great as ‘That’ll Be The Day’, maybe John Lennon and Paul McCartney could make tunes of their own. And when you listen to their first demos as a three piece, ‘In Spite of All the Danger’ does have more than a little bit of influence from Holly, down to the fact that it uses the same three chords that many of Holly’s songs used.
But whereas Holly was the exception at the time being someone who wrote all of his material, The Beatles were out there to set the standard for the rest of the world. They made songwriting almost mandatory for all singers, and while it took Harrison a little while to hit his stride, he was willing to make every single note he sang count once he finally honed his craft on tunes like ‘Here Comes the Sun’.
