Word: mccartney
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That hosannas from the beknighted would be sung for George Harrison, born the son of a Liverpool bus driver during the darkest days of World War II, is in keeping with the kind of miracles the Beatles made for themselves. The most famous of the Beatles' fated hookups involves McCartney wandering by a summer festival at St. Peter's Parish Church in Liverpool's Woolton district on a hot day in 1957, and being transfixed by a skiffle band called the Quarry Men. Paul happened to have brought his guitar and impressed the band's leader, a cocky lad named...
Without rehashing the many permutations of the evolving Quarry Men of the late '50s--the Moondogs, the Silver Beatles, the endless series of exploding drummers--we arrive in the Reeperbahn, the famous cabaret district in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 1960s with a band whose front line is Lennon-McCartney-Harrison because Lennon, in his wisdom, had decided that he would put at risk his dominance to build the strongest group. The way to think of those early Beatles is as one of the grittiest, nastiest, best punk bands ever, getting tighter by the night during sets that might last...
...been different, his age might have cost him his place in history. During the group's first five-month gig in Germany, authorities discovered that Harrison, at 17, was too young to be working in the Reeperbahn nightclubs. They had him deported. Guitarists can be replaced, but by then McCartney and Lennon were protective of their little brother--the Beatles were as much a fiercely insular family as they were a ferocious rock band--and a few weeks later the boys were playing together again in England. Sounding better than ever, and much better than other Liverpool pop bands...
...screed Piggies and the gorgeous Here Comes the Sun and Something. With more than 150 versions recorded, Something is the second-most-covered Beatles song after Yesterday, but a measure of Harrison's obscurity within the band is that Frank Sinatra used to introduce Something as his favorite Lennon-McCartney tune...
Such confusion would end with the band's acrimonious breakup, announced in 1970. For Harrison, the split opened the door to artistic liberation. He had been piling up songs for months--years--songs that couldn't be squeezed onto Beatles albums, brimful as they were with Lennon and McCartney's efforts. Now, in a work that is the very definition of magnum opus, Harrison poured forth the three-disc set All Things Must Pass. (A 30th-anniversary reissue earlier this year only confirmed that this was Harrison's masterpiece...