(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 6 March 2026 17:30, UK
George Harrison wasn’t considered the ‘Quiet One’ in The Beatles by accident.
As much as he was a phenomenal player, every time he got a guitar in his hands, a lot of the greatest moments of his career were always a lot more subtle than just throwing any old guitar solo on top of whatever John Lennon and Paul McCartney were coming up with at the time. He was the kind of artist who didn’t have to say much with his instrument, but whenever he spoke through his guitar, it didn’t take long for people to listen to see what the hell he was doing.
Because when you think about it, Harrison was the reserved sage of the group in lots of ways. He didn’t get into the business to be the greatest guitar player in the world, and even if he had a lot of chops to work with, it wasn’t worth it for him to play a smoking blues solo when he knew that Eric Clapton could outmatch him. So if he was making something of his own, it would have had to have been something a bit more original.
Which probably explains why his best solos are often songs within themselves. ‘Something’ is still one of the greatest love songs ever written, but when you listen to his solo coming in, he takes the listener on a journey within only a few bars every time he hits the right bend. His soloing was a lot more like a conversation, but that wasn’t really where rock and roll was headed once he went solo.
All Things Must Pass was a fine album and up there with the best albums that any Beatle has ever made, but a lot of his friends were more interested in expanding where rock and roll could go. Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith had become some of the biggest names in music, and while it wasn’t necessarily cool to be Harrison around the time he was making tunes like ‘This Song’ or ‘Blow Away’, he could have really cared less when he made music that he enjoyed making.
He would have much rather given up making new records altogether, but Jeff Lynne was the one reminding him that he could still make fantastic songs if he had the right idea. Cloud Nine introduced us to the version of Harrison that everyone forgot about for so long, but even in the age when the biggest names in guitar playing were people like Eddie Van Halen and Joe Satriani, Harrison had absolutely no interest in trying to compete with any of the shredders in the rock scene.
That was rock and roll if it were turned into an Olympic sport, and it wasn’t really what Harrison was after, saying, “It doesn’t impress me to hear some guy play this noisy fast shit. I’d rather hear Robert Johnson or Ry Cooder or Segovia. Those are the guitar players I like. But you know I like everything basically — except noisy head banging shit. [I]t’s not my goal to play this lick that everybody else can play anyway. You can’t be everything in life. I’m just thankful that I’m here. And whatever I do, why, that’s it.”
But even if Eddie had some great licks up his sleeve, Harrison knowing his limitations is half the reason why his guitar playing sounded so great. He was no flashy player by any stretch, but when you heard his slide guitar coming in on any number of his solo hits, he had the kind of unique feel on his guitar that’s enough to make someone cry whenever they hear it, especially when he fully mastered it in his later career on songs like ‘Free as a Bird’.
The heavy metal kids definitely had their fair share of fine guitar hero moments, but if Harrison learned anything through his spiritual practices, it was about trying to let go of the ego behind his playing. Many people can spend their whole lives trying to be the biggest and best guitar player they can be, but what Harrison was interested in was making songs that sounded more like him than anything else.