Credit: Far Out / The Travelling Wilburys
Mon 10 August 2026 21:15, UK
George Harrison didn’t need to play a million notes per second to prove himself as a fantastic guitarist.
Not everything he played was the most technical thing in the world, but when you listen to every one of his solos when he was in The Beatles, you can sing along to pretty much every single melody that came off of his fretboard on each of his tracks. But even for someone who could be justifiably considered the greatest of all time in his field, Harrison always knew that there was someone better suited for his job whenever he found a solo that he couldn’t really match.
But it’s not like Harrison was cut out to be some shredder or anything like that. He usually left the technical side of playing to friends like Eric Clapton when he jammed with them, and a lot of his greatest solos were often songs within the songs in many respects. He was looking to create a different mood with every single note he played, but even at his most cerebral, he still knew when to have some fun when jamming with his buddies in the Traveling Wilburys.
The whole point of the band was to get together to have some fun, and you can feel that sense of fun the minute that ‘Handle With Care’ starts on their debut record. Harrison was simply having a blast strumming away on songs with Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison, and whenever he did play a solo, it was always to serve the song. He didn’t need some wild solo to get his point across, and even when breaking out his slide, his tone was beautiful on some of their tunes.
When Orbison died, though, the band’s next album did feel a lot different by comparison. Orbison was so much a part of what made the Wilburys special, and while the rest of the band had the ability to carry on without him, there’s a far more ramshackle feel to a lot of the tunes on their sophomore record that sound better suited for one of Dylan’s more forgettable albums he made back in the day.
It still has some stellar singles, but whereas a song like ‘Inside Out’ feel like the younger cousin of ‘Handle With Care’, ‘She’s My Baby’ is a lot closer to what the album was about. This was the sound of the band going back to their garage roots and having some fun playing blues, but when it came time for Harrison to play the solo of the track, he knew that Gary Moore could have done a much better job than he ever could on the tune.
Moore was already a legend in his own right, but Harrison knew that there was no way that he could have done what his friend did on the lead guitar track, saying, “When we first put that song on, we felt it had to have a guitar solo. I can just imagine me or Jeff Lynne trying to figure out a guitar solo that wouldn’t really be in that style. So we thought, ‘Why don’t we get Gary to play it?’. He came in and came up with it in about five minutes.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Then again, Harrison might have been selling himself short a little bit. There were many times where Tom Petty remembered the former Beatle having a treasure trove of blues licks in his arsenal that he would have never tried to play on his own, but maybe that was just the nature of how Harrison approached his craft whenever he felt that one of his songs needed a blistering lead underneath everything.
He was more than capable of making great music, but he knew that the important part was the people he was making music with. He didn’t want to outshine anybody whenever he performed, and the fact that he could relinquish guitar duties to Moore was a sign that he just wanted the chance to play some music with his friends.
