George Harrison - Blues Rock Guitarist

I was hoping no one would say that. His rockabilly playing IMO is pretty lame. Listen to the solos on Honey Don't. Absolutely no edginess at all to them. I realize the tempo did not help but still pretty boring IMO.

 

All My Loving, Octopus's Garden - that kind of guitar is what George was best at but he just didn't practice enough - he could have been really good.. It's someone like Howe we should be comparing him with, not Clapton, Hendrix or Beck. Now that really puts his playing into perspective.

 

There was a solo on the coda of I Want You. They just didn't leave it in. If you listen to the isolated drum track you can hear it leaking through the drum mikes.

 

I used to work with a guy who once asked Gary Brooker how he got both George Harrison & Eric Clapton on a solo album. He said he called Clapton to ask him to play on the album & Clapton said to to for him call George since he's a better guitar player.

 

Don't agree. He's on fire in his parts in the End, can anyone doubt he could have carried a long break on his own? Paul's and John's parts are not comparable to George's. (Well, Paul's single note playing is good, no question, but to me George has the bluesy sound in both chords and single notes).

 

Well again, I can only compare it to other players I've heard and those bits I mentioned are as good as any blues rock playing I know. He is playing economically and tightly but with great effect there. In Bad Boy, where his playing basically makes the song, he uses a fairly full range of blues guitar techniques including some incisive chord work. If he had played through Marshall amplification with a chorused effect on the guitar it would sound like Clapton I think.

 

No one is suggesting George was secretly coming up with Hendrix-like riffs in his spare time, but I definitely think if he wanted to, he could've become more of a flashy player. Beatlemania and his interest in Indian music took him in a different direction, but by 1968 he had a more powerful sound, and he could've easily developed that. Instead he focused on slide. George was extremely humble about his guitar playing, yet even he said he could be a showy player if he wanted, and I think people like Clapton know more about what he could do than any of us.

His guitar playing in Somebody's City by Splinter for instance, is very different to the kind of playing he normally did, and it's great:

 

I really like the way Simon Leng talks about George as a guitarist. This is an excerpt from an interview he did in 2006:

Rip Post: Why did longtime Beatles engineer (and sometimes de facto producer) Geoff Emerick all-but-dismiss George as a Beatles soloist before his inspired solo on “Something?” It’s true that, as Emerick says, you can hear young George “fumbling” in live performances, almost as if he doesn’t know how to fill up all that “blank space.” Paul played a number of solos on Beatles recordings, reportedly because George could not come up with anything fast enough.

Simon Leng: Well, he probably said it because it is true, but my view on that would be “so what?” Perhaps the true value is in the finished product, does it really make a material difference how quickly the solo was created? Or if it was improvised or not? I would want to beware of mistaking the wood for the trees here. If a musician delivers a performance that affects the listener that is the important part, and not so much how it was created or how quickly.

Certainly Paul McCartney had a quicker musical mind than George and that’s great, but, again, I can’t help but feel that we would be better celebrating the complementary differences between musicians, or anybody else for that matter, rather than insisting that only one model has value.

And, as long as we are comparing the two styles, I would just suggest that people reflect on how many instantly memorable guitar breaks George came up with that they can sing as if they were songs in their own right. And, then ask the same of Paul’s solos. For instance, which is more musically memorable – George’s solo on “Nowhere Man”, or Paul’s on “Another Girl”?

Rip Post: Yet students of the group can hear some terrific live solos from George even in the very early days, and his Perkins-esque twanging on “Can’t Buy Me Love” is no more or less considered classic stuff—-McCartney had his band reproduce it note-for-note on recent tours. So why was his soloing in the Beatles period inconsistent?

Leng: I think it comes down to cyclical changes, confidence and the pecking order of the band. When The Beatles first hit it big George was at the forefront of lead guitarists for that time – take With The Beatles as an example. How many other guitarists at that time could have played the variety of solos George did on that album i.e. “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Til There Was You” and “All My Loving”? So, he was at the forefront – but, by 1965 the white blues soloists like Eric Clapton had started to emerge and a more virtuoso style came into vogue. As George did not come from a blues-based tradition he was not immediately in that groove of longer improvised solos. So, given that he was a somewhat diffident character, and that Paul was quicker at picking up that style, his confidence took a knock. But, as we have seen, by 1969 he was playing that style if he wanted to.

But then again, I come back to the main point – it’s one thing to have all the flashy technique in the world, but what’s the point of it if you have nothing to say musically? And let’s be clear about this, aside form those solos on With The Beatles, George played some wonderfully musical and inventive solos on early to mid-period Beatles records – to pick out a few: “I Call Your Name”, “Nowhere Man”, “Baby’s In Black”, “And Your Bird Can Sing” (which almost has elements of Bach counterpoint in it) and, as you say, “Can’t Buy Me Love”.

It’s also worth remembering that amongst musicians and other guitarists George is widely respected, and possibly more so than he is by the media in general.

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Simon Leng: [...] It’s interesting to note that it seems that George had an immediate and almost innate understanding and empathy with Indian music. That’s an interesting happening for a guy from Liverpool.

As a guitarist the words that spring to mind again are “unique” and “soulful”. He had a unique musicality, and the way in which he incorporated Indian inflections into his slide guitar style was unprecedented. I say this because he did not do it as if he were a “cultural tourist”, just learning to play a few phrases by ear and replicating them. Rather, he understood the phrasing, rhythmic and expressive nuances of Indian music in great detail and made them his own.

The problem of recognition of these skills might be down to “currency” if you will. We tend to measure and value things in terms of paper qualifications deriving from examinations, and great technical proficiency. George was never a showboating technical guitarist in the Jeff Beck mould, but that’s fine isn’t it? Beck is great and how he plays fits perfectly with his musical mission – George was also great, but in a different way, and his style was perfect for his musical idiom. I guess the point here is that we don’t all have to be the same, or aspire to the same talents because that is the norm propagated by mainstream media. To suggest that George was a lesser guitarist as some have because he didn’t rip through scales like a jazz guitarist is specious. I mean, if George was meant to be a jazz guitarist, he would have been! In George’s case, his understanding and exposition of Indian music flowed from his innate musicality and ability to communicate mood and emotional timbre to the listener. So, George’s “currency” was slightly at odds with the general flow and therefore overlooked. This book [While My Guitar Gently Weeps: The Music of George Harrison] is about addressing that imbalance.

 

This is electric blues guitar playing at it's finest. Not slick but oh so full of emotion. 'Nuff said. No knock on George's playing but this is in a different dimension IMO.

 

Once you hear 12 bar Original from the Beatles and some of the outtakes from Let It Be (909 aside) and it about as much blues from George
as you'd ever want to hear! Great slide player and produced some nice rock licks and riffs with The Beatles, but blues? no thanks :/

 

George Harrison was not a blues guitarist. Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins were also not blues guitarists. Nor were Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly blues musicians. Rock-n-roll and R&B are not synonymous with "the blues" even though it's one of their antecedents.

 

I agree he is not a blues guitarist, and I didn't say he was. I said he was a blues rock guitarist, i.e., he integrated blues licks extensively in his playing (amongst other influences) as the lead guitarist of a rock and roll band. Bad Boy is all blues licks, also, the song has a heavy tone for the time, I'd love to have heard it in the studio. One of Bert Kaempfert's technicians said the Beatles when Bert recorded them were "loud, loud loud".Think about that for a minute. But it didn't get across in the recording environment. No rock and roll really delivered the live sound until Bluesbreakers and Hendrix started that. Jeff Beck too of course.

I would also say that blues is by far the most important component of rock and roll. All the 50's guitar-based R&B like James Cotton and the guitarists like Goree Carter and (especially) Pat Hare was based on electrified blues. Mainstream rock is a development of that mostly (IMO) with some elements from country, jazz and pop.

 

But you agree on 909 (I can't see how anyone can't, and I'd add Octopus's Garden in this period) and of course he played in a variety of styles especially in later years. But in the early years, blues guitar stylings was an important part of his sound.

 

Well, I love Freddie King. I am not comparing Harrison to him. I am saying that when you listen to the Beatles especially in earlier years, you hear extensive use of the blues lexicon in George's lead playing. I do feel though it is more fair to discuss Clapton and Harrison together and Clapton thought Harrison was a great player.

 

Regarding Emerick, that's his opinion, one I don't share. I think George knew exactly what he was doing and what he wanted. The lead playing throughout Bad Boy and Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby (this more rockabilly) are accomplished blues-influenced leads, they are not hesitant or poorly thought it, they perfectly complement the melody and singing and other instruments in the ensemble. There are many other examples, I'd have to sit down again through the albums.

Also, by the time of Emerick's remarks, we are all familiar with the front man lead blues-rock player. This didn't exist from '62-'67 except for the Ventures maybe, that kind of playing. (And Dick Dale and the early proto-metal guys). George didn't come up that way and while he easily could have become that kind of player, as Page did say, he didn't want to. But when you listen to what he frequently played as the lead guitarist of a highly accomplished band, the blues guitar stylings inherited from the 50's are all over it (IMO).

 

Just about every 60s rock guitarist had more blues in their playing than Harrison

 

Like Pete Townshend, Roger McGuinn, Tony Iommi, Eric Brann, Robbie Krieger, Zal Yanovsky, Tony Hicks, Carl Wilson, Randy Bachman, Stephen Stills.

 

Honey Don't is awesome. But nobody says you have to like it.

 

Every time we get on these guitar player discussions, you get a certain number of people that run out a line a logic that a certain guy is lame because his playing is not this or that. George's work is tasteful, well thought out and economical. Unless you define great guitar work by the total number of notes or the highest degree of sustain or gain, calling Harrison lame is like calling Harley-Davidson lame because you like crotch rockets, or Fender guitars lame because you prefer saxophones. George Harrison is not Clapton or Jimmy Page. But those guys would tell you, he's every bit their contemporary, and just as visonary.

 

The break in Honey Don't is more a chordal solo, he's following the melody, and it has that choppy sound characteristic of some rockabilly. He's supporting the song as was the style at the time and does a great job, IMO. He sounds great playing with Perkins in the 80's, the well-known clips on youtube show them both to great advantage.

 

Pretty much every rock guitar player of the 60's, 70's, etc...started getting down blues licks as they started developing. George is no different. A good majority of classic rock playing is just based on some version of the blues just sped up, louder, thrown in with their own "stuff". Making a list of guys that played rock guitar who couldn't play the blues at least to some standard would probably be much smaller than those that could. I guess I really don't think it's as big of deal as your making it out to be. Just my opinion though.

 

He wasn't a blues guitarist although he learned some licks here and there.

These fab four from the Netherlands are the 'real' deal though. Tejano to the core!

 

If you saw that list of guitarists I mentioned (Roger McGuinn, etc.) I don't think any of them could play Bad Boy like Harrison did, except maybe Krieger (and even there).

 

I have to assume that you are referring to me. If so, you have done what others do when anything other than praise is given regarding a Beatle. I said, IMO his rockabilly playing is lame and that was it. You forget that their covers of rockabilly tunes and rockabilly style tunes are what.....2% of their recorded output.
BTW-Tasteful, well thought out and economical IMO does not suit every style that George played and rockabilly is one of them.

 

George was a brilliant guitarist - his solos are an integral part of many of the Beatles' songs - so much so that even today, when Paul plays them in concert, they are usually played note-for-note without any changes whatsoever. Those solos were painstakingly worked out and crafted in the studio - we know that because we have all of the studio outtakes.

The Beatles never played any real blues (other than 12 Bar Original, which is terrible, and For You Blue, where John plays lap steel), so we can't say for sure that George couldn't play the blues, but I suspect it would not have come naturally.