He was in the band

George Harrison didn't do anything except bring to every Beatles song exactly what it needed.

By Gary Kamiya

Dec. 1, 2001 | George Harrison was my favorite Beatle when I was the age when you have favorite Beatles. For a shy kid lurking on the edge of teenagerdom, the skinny, quiet Harrison was the perfect moptop to adopt. The two big guys were too obvious; John was too brash and Paul was too pretty. There was Ringo, but for some obscure reason the fact that he was the drummer worked against him. Besides, he was cute in a way that in sixth grade was strictly for the girls, and he had what looked disturbingly like a 5 o'clock shadow.

George, by contrast, seemed aloof and innocent and mysterious -- and young. He wasn't entirely boyish -- there was some hint of mastery about him, some vaguely unnerving sense of sexual knowledge in his lean face -- but he definitely came off like the junior partner in the band. On the cover of "Meet the Beatles," the first record I ever bought, he looks like he's about 16 years old -- which wasn't that far from the truth. He was the kid who was accepted into the club: the perfect wish-fulfillment icon.

And he played lead guitar. At the time, I barely knew what that meant, but I figured it must mean he was a better instrumentalist than his gaudier big brothers. While Paul and John were busy being geniuses and stars, I imagined George in the background, hunched over the neck of his guitar like a writer hunched over his typewriter, quietly and painstakingly adding the notes that would make the songs John and Paul wrote even better.

But George didn't stay my favorite Beatle for very long. Partly this was because he was so much less incandescent than John and Paul that idolizing him felt almost perverse, self-consciously eccentric: It was like choosing to memorize Rosencrantz's speeches instead of Hamlet's. All the great songs, all the great vocals, were by John and Paul. "Don't Bother Me," the first Harrison composition to appear on a Beatles album, was a nice song, and his voice had a slightly nasal, sensitive thinness that was endearing, but it wasn't memorable enough to thrust him into the limelight. His guitar playing and backing vocals sounded good, but you didn't really notice them. If you were going to have a favorite Beatle, and you weren't making your choice on the basis of sexiness or deliberate obscurantism, it had to be John or Paul. George just kind of fit in.

The real reason George didn't stay my favorite Beatle is that as I listened over the years, it became clear that the Beatles couldn't be taken apart. They were indivisible. It was the Beatles, not John or Paul or George or Ringo, that my generation grew up with; it was the Beatles that, for a host of sometimes inexplicable reasons, created a soundtrack that so many of us lived by. I couldn't have a favorite Beatle any more than I could have a favorite parent or a favorite child.

And it is as a member of the Beatles -- nothing more, nothing less -- that we will remember George Harrison. "He fit in" does not appear to be much of an epitaph -- until you remember that what he was fitting into was the greatest rock group of all time.

Say "lead guitar" and you don't think of somebody fitting in -- you think of somebody soaring off, opening their id like a firehose and blasting away everything in the vicinity. This is the mainstream guitar-god rock legacy, from Mike Bloomfield to Jimi Hendrix to Eric Clapton to Van Halen to Allan Holdsworth. This wasn't Harrison's style. Blinding speed was never his specialty, though he could lay down nasty licks with the best of them. And in his entire career with the Beatles he probably never took longer than a 30-second solo. But what Harrison brought to the Beatles was exactly what the Beatles needed.

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