Born: 25 February, 1943, Liverpool, England
Died: 29 November, 2001, Los Angeles, USA

As a child George Harrison rode to school in a pale green Liverpool Corporation bus driven by his father. Like Paul McCartney, who rode the same bus, he came from a stable working class family. George was the youngest of four children.

From the start, George was independent and solitary, which made him difficult to handle as, in late childhood, he began to do poorly in school. Unlike the boisterous John Lennon, George was a silent rebel. He expressed his alienation by appropriating the tough guy fashions of Liverpool's teen outcasts, the Teddy Boys. Having noticed sketches of guitars penciled into his school books, George's mother bought one for him when he was thirteen years old. With her encouragement, he taught himself to play from a book.

One year later in 1958, George's schoolmate Paul let him tag along to a Quarry Men rehearsal. John, nearly three years his senoir, regarded him as a pest, but tolerated him in deference to Paul. Nonetheless George, having virtually flunked out of school, doggedly followed the band until they allowed him to sit in onstage. By the end of the year, he became an official member.

Unlike Paul and John, playing the guitar did not come easily to George. But the struggle made him apply himself and eventually he came to match the others in skill. One suspects that George became the lead guitarist, usually a centre stage role, primarily because John wasn't interested in learning the licks. In recorded rehearsals even as late as 1964, George's inability to improvise a solo is evident. However, he left the Beatles a top notch guitarist whom even Eric Clapton regarded as one of the best. The great forbearance required to improve so dramatically is one of the essential characteristics of the Beatle known for so long as the 'quiet one'.

George's forbearance is also evident with respect to his place in the Beatles hierachy. By the time the Fab Four began to attract public attention in late 1963, his talent was fully eclipsed by John and Paul's collaboration and competition. But that had not always been so. George's role on the 1 January, 1962 Decca audition tape - he sang lead on five of the twelve songs written by John and Paul - was far more prominent than he would be just a short time later. At some point, he was nudged into the background, where he remained until well into the group's career.

George emerged as a muscial force with 1966's Revolver, the first Beatles album to manifest his fascination with Indian music (though he had used a sitar in John's "Norwegian Wood"). On Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), he delivered the masterpiece "Within You Without You", which became the prototype for a sub-genre known as 'raga rock'. He also immersed himself in Indian culture, drawing the others into the practice of transcendental meditation and thus helping to set the spiritual tone of late 1960's youth culture. Like John's escapism and Paul's exuberance, contemplation of his place in the cosmic scheme was George's reaction to superstardom.

Like the others, George spent short periods away from the group in 1967 and 1968, experimenting with the new Moog synthesiser on Electronic Sounds (1969) and indulging his fascination with Indian music in a film score, Wonderwall Music (1968). And within the group, he was writing more and better songs. For the White Album (1968) he delivered "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "Piggies", "Savoy Truffle" and "Long Long Long". Abbey Road (1969) included two of his best, "Here Comes The Sun" and "Something", both equal in every way to the Lennon-McCartney songs on the album.

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