![]() on April 16th, 1964, after a three-hour session at Abbey Road, Harrison had made this Lennon-written raver his own: with his harmonic rain in the opening chord the pearly ring of his guitar in the circular fade-out and that solo, an ascending run of notes with a runaround flourish, doubled on piano by George Martin. Outtakes of the Beatles working on the title song from their first feature film show Harrison fighting his way to excellence: jabbing at half-formed ideas, even fumbling notes, on his twelve-string Rickenbacker. But double-tracking, with one take a hair out of phase with the other, gives the break a unique watery quality, as if it’s coming from a wobbly old Sun Records 45. Harrison added his guitar solo a month later, on February 25th, at EMI’s Abbey Road studios. The Beatles rushed through “Can’t Buy Me Love” in a Paris studio on January 29th, 1964, on a day off of sorts from a three-week grind of shows at the city’s Olympia Theater. But Harrison italicizes his real sense of loss (“I know I’ll never be the same”) with a brief fierce solo that sounds like he’s spitting nails through his guitar. Written on tour in August 1963, while Harrison was bedridden with illness in a hotel, “Don’t Bother Me” is, on the surface, about getting over a departed lover. The first Harrison song to appear on a Beatles album – With the Beatles in Britain 1964’s Meet the Beatles in America – is also Harrison’s first song about suffocating celebrity. Harrison’s most memorable contribution, however, is his closing chord, played under the last “Yeah!” Producer George Martin recalled hearing the Beatles run through the song on acoustic guitars at the July 1st, 1963, session: “I thought it was great but was intrigued by the final chord, an odd sort of major sixth … like a Glenn Miller arrangement.” It became the unorthodox icing on the Beatles’ first million-selling single. ![]() Harrison’s Gretsch Country Gentleman punctuates the frantic vocal magic with big, rippled chords and choked-riff interjections bearing strong traces of Chuck Berry. Harrison’s tightly wound phrases are dunked in cavelike echo and set in a growling register, an ingenious contrast to the high-pitched vocals of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Half of the single (with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”) that fired the Beatles to Number One in America in February 1964, “I Saw Her Standing There” features Harrison’s first guitar solo on an official Beatles release, recorded on February 11th, 1963, during the daylong session that yielded the bulk of the British LP Please Please Me. George Harrison‘s immense contribution to rock & roll guitar starts here.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |