George Harrison was known as the Quiet Beatle, the reserved, spiritual guitarist who preferred to stay out of the spotlight. But that familiar image captures only part of who he was, says Klaus Voormann, a close friend who knew Harrison long before the Beatles became global superstars.

Voormann met the Beatles in October 1960, when they were playing at Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller club, with Pete Best on drums and Stuart Sutcliffe on bass. He introduced them to his friend Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer who took their first professional-quality photos and helped establish their distinctive mop-top hairstyles.

An artist and bass player, Voormann went on to design the covers of Revolver and the Beatles’ Anthology albums. He also played in groups like Manfred Mann, performed sessions with Carly Simon and Lou Reed, and recorded on solo works by Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon.

But in a new interview in the December 2026 issue of Uncut, Voormann says Harrison never wanted to be a solo artist or a frontman.

“I don’t think he really ever wanted to be a solo artist,” he revelas. “He wanted to write songs and be part of the Beatles.”

Of the Beatles, Voormann says only Paul McCartney was a natural frontman.

“If you think back to the ’60s and seeing the Beatles onstage, Paul was the one who really had contact with the audience,” he says. “John didn’t have it, George didn’t have it and Pete Best didn’t have it at all...

“But George just wanted to play guitar and sing. He was fantastic, but he did not want to entertain an audience.”

Voormann also played on Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album, where he saw how the guitarist brought musicians together. Harrison, he recalls, created a warm, welcoming atmosphere in the studio.

“All the musicians loved George. They knew he was a very spiritual person, and he created a nice atmosphere in the studio. In contrast to John, he was always trying to make everything lovely. The lights were dimmed and he’d put joss sticks up on a little altar at the front, with a little figure. […] There was always something very melodic about George’s songs, very few hard edges.”

But Voormann says Harrison’s spiritual outlook coexisted with deep personal insecurity. The guitarist was more complicated than his serene public image suggested.

“One thing which I think is very important for people to know is that he was a very insecure, very complicated person. He was always searching for something, which was the religious part of him. You could even say he was a split personality.”

Voormann recalls that Harrison was in particularly bad shape in 1970, around the time of the Beatles’ breakup and the making of All Things Must Pass. Harrison was also spending time with Delaney & Bonnie and Eric Clapton.

“He would be coking like mad, he fucked his voice, he was in bad spirits. So he always seemed kind of conflicted. In one way he had the urge to be spiritual and very much down to earth, and wrote those songs where he's longing for that. But then suddenly — click — he's back and on the wrong side again.”

That complexity extended to Harrison’s relationships with other people. Although Voormann describes him as a caring and thoughtful friend, he says Harrison could also be sarcastic and cutting.

“That whole ‘quiet Beatle’ thing is nonsense. That was not a part of him.”

Harrison’s sharp tongue was on display when he encountered Formula One driver Michael Schumacher, a fan of the sport himself, at a party.

“He said, ‘Michael, you’re a fantastic driver. You’re so fast, it’s ridiculous. And you’ve won so many prizes, but you’re still an arsehole.’ That was typical of George.”

Harrison’s sense of humor also extended to practical jokes. Phil Collins has recalled how the guitarist once tricked him over his contribution to All Things Must Pass. Collins had played congas during the sessions but always wondered why his parts didn’t make the album.

Years later, Harrison sent him a tape he claimed contained an outtake from the sessions. On it, Collins’s conga playing was terribly out of time. Horrified by what he heard, Collins left the listening session feeling “angry, depressed and sad,” convinced he’d finally discovered why his contribution had been left off the record.

Only afterward did Harrison reveal that the tape was fake and the whole thing was a prank.

Collins eventually saw the funny side. “We eventually managed to have a laugh about it,” he said.

“And yeah, I swore at a Beatle.”

Welcome to the Ultimate Eric Clapton Guitar Quiz, where we test your knowledge of his guitars and music with 10 questions.

From the celebrated electric guitars he played in the Yardbirds and Cream to the acoustic guitar he co-owned with George Harrison — they’re all here. We’ve even included some difficult questions about songs and live shows.

All the questions are multiple choice. Sign in or register for free and see where you end up on the leaderboard.

When Brian Ray joined Paul McCartney’s band in 2002, he was tasked with learning more than 40 songs — in one week.

“Fortunately, I listened to the Beatles nonstop throughout my life, so I already knew most of them,” he says. “Of course, it’s much different when you’re playing in a band that, oh yeah, is led by Paul McCartney himself. Needless to say, I immersed myself in the material.”

But Ray quickly discovered that there’s a difference between how the Beatles recorded the songs and how they need to be played onstage,

“It’s one thing to listen to these songs and appreciate them as a fan, as we’ve all done,” he says. “But when you start digging into them and analyzing them, you’re just astounded by the creativity and depth. Even stuff that sounds simple isn’t simple at all. I’m constantly amazed at the brilliance in these songs, and that feeling grows stronger all the time.”

Given his rarified position, Ray has some unique insights for guitar (and bass) players looking to incorporate Fab Four material into their repertoire.

“It’s important to have respect for the Beatles’ records,” he says. “On the other hand, you don’t want to sound like karaoke. And if you’re like me and you grew up on these records, they’re part of your DNA. You’ve memorized every upstroke and downstroke.

“Given all that, I think it’s important to remember that these records were made by real humans in a room. The Beatles played what they felt, and they responded to one another. Some of their recordings were done in one take, but others required multiple takes, and each one varied from the previous recording.

“When I play with Paul, he isn't trying to play every single note on piano, guitar or bass like he did on the record. He doesn’t sing the songs like he did on record. Nobody is trying to duplicate the recordings. And that’s the advice I have for anybody who wants to play Beatles’ songs: Play them the way you feel. Use the records as a framework, and then go for it.”

However, Ray believes guitarists should attempt to approximate the Beatles’ guitar tones.

“I think this is a crucial part of putting the songs over live,” he says. “If you want to play the material in the spirit of the originals, it helps to stay true to them tonally.

“For example, when I play older Beatles songs, I’ll use a big hollowbody Gretsch along the lines of what George used at the time. I’ll dial up some EQ on my pedalboard to get them a little more trebly. When I play the rockabilly-type solo on ‘All My Loving,’ I’ll add a quick slap delay — that seems to work just fine. On later Beatles songs, I’ll veer off into SGs and Les Pauls, both of which George played.

If that sounds daunting, take heart: You don’t need a massive guitar collection to do the job. “If you’ve got a Fender and a P90 guitar, like an SG, you should be able to handle the sound of most any Beatles song,” Ray says. “Just choose the one that gets you pretty close to what you’re hearing. You can amp and EQ each guitar to get clean or dirty sounds, maybe add a bit of compression, and you’ll be fine. You don’t need to use a lot of effects.”

Because Ray also handles bass duties in the group when McCartney is playing guitar or piano, he has some unique insights to playing McCartney’s bass lines as well. Though you’ll never find the job as daunting as he did.

“For the first six months, I barely looked up because I just wanted to play the parts right, and I didn't want to get distracted by the fact that Paul McCartney was 15 feet away from me,” he says. “I would have lost my mind.”

Besides, he admits it would be impossible to replicate Macca's bass lines with the same supple touch and tone. “His touch on the fretboard was so deliberate, but at the same time so light. On some of those records, it sounds like he’s playing a fretless bass; you can hear him just gliding on those flatwound strings. His playing is idiosyncratic. Maybe it’s because he started out as a guitarist who switched to bass. Like me, it wasn’t his first instrument.

“I don’t think it’s important to use the same bass as he did. I don’t use a Hofner or a Rickenbacker. I play a 1963 Fender P Bass that looks like it’s been dragged from behind a motorcycle. It’s totally beat up, but it sounds just wonderful.

“And remember that certain parts are really hard to nail. For instance, on ‘Getting Better,’ on the first chorus he plays a wonderful walking quarter-note bass line, but on the other two choruses he mixes in sustained half notes. I want to honor that when I play it live. But one time in rehearsal I made a mistake in the chorus, and Paul asked, ‘Why don’t you just play it the same way each time?’ I said, ‘Because it’s so cool how you did it on the record.’

“I say all this with the knowledge that nobody can ever play these songs the way Paul did, but as always, what matters is that you play with spirit and love.”

As a final rule, Ray says that to most successfully perform the Beatles’ material, it's essential that you nail the solos exactly. Those, he says, “demand to be played as accurately as possible.

“Take John Lennon’s solo on ‘Get Back.’ He was mirroring Paul’s vocals. I think John had a very reverent approach to that solo because he was a songwriter. I do my best to play that solo the way John did — both solos, actually. At the end, Paul has encouraged me to stretch out a bit, so I’ll do an extra four bars or something. I’ll throw in a little B.B. King or Clapton feel — something that feels appropriate. But I wouldn’t do that without first nailing the solo that everybody knows. I couldn’t imagine playing it any other way.”

Today is Global Beatles Day.

During a 1963 visit to St. Louis, George Harrison found a record he couldn't stop thinking about.

He even imagined the Beatles recording it. But despite his enthusiasm, the song never made its way into the band's repertoire. Harrison would eventually get another chance with it — 24 years later.

It all stemmed from an early 1960s vacation.

“In 1963, the year before the Beatles first came to America, I took a trip to St. Louis to visit my sister, who was living there at the time,” Harrison wrote in The Beatles Anthology. “The whole Beatlemania thing had really begun in the U.K., and we’d had three or four hit singles.

“So while visiting my sister, I went around to all the music shops looking for new singles and especially albums that were really hard to find in Liverpool. And that’s where I finally found the James Ray album, If You’re Gonna Make a Fool of Somebody.”

In particular, the song that grabbed his attention most was “Got My Mind Set on You,” and Harrison thought it had the makings of a Beatles recording — despite one significant drawback.

“It would have been great for the Beatles to cover, except it wasn’t really rock and roll,” he admitted. “It was trying to rock, but it sounded like it was produced by a jazz musician — it had all these squawky horns and stuff.”

As Harrison later recalled, the song “stuck in my mind.” More than two decades passed before he finally revisited it while working on Cloud Nine, his 1987 comeback album after a lengthy break from recording.

Produced by Jeff Lynne, Cloud Nine found Harrison returning to a more electric guitar–driven sound. Revisiting Rudy Clark’s song, he stripped away the brass-heavy arrangement that had bothered him in the first place and gave it a contemporary rock treatment.

“I finally decided to try and put more of a rock edge on the song,” he wrote.

The changes made all the difference. Driven by punchy drums and a leaner arrangement, Harrison’s version of “Got My Mind Set on You” became a massive hit, reaching number one in the United States and giving him one of the biggest singles of his solo career.

In a fitting twist, the song Harrison once hoped the Beatles might record ultimately found its audience through him instead. After carrying it around in his head for nearly a quarter-century, he finally discovered what he'd sensed back in that St. Louis record store: the song had staying power.

Notably, the success of “Got My Mind Set on You” paved the way for Harrison’s next success, the Traveling Wilburys. When his record company asked for a B side to accompany a 12-inch remix of the hit, Harrison enlisted Lynne, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty to help him write "Handle With Care." The song was ultimately deemed too good to waste as a flip side and became the debut single by the newly christened Wilburys, one of the biggest supergroups of all time.

Everyone knows George Harrison and Eric Clapton were close. Their friendship became known to all when it was revealed that Harrison had asked Clapton to play lead guitar on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," using Lucy, the Cherry Red Gibson Les Paul he had gifted to Harrison.

But what's also well known is that their bond was strained when, in the late 1960s, Clapton fell in love with Harrison's wife, the former model and photographer Pattie Boyd.

Boyd was weeks from her 20th birthday when she began dating Harrison, and her beauty and charm were arresting. Clapton harbored a deep and unrequited love for her, which in turn fueled the burning rock track "Layla," recorded by his band Derek and the Dominos in 1970.

But that band’s demise, coupled with his inability to lure Boyd away from Harrison — as well as the death of his friend and former Dominos guitar partner Duane Allman — turned his world inside out.

“When [the Dominos] broke up, I went into that dark place,” he revealed. “I didn’t give a shit about the music anymore.”

Clapton indulged in heroin and largely stayed away from making music for the next two years. But when he finally re-emerged in 1974, he renewed his attempts to win Boyd’s affections. By then she was warming to him, not only thanks to "Layla" but also because her husband was preoccupied with his music and meditation.

To his credit, Harrison had tolerated Clapton's flirtations with his wife for years. In 1970, he had discovered them together one evening at the home of manager Robert Stigwood.

“George came over and demanded, ‘What’s going on?’” she recounted to Rolling Stone. “To my horror, Eric said, ‘I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife,’” she continued.

“I wanted to die. George was furious. He turned to me and said: ‘Well, are you going with him or coming with me?’”

But by 1974, Harrison decided he'd had enough. He challenged Clapton to a duel — not with pistols but with electric guitars, at Harrison’s Friar Park home.

“George handed him a guitar and an amp — as an 18th-century gentleman might have handed his rival a sword — and for two hours, without a word, they dueled,” Boyd recalled in a 2007 interview. “At the end, nothing was said, but the general feeling was that Eric had won.

“He hadn’t allowed himself to get riled or go in for instrumental gymnastics as George had. Even when he was drunk, his guitar playing was unbeatable.”

Boyd doesn’t say what effect the head-cutting duel had on her feelings for Clapton, but it seems to have helped him win her hand.

In the end, Clapton got his prize. He and Boyd married on March 27, 1979, in Tucson, Arizona. Remarkably, the following May 19, when the couple threw a reception for friends in England who had been unable to attend the wedding, Harrison showed up, as did former Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

Clapton and Boyd split in 1987 and officially divorced in 1989. On reflection, Boyd says his love for her was driven in part by his competition with Harrison.

“Eric just wanted what George had,” she concluded

Clearly, time has healed wounds. Last April, Boyd took in one of Clapton’s two concerts at G Live in Guildford, held as warm-up shows for his 2026 tour.

“Fabulous to see Eric in the relatively intimate G-Live venue in Guildford on Monday evening,” she wrote on Instagram. “Great to hear ‘Old Love,’ ‘Layla’ and ‘Wonderful Tonight’ (amongst others) live again.”

And should anyone have forgotten, Harrison and Clapton once co-owned an acoustic guitar — a rare 1913 Gibson Style O acoustic archtop. The instrument was used to write songs that include Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” and Clapton’s “Let It Rain,” as well as “Badge,” the song Harrison and Clapton co-wrote that appeared on Goodbye, Cream’s 1969 farewell album. The guitar has since been dubbed Pattie, in homage to Boyd, and sold at Heritage Auctions for $200,000 on May 8, 2026.

The Beatles have shared an early version of “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” from the forthcoming expanded special edition of Rubber Soul, which comes out October 2.

Titled “Second Version — Take 2,” the recording is the first version of the classic song, recorded on the first day of sessions for Rubber Soul. Written by John Lennon, “Norwegian Wood” is significant for George Harrison’s sitar part, marking the first time the Indian classical instrument was heard on a contemporary pop song.

Harrison first encountered the instrument on the set of the group’s 1965 film Help!. “There were some Indian musicians in a restaurant scene, and I first messed around with one there,” he recalled.

Harrison felt there was something familiar about Indian music. “It was as if I already knew it,” he said. “When I was a child, we had a crystal radio with long- and shortwave bands, and so it’s possible I might have already heard some Indian classical music.”

As his curiosity grew, Harrison purchased a sitar from a shop on London’s Oxford Street called Indiacraft in the summer of 1965. “It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it a bit,” he recalled.

That October, the Beatles began working on Rubber Soul. The group was recording its initial attempts at “Norwegian Wood” and Lennon was unhappy with how it was coming along.

“We went through many different versions of the song,” he recalled. “It was never right, and I was getting very angry about it.”

The Beatles were always keen to use new instrumentation on their recordings. Lennon asked Harrison if he could double his acoustic guitar line on the sitar. “He was willing to have a go, as is his wont,” Lennon said.

The result transformed both the song and popular music. The following March, the Rolling Stones followed suit by ornamenting their new single “Paint It Black” with a sitar riff written and performed by Brian Jones, who had studied the instrument under Ravi Shankar’s student Harihar Rao. The track became the first rock and roll record with a sitar to hit the top of the charts, and launched a mini craze for the instrument.

The increased demand was felt particularly by New York session multi-instrumentalist Vincent Bell, who suddenly found himself hauling his heavy sitar from gig to gig. Worn out by the effort, Bell created a portable electric sitar based on an electric guitar design, which was then developed into a production model under Danelectro’s Coral brand.

Eventually, the sound of his electric sitar was heard on late-’60s hits like the Box Tops’ “Cry Like a Baby,” Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her,” Joe South’s “Games People Play” and many others.

As for Harrison, his interest in sitar grew in the months after recording “Norwegian Wood.” He composed the song “Love You To,” from the Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver, around several Indian classical instruments, including sitar.

Then, in September 1966, he all but gave up playing guitar when he embarked on a spiritual journey that began with his study of the sitar. With the Beatles just a few months away from recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Harrison traveled to India to begin formal lessons with sitar master Ravi Shankar.

For the next 21 months, Harrison rarely picked up a guitar unless he had to for recording sessions or to compose. But by the summer of 1968, he gave up studying the instrument after Shankar encouraged him to seek his musical roots. Harrison realized then that rock and roll was where he belonged.

“I thought, Well, maybe I’m better off to get back into being a guitar player, songwriter, whatever I’m supposed to be,” he recalled. “Because I’m never gonna be a sitar player. Because I’ve seen a thousand sitar players in India who are twice as better than I’ll ever be!”

The “Norwegian Wood” outtake is the third advance release from the forthcoming Rubber Soul set. Apple previously released “Michelle (Take 1)” and an early songwriting work tape of the Rubber Soul–related single “Day Tripper.”

George Harrison’s Dark Horse tour in 1974 has gone down in rock history for all the wrong reasons. The shows were plagued with issues, and the run was so bad that the Beatle wouldn’t tour again for another 17 years. For his foil, Robben Ford, the tour had a completely different set of problems.

Throughout the run, Harrison fought a losing battle with laryngitis, earning the tour its derogatory nickname, “Dark Hoarse”. Fans also resented the limited number of Beatles songs aired, and the lengthy opening set of his close friend, Ravi Shankar.

That, however, was just one side of the story. For a youthful Robben Ford, his big break was anything but. At 22, he was playing in Tom Scott’s jazz-fusion group, L.A. Express. Soon, they’d be hired as Joni Mitchell’s live band, later playing on her studio albums, Miles of Aisles and Hissing of Summer Lawn.

Harrison was in attendance at their London show, and he subsequently claimed the band for himself, ahead of hitting the road to support his fifth studio album. It was meant to be a dream gig for Ford.

“It was an amazing opportunity to be able to work with a Beatle,” he tells Thinking About Guitar with a degree of diplomacy. “George was always my favorite Beatle, but the music was very simple, and it was already done. So you learned the part, and you played the part. It wasn’t a challenging gig.”

Considering his jazz-tinted background, being reduced to a sideman playing cowboy chords wasn’t thrill-a-minute for the hotshot guitarist. His issues, though, ran deeper.

“There was no creativity asked of me in that situation,” he explains. “It was a hard tour; George couldn’t sing; he had really terrible laryngitis. We were in private planes, and sometimes we’d be in venues for 15 hours a day. The show was three and a half hours long. At the Cow Palace in San Francisco, we played twice in one day. It was really hard physically and emotionally, and mentally it was kind of rough, I have to say.”

Then there were the drugs. A day after first meeting Harrison backstage at that Joni Mitchell show in England’s capital, he was whisked into the studio. There, he said, there was “a box of cocaine on every shelf,” and that behavior didn’t change on the road.

The tour ran for 45 shows, and the whole time, Ford felt like an outsider.

“There was a lot of what went on during the ‘70s,” he says, again taking the diplomatic route. “You had all those cats, and I was 22. I had my 23rd birthday on that tour.

“So, I know these guys are older than me, and they’re doing their own thing,” he goes on. “It was very hard for me, actually. I felt like a fish out of water in that bunch, in that group of people. So, it wasn’t really fun. It was something I really kind of had to get through.”

On a positive note, he did get through it. He returned to Joni Mitchell’s side the following year before being invited to write a guitar solo for Steely Dan’s “Peg” in 1977, though he didn’t make the final cut. His next big gig would prove to be his weirdest. That’s probably why he’s largely remained a solo act since.

Thankfully, the marred George Harrison tour did little to douse his flame, and playing a Beatles classic with the man who wrote it remains a memory he holds dear.

Led Zeppelin are often credited for creating some of the heaviest music in the hard-rock canon. But Jimmy Page, the group’s main songwriter, was anything but one-dimensional in his output.

Perhaps no track in the band’s catalog demonstrates this better than “The Rain Song,” the second cut on Zeppelin’s fifth album, 1973’s Houses of the Holy. Combining guitar work inspired by folk, blues and jazz with a sentimental orchestral score and Robert Plant’s romantic lyrics, “The Rain Song” is a track you either skip over or submit to.

But where did the inspiration for such an atypical Zeppelin track come from? Apparently from a Beatle: George Harrison.

Page explained the song’s genesis to former Guitar World editor Brad Tolinski in his book Light and Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page. As he revealed, Harrison — newly solo following the Beatles’ breakup — was discussing Zeppelin’s music with the band’s drummer, John Bonham.

“George was talking to Bonzo one evening and said, ‘The problem with you guys is that you never do ballads.’ I said, ‘I’ll give him a ballad,’ and I wrote ‘Rain Song,’ which appears on Houses of the Holy.

“In fact,” Page continued, “you'll notice I even quote ‘Something’ in the song's first two chords.”

Page — who tuned his electric and acoustic guitars to D G C G C D for the track — does in fact follow the same descending progression heard in the verse from Harrison’s “Something,” from major to major 7 to 7.

The irony is that Harrison himself took his opening lyrics to “Something” from the James Taylor song “Something in the Way She Moves,” from Taylor’s 1968 self-titled debut. Harrison knew Taylor’s song well, since the folk singer was among the artists signed to the Beatles Apple label. Both he and Paul McCartney had been key in bringing Taylor aboard, and even contributed performances to his debut.

Harrison was correct in his appraisal of Zeppelin’s catalog, and Page was resolute in making his response. “The Rain Song” is profoundly unlike anything else the band created.

Page seemed the know the band was treading far from their well-beaten path. His working title for the tune was “Slush,” a word that among the Brits informally refers to something overly sentimental. The song’s orchestral passages, performed by bass guitarist John Paul Jones on a Mellotron, recall Muzak, the anonymous easy-listening music once commonly played in department stores for ambience.

While the song has its detractors (Rolling Stone’s reviewer slagged it and “No Quarter” as “drawn-out vehicles for the further display of Jones’ unknowledgeable use of Mellotron and synthesizer”), “The Rain Song” touched a nerve in many record buyers and future musicians, including producer Rick Rubin.

"I don't even know what kind of music this is,” Rubin declared in a 2010 artists picks feature for Rolling Stone. “It defies classification. There's such tasteful, beautiful detail in the guitar, and a triumphant feel when the drums come in — it's sad and moody and strong, all at the same time. I could listen to this song all day. That would be a good day."

And while there’s no denying that it’s the odd duck among the vibrant rockers on Houses of the Holy, “The Rain Song” is a fitting entry in a catalog that defied convention and both established and expanded the hard-rock repertoire. The track arguably paved the way for the power ballad.

While we don’t know if Harrison ever had a response to “The Rain Song,” we do know he wasn’t a fan of the heavier guitar sounds that players like Page pursued in the wake of Cream-era Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

For that matter, we have a record of when Harrison first heard about Led Zeppelin in a January 1969 recording session during the making of Let It Be. Asked if he’s heard the album from Jimmy Page’s new band, Harrison seems a bit confused.

“Jimmy Page? Is he the one that was in the Yardbirds?” he asks.

Told it is indeed the very same Jimmy Page, Harrison pointedly demurs.

“Uh… I think is lunch ready?” he replies.

During the Beatles’ early hit-making years, John Lennon and Paul McCartney took most of the plaudits for their songwriting. George Harrison was slower to find his voice as a writer, and when he wrote his first solo composition for the Beatles, he was sick in bed. Even then, he wasn’t convinced what he had written could even be considered a song.

By the time the Beatles landed in Bournemouth, on England’s south coast, for a six-show residency at the Gaumont in August 1963, their debut album, Please Please Me, was already fueling the first ripples of Beatlemania. Harrison had come away from those sessions without a songwriting credit, despite handling lead vocals on “Chains” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret.”

Harrison had already co-written songs with fellow Beatles, including “In Spite of All the Danger” with Paul McCartney and “Cry for a Shadow” with John Lennon, but “Don’t Bother Me” was different. This was his first Beatles song written entirely by himself.

Harrison wrote it while he was sick in bed in Bournemouth. It would appear on the Beatles’ second album, With the Beatles, released in November 1963. But its creator wasn’t exactly impressed with his first solo effort.

“I don’t think it’s a particularly good song,” he once confessed in his autobiography, I Me Mine. “It mightn’t be a song at all.”

That assessment is striking in hindsight. Harrison would go on to write some of the Beatles’ most enduring songs, including “Here Comes the Sun” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which featured an uncredited lead-guitar contribution from Eric Clapton. But in 1963, he was still trying to establish himself as a songwriter within a group whose creative partnership was already dominated by Lennon and McCartney.

Paul McCartney remembered that Harrison’s growing desire to write for the band had become an issue.

“A lot of the girls were mad on him, so we always wanted to give him at least one track,” he said in the Anthology box set. “Then George started to catch on, [asking] ‘Why should you write my songs?’ And then he started writing his own.

“It was an option to include George in the songwriting team. I remember walking up past Woolton Church with John one morning and going over the question: ‘Without wanting to be too mean to George, would the three of us write, or would it be better to keep it simple?’ We decided we’d just keep the two of us.”

Harrison nevertheless kept writing. And getting a song into the Beatles’ repertoire wasn’t easy for him. In 1969, he admitted that he felt uncomfortable even telling his bandmates that he had written something for an album.

“I used to have a hang-up about telling John, Paul and Ringo I had a song for an album,” he said in 1969. “I felt mentally, at that time, as if I was trying to compete. And in a way, the standard of the songs had to be good, because they were very good. I don’t want the Beatles to be recording some rubbish for my sake just because I wrote it.”

“Don’t Bother Me” did make the cut, despite Harrison’s reservations. And the Beatles took the song seriously enough to experiment with its sound. John Lennon tried to give his rhythm-guitar part — played on his 1958 Rickenbacker 325 electric guitar — a harsher, more aggressive character by using a Maestro Fuzz Tone pedal, one of the earliest commercially available fuzz units. Producer George Martin rejected the effect, however, feeling that the primitive fuzz created too much distortion and noise.

Instead, Lennon used the built-in tremolo on his Vox AC30, switching the effect on and off with a foot-switch. During overdubs, the group added percussion, including an Arabian bongo played by Ringo Starr, giving the song an unusual exotic sound. These are small details, but they show that “Don’t Bother Me” was more than a token Harrison composition: the Beatles regarded it as deserving the same creative support they gave Lennon and McCartney’s.

Harrison himself saw the experience as a starting point rather than a triumph.

“At least it showed me that all I needed to do was keep on writing and maybe eventually I would write something good,” he wrote in I Me Mine.

He was right. “Don’t Bother Me” may not have been a classic, but it was a watershed moment: for the first time, Harrison had put a song of his own alongside the work of Lennon and McCartney. He would soon prove he belonged there.

And Harrison wasn’t the only Beatle to have doubts about the quality of his own material. John Lennon later dismissed “Run for Your Life” as a throwaway macho number and said he loathed the song. The Beatles were never entirely unanimous about their songs or their sound.

For Harrison, though, “Don’t Bother Me” represented something more important than a hit. It was the moment he stopped waiting for Lennon and McCartney to give him a song and began insisting that he had songs of his own.

Filming for Sam Mendes’ forthcoming Beatles biopics is well underway, and the on-screen Fab Four have been spotted in London re-creating the band’s iconic Abbey Road album cover.

Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal, Joseph Quinn and Barry Keoghan are set to play John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, respectively, in a four-film project directed by Mendes. Each film will focus on the backstory of a specific Beatle, making it one of the most ambitious music biopic projects ever to hit the big screen.

But the shoot to re-create the Abbey Road album cover this past weekend was getting all the attention.

Since the record’s release in 1969, the image of the four Beatles walking in line on the zebra crossing in front of Abbey Road — the historic studio where they made nearly all of their recordings — has become one of the most recognizable album sleeves ever produced.

Famous as the image is, the idea behind it was actually quite simple. The Beatles were struggling to come up with a suitable design for the record cover, and Paul McCartney suggested photographing the group crossing the street outside the studio.

On the morning of August 8, the late photographer Iain Macmillan was brought in to make the idea a reality. Beginning at 11:35, Macmillan was allowed 10 minutes to shoot the photo while a policeman held up traffic.

In the days leading up to the shoot, the photographer had used stand-ins to meticulously plan the shot. Still, he couldn’t predict the issues on the day. He managed to get just six shots. One was ruined by a car pulling out from behind the studio; another was marred by too much spacing between Starr and Lennon.

The fifth shot proved to be the perfect choice. Selected by McCartney, it was chosen partly because it was the only one that featured all four members mid-stride.

As former Apple Records creative director John Kosh told Forbes in 2019, he had just days to work on the design for the completed album jacket.

“I suddenly found myself [thinking], ‘By God, I’ve got to do this and get it out on Wednesday?’” he remembers.

Kosh had assumed the photo had been taken for publicity. He was already busy working on the cover for what he assumed would be the group’s next album, Get Back, recorded the previous January (and ultimately released as Let It Be in May 1970).

“But in the middle of all of this,” Kosh says, “they put that on hold, and Abbey Road came in.”

It was trial by fire, but Kosh stuck to his vision for the cover. He was against having any type on the front of it, insisting no one would have any doubt as to who the four musicians were.

“I thought, ‘Here are the four Beatles walking across the street. If you do not know who they are, you have definitely been in a cave somewhere.’”

His decision outraged Sir Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of EMI, Apple Records’ parent company. He called Kosh in the middle of the night to complain that he was ruining the Beatles’ career.

When Kosh showed up at Apple headquarters the next morning, he ran into George Harrison and told him what had happened.

“George looked at me and said, ‘Oh fuck it. We’re the Beatles.’

“So that was the end of that. George was such a sweet man. All the Beatles were fun to work with.”

In the end, Kosh got the cover he wanted — and one that went down in history.

“This was my first album cover, not really knowing what I was doing,” he confessed. “The fact that it’s turned into an icon, and possibly the most parodied album cover of all time, is really thrilling to me.”

But the cover not only birthed an icon — it drew untold numbers of visitors to re-create the crossing themselves. Artists copied it as well, including Booker T. & the MGs (1970’s McLemore Avenue), the Red Hot Chili Peppers (1988’s The Abbey Road E.P.) and even McCartney, who repeated the crossing with his sheepdog for the cover of his 1993 album, Paul Is Live.

Unfortunately, the original photo fueled the late-1960s rumor that McCartney had died and been replaced by a look-alike. Sleuths pointed to the fact that he was the only Beatle walking barefoot as a hint that the bass guitarist was dead.

“Back in the Sixties, the wild rumor was that I was dead because of certain alleged ‘clues’ on the Abbey Road sleeve,” he wrote in the press notes accompanying the Paul Is Live album sampler. “Because I was barefoot, it being a scorching summer’s day, it was taken as a bizarre Mafia sign of death.”

The Volkswagen parked on the side of the road in the photo provided another clue. Its license plate read 28IF. “It meant I, being 27 at the time, would have been 28 if I’d lived,” McCartney wrote.

More than half a century later, the image is still being copied. This time, it’s the actors playing the Beatles in Mendes’ films who have taken the famous walk, giving a new generation of Fab Four a chance to step into one of the most recognizable photographs in music history.

The Traveling Wilburys was the only band George Harrison ever joined outside the Beatles, and it came together by accident. Spontaneity became the band’s backbone, and, strangely enough, Dave Stewart’s kitchen became their base.

Harrison had enjoyed a successful first decade as he adjusted to life after the Fab Four. All Things Must Pass outsold his former bandmates, and — the blighted Dark Horse tour aside — the quiet Beatle had found his voice.

The Traveling Wilburys, completed by Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne, came together in 1988 when Harrison was asked to provide a new B-side for the European release of “This Is Love,” a single from his Cloud Nine album. He and Lynne were in Los Angeles, and with Orbison also around, they decided to record the song at Dylan’s home studio. Petty joined them, and “Handle with Care” began to take shape.

The feeling shared between the musicians as they brought the song to life was mutual, and soon the B-side had become something much bigger. When Harrison played the finished track for Warner Bros., the label decided it was far too good to be buried on the back of a single. Harrison agreed. As he later put it, “I liked the song and the way that it turned out with all these people on it so much that I just carried it around in my pocket for ages thinking, ‘Well what can I do with this thing?’”

His answer was simple: make another nine songs and turn it into an album. Harrison figured it wouldn’t take them very long.

“If we did one song in one day, all we need is nine days to make an album,” he quipped.

As they set about making the album, Harrison’s temporary home proved to be just the place for sharing and hashing out ideas.

“I was great friends with George Harrison,” Dave Stewart tells Uncut in a new interview. “He decided to live in LA for a bit, so he was living in my house with Dhani and Olivia [his son and wife].

“I’d designed the house to have a great sound wherever you were, so the kitchen had a high ceiling with a kind of Mexican fireplace in the middle. [The Wilburys] would write songs sitting on the sofa in the kitchen or around the table, and [drummer] Jim Keltner would play the brushes on the refrigerator. They were having fun.”

Fun was what mattered most to the band. Each member had experienced huge success with their respective bands, rightly making the Traveling Wilburys the biggest supergroup of the 1980s. But it was the band’s playfulness and casual nature, rather than the seriousness that might have come from so many esteemed musicians coming together, that became their glue.

Unfortunately, for the company that Stewart kept, that meant some rather wild surprises.

“I had a friend from Sunderland [England] visit me, who’d never even been to America before,” he continues. “At the same time, Dylan was arriving looking like a vagrant, because he’d just driven from Malibu on his motorbike.

“My friend, he’d already had his mind blown just from arriving [in LA], and then he walked around the corner to see George trying to teach Dylan how to play ‘Taxman’, with Tom joining in. He didn’t say anything, in that classic Northeast way, but I realize now he must have been having a heart attack.”

“It was a nice environment because you could sit outside. It was warm, and the doors were always open,” Petty once said of the sessions at Stewart’s place (via Far Out). “It had a little tiny studio, but it wasn’t a studio; it was more like just a control room, with a vocal booth, so we didn’t have any space to play the guitars.”

The house became one of three home-based locations where the band recorded. Overdubs and mixing were undertaken in England, at Harrison’s Friar Park mansion, while “Handle with Care” was recorded in Bob Dylan’s home studio. That was a song that Petty’s foil, Mike Campbell, was originally due to play the guitar solo on, but he got stage fright in front of his Liverpudlian hero.

The three home studio setups, Mike Campbell’s fears aside, helped forge a cozy atmosphere during the sessions. It’s what Petty remembers most fondly of that first album.

“The Wilburys was this nice friendly thing,” he said. “I'm really proud that I was part of it. Because I do think that it brought a little sunshine into the world.”

Ritchie Blackmore has played with some of rock’s biggest names, but jamming with George Harrison was something else entirely.

“It was very overwhelming to play with a Beatle,” the Deep Purple and Rainbow guitarist recalls.

Blackmore was in Australia with Deep Purple in 1984 when Harrison came to see the band. As Blackmore recalls in an installment of his YouTube series, Tales From the Tavern, he politely asked if he could join them onstage.

“He was friends with Jon Lord and Ian Paice. He lived just down the road,” Blackmore says, sitting with a classical acoustic guitar on his lap. “He was over in Australia when we were there as Deep Purple, and he said to me very politely, ‘Can I get up onstage with you and use your guitar?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ I was flattered.

“Sure enough, we all got up onstage and we did the old rock and roll number ‘Lucille,’ by Little Richard.”

Footage of the performance shows Harrison and Blackmore trading solos as the band tears through the song.

“We had a good time,” Blackmore continues. “He was a very nice man, very serious, and very complimentary. It was very overwhelming to play with a Beatle. I mean, there’ll never be another band like the Beatles.”

Harrison had largely stepped away from music two years earlier, following the release of his 10th solo album, Gone Troppo. He would later describe himself as “peaceseeker, gardener and ex-celeb,” which made his appearance with Deep Purple all the more unexpected.

Blackmore has discussed the jam before, admitting, “I was playing the wrong key and everything, but it didn’t seem to matter.”

In the Tales From the Tavern video, he also recalls how much he loved the Beatles’ early material, singling out “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “From Me to You” for their “fantastic… simple melodies.”

“George was very modest,” Blackmore says. “A very quiet man. I noticed onstage that he had big feet, because he was tapping out the rhythm. I looked down at one point and thought, My god, he has big feet! George was great.”

The Beatles are set to revisit Rubber Soul, their transformative 1965 album that blended folk, baroque pop, soul, and early psychedelic experimentation — a record that captured a year when popular music was rapidly expanding in every direction. Bob Dylan was one of the artists helping push those boundaries.

Dylan’s influence could be heard in the Beatles’ increasingly introspective songwriting, particularly on John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood” and “Girl,” as the band moved beyond the youthful optimism of their early years. But while the Beatles were absorbing elements of Dylan’s folk-driven approach, Dylan himself was undergoing a revolution of his own.

In 1965, Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited, an electrified masterpiece that pushed beyond the conventions of traditional folk and embraced the power of a full rock band. Months later, when he brought that sound to the stage — with Robbie Robertson along playing a Fender Telecaster — and the world was stunned. He was even branded “Judas” during a show at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, U.K., in May 1966.many fans felt betrayed — but George Harrison, himself a songwriter constantly looking toward the future, saw the change as a natural progression.

The Beatles’ sixth album will arrive October 2 as an expansive new box set featuring a new stereo mix by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, alongside previously unheard session recordings and home demos. The collection offers fans an unprecedented glimpse into the making of a record that marked a major turning point for the band.

The shift represented by Rubber Soul had roots in the Beatles’ famous 1964 meeting with Dylan, an encounter Paul McCartney later described as a life-changing experience. Dylan introduced the band to marijuana that night, and McCartney later joked that he had discovered “the meaning of life.” The meeting helped reinforce the creative connection between two artists who were both beginning to move beyond the limits placed on them by their audiences.

For the Beatles, that meant songs that explored new emotional territory, from Lennon’s enigmatic “Norwegian Wood” and the aching “Girl” to McCartney’s elegant “Michelle” and the dark, unsettling “Run For Your Life.” The group was leaving behind the straightforward charm of its early singles and embracing something more complex.

Dylan’s own transformation was even more dramatic. When he performed with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, some members of the folk community reacted with outrage. By the time he toured the U.K. the following year, the backlash had intensified, culminating in the infamous moment when an audience member shouted “Judas” at his concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in May 1966.

But when Harrison saw Dylan perform his electric set at London’s Royal Albert Hall, he couldn’t understand the controversy.

“The set was in two halves, and in the first half, he came out and did his usual thing with the guitar and the harmonica,” Harrison recalled. “Then in the second half he came out with the band.”

The Beatles guitarist understood why some fans were unsettled. Many had embraced Dylan as a symbol of the folk revival and saw the electric performances as a rejection of that identity.

“A lot of them were really uptight. They were like, ‘Hey, he’s forsaken the folk,’” Harrison said. “But Bob just came out and said, ‘Well, you know, you all may know this song. Remember how it goes? Well, here’s how it goes now!’ and they just went off wailing.”

Harrison, however, saw the performance differently.

“It was a great show. I mean, it was ragged, but that is the nature of Bob: raggedy,” he said. “And all through that second half, people were getting up and walking out, and shouting, and it was controversial.”

More than 60 years later, Dylan’s decision to embrace electric guitars and instrumentation seems less like a betrayal and more like a defining moment in rock history. Musician and author Dr. CP Lee has described the “Judas” incident as one of “the pivotal moments in popular music in the 20th Century,” capturing the divide between tradition and experimentation that defined the era.

Dylan, for his part, appeared unfazed. As recalled in the book Dylan on Dylan: The Essential Interviews, he responded to criticism of his Newport performance by telling one journalist, “They must be pretty rich, to be able to go some place and boo. I couldn’t afford it if I was in their shoes.”

And Harrison agreed with Dylan’s instinct to keep moving forward.

“It was interesting. It seemed natural,” Harrison said. “There’s a limit to what you can do just with acoustics; it didn’t seem that Bob should particularly be limited to just doing that. It seemed kind of a natural progression.”

It may be more than 60 years since the Kinks–Beatles rivalry was at its peak, but Dave Davies isn’t letting sleeping dogs lie.

Speaking at a new Kinks artwork exhibition at the Gibson Garage in London, the guitarist took aim at two members of the Beatles while naming the only one he says he genuinely liked.

In conversation with British tabloid The Mirror at the launch of The Kinks: Brothers, Davies didn’t hold back when asked about the Fab Four and the long-running rivalry between the two bands.

“John Lennon didn’t like the Kinks, he really didn’t,” Davies said, confirming something he has long suggested. “In fact, John Lennon didn’t really like anybody!”

Paul McCartney, who recently released his nostalgia-tinged album The Boys from Dungeon Lane, also came in for criticism. Davies said the 18-time Grammy winner “wrote a few decent songs,” but offered little more by way of praise.

Ringo Starr, who duets with McCartney on Dungeon Lane, escaped mention altogether. Instead, Davies reserved his warmest words for George Harrison.

“George Harrison was the only one I really liked,” he said. “He was the nicest guy.”

The roots of the Kinks’ rivalry with the Beatles are widely traced to a Bournemouth show in the summer of 1964, where the Kinks opened for the Liverpool band. According to later accounts, Lennon approached Davies before the show and made several cutting remarks, including a dig at the Kinks’ lack of hit records.

Writing in his 1994 autobiography, X-Ray, Kinks frontman Ray Davies suggested Lennon’s put-down stemmed from insecurity. He claimed the audience was calling for the Kinks to return to the stage for an encore just as the Beatles were preparing to perform.

If so, Lennon’s comments quickly proved ill-timed. Just days later, “You Really Got Me” topped the U.K. charts and reached the top 10 in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Ireland and Sweden. In a fitting twist, it displaced the Beatles single “A Hard Day’s Night” from the number one spot.

The song — later introduced to a new generation through Van Halen’s explosive cover — became one of electric-guitar rock’s defining moments. Davies famously slashed the speaker cone of his guitar amp with a razor blade to create the raw distortion that helped lay the groundwork for modern rock guitar.

This has already been a busy year for Davies. In March, he pushed back against transphobia accusations made by electronica artist Moby, and he has also criticized a new Kinks biography, saying it contains “misinformation.”

The renewed attention has also prompted fresh questions about a possible Kinks reunion, with Davies suggesting his relationship with older brother Ray may finally be improving.

“We enjoy each other’s company,” he recently said (via MusicRadar). “We have fluctuated between getting on really well and not getting on at all over the years, but there’s always been telepathy, since childhood... Never say never.”

In George Martin, the Beatles had a producer who excelled at thinking outside the box. Martin‘s innovative studio techniques and openness to new ideas made him the ideal producer for a group as wildly creative as the Beatles.

But he was only human, and like most people he preferred to wrap up the workday at a reasonable hour.

That didn‘t always sit well with the Beatles, particularly in their later years, when recording sessions frequently carried over past midnight..

“Some of the people here — the engineer, for instance — would always be trying to go home at 5:30, and we'd be trying to make history,” George Harrison says in the 1991 Beatles Anthology documentary as he, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr sit in Abbey Road Studios.

The Beatles certainly knew how to fight fatigue. When performing night-long sets in Hamburg in the early 1960s, they‘d take Preludin, an appetite suppressant and stimulant with effects similar to amphetamines — a.k.a. speed, or uppers — to help them stay awake.

Which is how they managed to get Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick to work after hours on one particular night in the late 1960s: by lacing a pot of tea — prepared by their roadie, Mal Evans — with speed.

“Mal had this big teapot,” Harrison explained. “It was a big aluminum teapot, and I remember one specific incident where he made a pot of tea, and we doused the tea with uppers.”

Evans proceeded to take cups of tea up to the control booth overlooking the studio. "‘Cause they were asking, ‘Can we go home now?’” Harrison continues. “‘No, you can’t, you bastard. Have a cup of tea!’

“And then they were up there until 11 o‘clock at night.”

“Yeah, and then they didn’t want to go home,” McCartney adds. “They wouldn‘t let us leave.”

It was only when the 1995 documentary first aired that Martin learned about the episode.

Ironically, Harrison and John Lennon's first time taking LSD came after a dentist friend spiked their coffee.

It wasn‘t all fun and games, though. McCartney's love of pot got him busted in Japan. And American singer-songwriter James Taylor — who signed to the Beatles' Apple label in 1968 — claimed his heroin use influenced Lennon's decision to try the drug. He subsequently became addicted.

Delaney Bramlett had plenty of famous musical friends, including George Harrison and Eric Clapton. But few were closer to him than Duane Allman.

The Allman Brothers Band guitarist befriended Bramlett in the late 1960s and became a member of the extended musical family surrounding Delaney & Bonnie and Friends. Allman played on several of the group’s recordings, and in 1970, he gave Bramlett a beautiful three-tone sunburst 1961 Fender Stratocaster with a rosewood fretboard.

As Bramlett told Guitar Player, the gift was a remarkably personal gesture from a friend who had become like family.

“Duane had left the Allman Brothers to tour with my band,” Bramlett told the magazine in its March 1996 issue. “Sometimes he’d play my goldtop, and most of the time I’d play his Strat ’cause I liked it so much. We were gigging in New York, and he had to go to Macon for some reason. My brother found the Strat in his room with a note he left: ‘To Delaney, my best friend. Wear it in good health.’”

Bramlett said the last time he saw Allman was at the funeral of bluesman King Curtis, who had died in August 1971. Allman died just over two months later, on October 29, while Bramlett was on the road in western Oregon.

“My brother got a call that Duane had got killed,” Bramlett recalled. “He wouldn’t tell me till I got through the show. So the next thing I knew I was at Duane’s funeral.”

The gift was especially generous considering that Bramlett had once refused to return a guitar that Allman desperately wanted back: the first electric guitar he had ever owned.

In 1961, Allman’s mother bought him a cherry-red double-cutaway 1959 Gibson Les Paul Junior to stop him from constantly borrowing his brother Gregg’s Teisco Silvertone. Allman eventually pawned the Gibson. Sometime later, Bramlett acquired an electric guitar that sounded suspiciously like the one Allman had lost.

“I called Duane to brag about it, and he said, ‘Does it have a big scrape across the back?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘That was my first electric guitar. I pawned it and forgot where. Can I have it back?’ And I said, ‘No way. This is a real good ’un.’”

Bramlett’s recollection of his guitars wasn’t always entirely accurate. In the same Guitar Player interview, he told a story about another famous instrument in his collection: a rare 1913 Gibson Style O archtop that had previously belonged to Eric Clapton and George Harrison.

According to Bramlett, he and Clapton discovered the guitar while they were touring in support of Clapton’s debut solo album.

“We used to keep our eyes peeled for guitars,” Bramlett said. “We found this neck stickin’ out of a Dumpster, grabbed it out, and there it was. One of the real rare ones. It had a broken neck, but other than that, it was a beauty.”

The story, however, doesn’t line up with the guitar’s documented history.

Clapton had acquired the 1913 Gibson by 1968, and he and Harrison used it during the songwriting sessions that produced some of their most important work. The guitar is associated with “Badge,” the Clapton-Harrison co-write that appeared on Cream’s final album, Goodbye, as well as “Here Comes the Sun” and other songs Clapton and Harrison composed in the late 1960s. Clapton later passed the guitar to Bramlett around 1970.

The instrument eventually became known as “Pattie,” a nod to Pattie Boyd, Harrison’s former wife who later married Clapton. The guitar was listed for nearly $1 million on Reverb in May 2025 before being offered by Heritage Auctions in November of that year, where it failed to sell.

Bramlett’s collection grew to include other famous guitars, including Harrison’s 1968 Rosewood Telecaster, which is now back with Harrison’s estate. He sold Allman’s Les Paul Junior in 1999, and many of Bramlett’s remaining guitars were sold off following his death in 2008. While Bramlett may have been a little loose with the details of how he acquired one of the most historically significant guitars he ever owned, there’s no question that he was the keeper of some extraordinary instruments.

Phil Collins thought he’d been fired by George Harrison for more than 30 years — until the former Beatle finally let him in on the joke.

The two first met in 1970, when a 19-year-old Collins landed a £15 session (roughly $280 today) playing congas during the recording of Harrison’s first post-Beatles solo album, All Things Must Pass. Collins recorded parts for “Art of Dying,” but they never appeared on the finished album.

For decades, he thought little of it. Then, while Harrison was preparing the album’s 30th-anniversary reissue, he unearthed an old session tape and sent Collins a copy with a handwritten note.

“Dear Phil, could this be you? Love George.”

Collins later recalled to Mojo (via Guitar.com) that he eagerly listened to the tape, convinced he was finally hearing the performance he’d recorded as an unknown teenager.

Instead, he got a shock.

“The conga player sounded like a hyperactive toddler,” Collins said. “At the end, I heard George’s voice saying, ‘Can we try one without the conga player?’”

“I rewound it and played it again and again and thought, ‘Fuck… I was sacked, and I never knew!’”

He left the listening session feeling “angry, depressed and sad,” convinced he’d finally discovered why his contribution had disappeared from the album.

A few days later, Harrison called to see whether Collins had received the tape.

“I said, ‘You fucking bastard. You sent me this tape, and it turns out I was sacked!’”

Harrison burst out laughing.

When he finally caught his breath, he revealed the truth.

“Oh no, no, no — that was [famed percussionist] Ray Cooper on the congas. We made the tape as a joke for you!”

Collins admitted he eventually saw the funny side.

“We eventually managed to have a laugh about it,” he said.

“And yeah, I swore at a Beatle.”

Of course, Collins’ career — from Genesis to a string of chart-topping solo hits and even Disney film soundtracks — suggests he wasn’t too badly wounded by the experience.

He also wasn’t the only future star to appear on All Things Must Pass. Peter Frampton contributed electric guitar leads to Harrison’s landmark solo album years before either musician became an international superstar.

George Harrison never had any interest in reuniting the Beatles after the band’s breakup in 1970. While several members collaborated during their solo years — David Bowie even claimed he, John Lennon and Paul McCartney once discussed forming a group — the Fab Four never returned to the studio or stage together.

But Harrison hadn’t completely soured on his former bandmates. As he revealed in a 1974 press conference, he was open to forming a new band with one Beatle in particular.

The Beatles’ breakup came at an unfortunate time for Harrison. After years of being overshadowed by the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, he was flourishing as both a writer and guitarist. Songs like “Something,” “Here Comes the Sun” and “Old Brown Shoe” proved he could match his bandmates as a songwriter, while his increasingly distinctive guitar work established him as one of rock’s most original stylists.

The release of All Things Must Pass, his ambitious 1970 solo debut, vindicated years of frustration. Powered by the hits “My Sweet Lord” and “What Is Life,” it became the most commercially successful solo album by any former Beatle in the immediate aftermath of the split.

By 1974, Harrison was preparing to launch the tour behind Dark Horse with a band that included organist Billy Preston, bassist Willie Weeks, drummer Andy Newmark and a young Robben Ford. During a press conference promoting the tour, he made it clear that a Beatles reunion held little appeal — but revealed there was one former bandmate he’d happily work with again.

“It’s all a fantasy, the idea of putting the Beatles back together again,” he said, as recounted in the book George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters. “If we ever do that, the reason will be that we are all broke. I’d rather have Willie Weeks on bass than Paul McCartney. That’s the truth, with all respect to Paul.

“Paul is a fine bass player,” he admitted, “but he’s a bit overpowering at times.”

Elsewhere in the press conference, Harrison expressed his fondness for drummer Ringo Starr, calling him a player with “the best backbeat I’ve ever heard.”

But in the end, it was Lennon whom he held in the highest regard.

“John’s gone through all of his scene, but he’s like me, he’s come back around,” Harrison said. “To tell the truth, I’d join a band with John Lennon any day, but I couldn’t join a band with Paul McCartney. But it’s nothing personal. It’s from a musical point of view.”

Harrison may also have been remembering Lennon’s generosity during a September 1969 meeting, when he suggested future Beatles albums should feature a more equal distribution of songs among the four members. Lennon also said he regretted not giving Harrison and Starr the lucrative B-sides to Beatles singles so they could gain greater exposure — and make more money. Two weeks later, Lennon privately announced he was leaving the band, rendering the proposal moot.

Harrison had already worked with Lennon on the latter’s 1971 solo album, Imagine, contributing lead and slide guitar to several tracks. He also played Dobro on “Crippled Inside,” demonstrating the musical chemistry the two still shared.

Aside from his work with the Traveling Wilburys, Harrison continued recording and performing as a solo artist until his death in 2001.

Before the British Invasion swept the Beatles across American airwaves, popular music in the United States had a distinct sound. Roger McGuinn, who co-founded the Byrds, accented by his now iconic Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string, was a big part of it.

When the Beatles landed in America on February 7, 1964, McGuinn was working as a session player and songwriter, writing songs for singer Bobby Darin’s T.M. Music company. He says that despite Paul, John, George and Ringo being relative unknowns in the States, he was aware of them.

“I was living in New York, and I was a studio musician, and also working as a songwriter in the Brill Building,” he tells Guitar Player. “And as it turned out, I think there was a CBS TV Channel 2 in New York, and there was a clip of the Beatles, maybe about two minutes long. It had girls screaming, and had the Beatles playing… I don’t know if it was ‘She Loves You,’ or ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ but it was one of those songs.

“I went, ‘Man, these guys are good,’” he admits. “I realized they were using folk music chords for rock and roll. They’d come up as a skiffle band, the Quarrymen, and they’d been playing folk tunes with chords they’d developed into a rock band.”

This realization led McGuinn to change course with varied results. “I started putting folk songs to a Beatles beat and taking it to the Village [in New York City] and playing that for people in the coffee houses.

“They didn’t like it,” he adds with a laugh.

But he knew he was onto something. When George Harrison began playing a Rickenbacker 360/12 in 1964, McGuinn — who had been playing 12-string for years — picked on up as well.

The same year, McGuinn founded the Byrds with David Crosby on guitar and vocals, Gene Clark on vocals, Chris Hillman on bass guitar and Michael Clarke on drums. A 1965 tour followed, orchestrated by their press office Derek Taylor, who had worked for the Beatles in 1964 (and would again from 1968 to 1970). Through Taylor, the Byrds met the Beatles, leading to a friendship between the bands that had a profound impact on both their musical and personal lives.

That impact is evident in George Harrison’s Rubber Soul track “If I Needed Someone.” It also provides the back story to “She Said She Said,” one of John Lennon’s tracks from the Beatles’ 1966 album, Revolver. In August 1966, near the end of their last tour, the Beatles were visiting the Byrds. LSD was a popular drug of choice at the time, and the Byrds and Beatles dropped acid together, along with actor Peter Fonda.

It was Fonda, who, while tripping on acid, said, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

“Peter had somehow shot himself in the stomach when he was a kid,” McGuinn explains. “He died on the operating table. But they brought him back. So he did know what it was like to be dead.”

Lennon was appalled at the Fonda’s statement. Long after the party ended, still reeling from the episode, Lennon wrote “She Said She Said,” substituting a woman for Fonda, who says, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

Asked what he made of Lennon’s creation, McGuinn shrugs. “I liked it. I like the song,” he says, “I loved everything the Beatles did, really. There’s nothing that I would put down.”

Despite these connections, the friendship between the two groups is rarely discussed. But the Beatles and Byrds were tight, so tight that when the Beatles gave a press conference at Capitol Records on August 24 of that year, Crosby tagged along.

“Yeah, we were friends,” McGuinn says. “And Crosby kind of followed them around. He’d poke his head out, and whoever was interviewing the Beatles said, “Who’s that guy with the long hair over there?’ And the Beatles would say, “Oh, that’s our mate from the Byrds, David Crosby.’”

Is it true that George Harrison inspired you to start using a Rickenbacker 12-string?

Yeah. We all went to the movies and saw A Hard Day’s Night, and I’d heard that sound on the records, but I didn’t know what instrument it was. But George came out with a Rickenbacker, and it looked like a six [string] from the front.’

But he turned it sideways, and you could see six other tuning pegs, like a classical guitar, sticking out of the back. I went, "Oh, they kind of condensed the 12-string head into something good-looking.” And it sounded great. I had to get one.

What was the first Rickenbacker 12-string you had after seeing George’s?

I traded an acoustic Gibson 12-string that Bobby Darin had given me because he broke the one that I had before that. I put it up against the piano, and the piano was on casters, and it rolled, and the guitar fell down, and the neck broke off. So he brought me a new Gibson 12-string.

I also traded my five-string banjo — a Vega long-neck five-string banjo, like Pete Seeger played — and some cash, and I bought a Rickenbacker 360 12-string in a guitar store in L.A. I played it for about seven hours a day. [laughs]

Was it tough to get used to the 12-string?

Oh, Jim Dixon, who was our manager, said, “You can’t put a capo on an electric guitar, it’s just not done.” So, I had to learn a lot of scales and learn how to play all kinds of stuff up the neck. I had to practice like seven hours a day to do this. That’s how the “Eight Miles High” thing came about, because I’d been doing a lot of scales.

George influenced you, but if you listen to “If I Needed Someone” from Rubber Soul, it’s obvious that you influenced him, too.

Well, Derek Taylor had been in London, and George gave him, I think, a three-inch reel-to-reel of “If I Needed Someone.” He came over — Derek had been living in L.A., and we were all in Laurel Canyon. He was a few houses down from me, and [Byrds bassist] Chris Hillman.

But Derek came over to my house with this three-inch reel-to-reel tape, and said, “George wants you to play this.” So I played it, and it was “If I Needed Someone.” He said he wants you to know that he got that riff from [Pete Seeger’s] “The Bells of Rhymney” [which the Byrds recorded a famous live version of in 1965].

That same year, in 1965, the Byrds and the Beatles met in August for a psychedelic experience. Can you recount that?

The Beatles had already come over to America and declared that the Byrds were their favorite group. And when they first came over, they would send a limo down to pick us up at our various locations and take us to the house that they were renting up in the Hills, in Beverly Hills.

It was the estate of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor that they had rented for, like, a week, or however long they were there for. And so, we’re coming up in the limo, and there’s all these girls, and they’re up on the fences, and there were policemen, and they took us in. The gate opened up, and we go down to this house, and that’s when we all dropped acid.

What was that like?

Peter Fonda was with us, Ringo [Starr] took acid, and Paul [McCartney] didn’t want to do it. So, George, John, and I did, and Ringo, I think, was playing with some girls in the pool.

Did Paul say why he didn’t want to drop acid, too?

No. I really didn’t have any interaction with Paul at that time. I did when we first met the Beatles in London. It was during that tour that we went over, and they billed us as “America’s answer to the Beatles.” Derek Taylor was with us, and, of course, he had been their press officer, so he introduced us to the Beatles.

I met George and John the first night, and then Paul invited me to the Scotch of St. James, his private club. We had a Scotch and Coke, went outside, and he got into his Aston Martin DB5, and we drove around London. It was really cool.

And later on, we went to a party with the Beatles and the [Rolling] Stones. The Stones told us how their butler would roll up hash joints and put them on the steps for breakfast every morning. [laughs]

Circling back to dropping acid in Beverly Hills, that’s also when you and David Crosby introduced George and John to Ravi Shankar, right?

George, John, David Crosby and I went into this big shower, like a big, maybe nine-foot-square shower, where you could sit on a ledge. And we had one guitar that we kept passing around, and that’s when we showed him some Ravi Shankar stuff — and we all were on acid.

That was especially impactful on George.

George started freaking out. [laughs] He said, “I feel like I’m dying…” And then, Peter Fonda said, “Oh, I know what it’s like to be dead.” And John Lennon said, “Oh, don’t tell me that… you’re creeping me out. This is terrible.”

George was pretty into Indian music by then, so it’s surprising that he hadn’t heard of Ravi Shankar.

Well, Jim Dixon was a producer and engineer at World Pacific Records in Hollywood, and they had Ravi Shankar as one of their artists. So we got a preview of the recordings of Ravi, and we knew about Ravi early on. That’s how we were able to tell George about him, and that he’d been an influence. He had been exposed to Indian music prior to that, but I guess he just didn’t know about Ravi Shankar.

You mentioned earlier that when you went to London, the Byrds were billed as “America’s answer to the Beatles.” But given how you fed off each other, it’s clear that it wasn’t so much about an answer as it was a call-and-response.

Well, what was going on was that America was blindsided by the British Invasion. They were looking for some kind of counter to it. I remember watching American Bandstand, and Dick Clark said, “The best Beatles antidote? It’s probably the Beau Brummels.”

And then, he’s on the phone with somebody, saying, “What? The Byrds? Oh, yeah, okay. It’s the Byrds.”

Todd Rundgren was all of 23 when his reputation as a boy-wonder producer landed him a high-profile gig with the star act of the Beatles’ Apple Records. Badfinger were a quartet of British musicians whose name and debut single under that moniker — the Paul McCartney–penned “Come and Get It” — had been selected by the Beatles themselves.

In early 1971, they were riding high on “No Matter What,” a top-10 hit in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and several other countries. What they needed was a hit album to follow it up.

The result would be Straight Up, the Rundgren-produced album widely regarded as the British quartet’s finest, thanks in great part to its two big hits: “Baby Blue” and “Day After Day.”

But as Rundgren explains, getting there was anything but straightforward. Badfinger — guitarists Pete Ham and Joey Molland, bass guitarist Tom Evans and drummer Mike Gibbins — had already started the album twice.

The initial sessions began in January 1971 with Geoff Emerick, the Beatles’ visionary engineer on albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Emerick had coproduced Badfinger’s previous album, No Dice, which included “No Matter What.”

Unfortunately, the new sessions failed to satisfy Apple’s American arm.

“Apparently the distributor was not satisfied with it,” Rundgren tells Guitar Player. “They didn't think they could promote it, or didn't hear a single or something, and said, ‘Okay, start over.’ So the band started over with George Harrison.”

Harrison approached the project roughly six months after releasing his own landmark solo effort, All Things Must Pass. Production began in May, but Harrison was soon swept up in organizing the Concert for Bangladesh after his friend Ravi Shankar brought the humanitarian crisis to his attention.

“They got maybe five songs in and George got completely involved in the Concert for Bangladesh and told the band, ‘I’m finished. I can't do this.’ That’s when I got the call — producer number three.

“At the time I was developing a reputation for getting things done very quickly, no nonsense. The label was looking for some assurance that the record would actually get finished. That’s when I inherited the project.”

By then, Rundgren had established himself as a rising production talent through his work at Bearsville Records — the upstate New York label run by Bob Dylan manager Albert Grossman — and on projects like the Band’s 1970 album Stage Fright. He’d also launched his own solo career under the name Runt, releasing two albums that showcased his increasingly adventurous songwriting talents and production style.

With Apple demanding a fast turnaround, Rundgren took stock of what had already been recorded.

“There was a whole album by Geoff Emerick. I think we lifted a couple tunes from that,” he says. “‘Flying’ was one of them. Then the George Harrison tunes — we used some of those, although most had to have parts re-recorded. It all sounded like Phil Spector. That was George’s thing at the time.”

Spector had, of course, overseen the heavily layered Wall of Sound production on All Things Must Pass, and Harrison brought a similar approach to Badfinger’s sessions.

“So when he produced Badfinger’s record he was doing all these Spectory things, like having three acoustic guitars playing — all this overdubbing and swampy reverb printed on the drums and stuff like that,” Rundgren explains. “I had to undo some of that.

“And then we recorded probably five new songs, of which ‘Baby Blue’ was one of them — the very first thing we recorded,” he reveals. “Then somehow I had to make it all sound cohesive.”

Rundgren ultimately completed the album at Bearsville Studio.

“I took it all back to Bearsville and somehow got it to sound like one record,” he says. “Geoff Emerick was not credited, but for some reason George Harrison was credited on ‘Day After Day.’”

Fifty-five years on, the slight still irritates him.

“He gave up on the project,” Rundgren says. “The only time I ever met him he said, ‘I’m done. Do whatever you want with it. Use it or don't use it.’

“Essentially he had no time to shepherd it. I heard nothing from him during the rest of the production.”

Straight Up would go on to produce two major hits in “Baby Blue” (number nine in the U.S.) and “Day After Day” (number three). Although critics were lukewarm at the time, the album would eventually come to be regarded as Badfinger’s finest work. “Baby Blue” would enjoy a a massive cultural resurgence in September 2013 when it was used in the final scene of the hit series Breaking Bad.

Despite their remarkable good fortune to land in the Beatles’ orbit, Badfinger were plagued by disastrous management. Pete Ham died by suicide in 1975, followed by Tom Evans eight years later.

Rundgren didn’t have an opportunity to revisit the album with Harrison in the years that followed.

“I never had reason to run into him, even though I was spending a lot of time in Hawaii,” he explains. “I would always come out to Kauaʻi, and he lived on Maui, I believe. But we never did cross paths.”

By the late 1960s, the Beatles were driving much of pop culture’s direction, from electric guitars to psychedelia to Indian music and meditation. But their influence also became entangled in the era’s more controversial shifts — including widespread experimentation with drugs.

That tension surfaced directly when George Harrison appeared on The Dick Cavett Show in November 1971. The host asked whether the Beatles bore responsibility for America’s growing drug culture.

“You had this tremendous influence on young people,” Cavett said. “Everyone knows you went through a drug phase. Did it ever occur to you that the fact that was known, and the fact that you were the Beatles, might have caused thousands of people to have drug problems that might not have otherwise?”

The audience bristled at the question, but Harrison responded without hesitation, beginning with a story that reframed the premise entirely.

“First of all, when we took the notorious wonder drug LSD, we didn’t know we were having it,” he said. “John and I had the drug when we were having dinner with our dentist. He put it in our coffee and never told us.”

The doctor, John Riley, had invited the two Beatles to dinner in spring 1965, where he spiked their coffee. At the time, Harrison said, neither he nor John Lennon knew much about LSD at all.

“It’s a good job we hadn’t heard of it,” he said, “because there’s been so much paranoia now created around the drug that people, if they take it, they’re already on a bad trip before they start.”

“So we had it; we went out to a club, and it was incredible.”

Harrison then shifted the discussion toward what he saw as a broader issue: the role of the media in turning LSD into a cultural flashpoint.

He pointed to the moment Paul McCartney publicly acknowledged taking LSD in 1967 after repeated pressure from reporters.

“If you’re going to ask me if I’ve had it, I’m not going to lie,” Harrison recalled McCartney telling one reporter.

Harrison said McCartney also warned journalists that broadcasting the admission would inevitably produce sensational headlines — and amplify the drug’s visibility far beyond the Beatles themselves.

“Really, it was their fault,” Harrison said. “They asked the question, Paul said yes, and then they put it [out there] and the world goes crazy.”

Pressed again on whether the Beatles still bore responsibility because of their fame, Harrison pointed to the constant surveillance the band faced during the 1960s.

“There were always reporters who’d follow us around on tour and always try breaking into our room,” he said, “catching us doing something we maybe shouldn’t have been doing.”

“The whole thing,” he added, “is that people want other people to do nasty things because they feed off it. And then they write, ‘Ha, they’re doing nasty things.’”

The Beatles’ experimentation with the drug spilled into their songwriting when an LSD trip with the Byrds and actor Peter Fonda led John Lennon to write “She Said She Said.”

And in a scene that recalls their own introduction to the drug, members of the band spiked a tea pot — likely with amphetamines — at one of their Abbey Road sessions to keep producer George Martin and members of the recording crew working late into the night.

The fun part about writing this column is learning a guitar’s back story — where and when it was made, who played it — and assessing its playability and sound.

But sometimes you get a surprise, as I did with this 1961 Watkins Rapier 3 electric. Its creator was Sid Watkins, whose company — Watkins Electric Music, or WEM — played a fascinating role in British musical-instrument engineering. Sid was not just a luthier and woodworker but something of an electronics genius as well. He designed the electronics for the Vox Phantom Synth guitar as well as the echo units used by Hank Marvin and the Shadows.

As the company grew and its product lines expanded, WEM became nearly ubiquitous in the U.K. In addition to guitars, WEM made amps and PAs used by groups like the Who, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. The company even made Vox guitars to help the brand keep up with manufacturing demand during the guitar boom of the ’60s.

Watkins launched the Rapier line in 1959, and it continued until 1970. As for the surprise I mentioned earlier: There are photos of George Harrison playing a highly modified Rapier 33 that belonged to his friend Del Mandel at the Beatles’ Apple Studios in 1971, while he was producing the Radha Krishna Temple album. That’s right — a Beatle touched it!

WEM also became known beyond the U.K. through exports. At one point the company was shipping 500 guitars a month overseas, most of them to the United States.

At the risk of sounding snarky, the Rapier 3’s weirdo factor is that it’s an early British guitar that actually sounds and plays great. If you’ve ever played any of Vox’s clunky guitars, you’ll know what I mean.

The Rapier 3 originally sold at the bargain price of 29 guineas, or $85, about a third of what a Fender Stratocaster cost at the time. But don’t let that fool you. These are well-made instruments.

At first look, this is an inviting glossy fiesta-red guitar not unlike a Strat, with three pickups, a vibrato bar, offset cutaways, a toggle switch and three knobs. As it turns out, there actually is something weird here, and it’s hiding in those knobs. Their functions aren’t as straight ahead as you might think.

The first knob is a rotary pickup selector with four detented stops. The next two are global volume and tone controls. As for the toggle, used in conjunction with the rotary knob it allows you to employ only the middle pickup. But depending on what setting you’re using, it also can act as a tone bypass and/or a kill switch. It only took me about an hour to figure that out.

But my patience was rewarded when I discovered a bunch of cool sounds and switch combinations along the way. This guitar is deep! It goes from rich-sounding jazz tones to really cool phasey rhythm guitar sounds and the thinnest banjo-like setting I’ve ever heard on a guitar without active EQ or processing. I’m not sure what you’d use that for, but I couldn’t stop playing the Status Quo song “Pictures of Matchstick Men” with it. The middle two pickup settings are where this guitar really comes to life, with usable clean tones that sound great with overdrive or distortion.

The maple neck is skinny and fast, and has a rosewood fingerboard with 22 frets, plus a zero fret. The neck is relatively straight, but the truss rod seems to have plenty play left on it. In addition, there’s a Hi/Lo vibrato that works cleanly and offers little resistance. But while it’s great for playing surf rock, there will be no dive-bombing on this guitar.

Note that the sticker on the pickguard is right in the strum path. The original one disappeared years ago, but I replaced it with an aftermarket sticker that I’ve already managed to scratch up.

In sum, this guitar is light, easy to play and sounds great.

Despite its features and history, the Watkins Rapier 3 never really achieved cult status. They can still be found online for well under a thousand bucks.

I bought the guitar shown here from its original owner, Francisco, whom I met on Facebook Marketplace. He and his brothers played in bands all through the ’60s and ’70s and this was the guitar he used.

When I showed up at his house to pick up the guitar, he and his brothers were in their garage amid drums, keyboards, guitars, amps, mixers, exercise equipment and a man-fridge. Classic. The guys were so friendly, and Francisco gave me a great deal on the guitar. My thanks to Paul Connet for getting the stickers off (sorry Francisco) without harming the finish.

Contact me with questions or pics of your whack jobs. I may even write about them.

Paul McCartney has spent more than six decades moving forward as one of rock’s most prolific artists. But lately, the past keeps pulling him back.

At a listening event at Abbey Road Studios, the former Beatles songwriter previewed his new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, and explained why memories — of childhood, lost friends and family — have become the driving force behind his latest music.

“Why am I doing all these songs about memories?” McCartney asked himself at the event, as reported by The i. “Well, it’s where your big bank of information is. Quite a few of the songs on this album go back in time.”

The legendary bass player will release the record May 27. Its title references Speke, Liverpool, where McCartney grew up — and several of the songs revisit moments from those early years.

The album’s opener recalls a teenage crush on a neighbor named Jasmine that never quite blossomed. “She did knock on the door once, but I was on the toilet,” McCartney laughs.

But some memories cut deeper — particularly those involving his former bandmates.

Lead single “Days We Left Behind” looks back on McCartney’s early adventures with John Lennon and George Harrison, long before the three would change popular music forever.

“I still get a little bit emotional talking about John and George,” McCartney admits.

One memory behind the song involves a youthful hitchhiking trip he took with Harrison. At one point the pair caught a ride on a battery-powered milk delivery truck as they headed “down south.”

“There was the driver’s seat, a battery, and a passenger seat. George got the battery,” McCartney recalled (via The Guardian). “He had jeans with a zip on the back, and they connected with the battery. Later, at a B&B, he showed me the big zip burn!”

When McCartney later told the story to Olivia Harrison, she remembered hearing a similar version from her husband — though with a different culprit.

“She said, ‘Yeah, George told me that story about you getting your zip stuck in the battery,’” McCartney said. “I maintain it was him.”

The past isn’t only present in memories on the album. It also surfaces in the music itself.

The record features a duet between McCartney and fellow Beatle Ringo Starr — the first collaboration between the two surviving members of the band on one of McCartney’s solo releases.

McCartney has paid tribute to his former bandmates before, including performing at the 2002 Concert for George at Royal Albert Hall. And Beatles history has continued to echo into the present through projects such as the band’s AI-assisted 2023 single, “Now and Then.’

Memories of McCartney’s family also play a role on the album. His mother died while he was still a boy, leaving him and his brother, Mike McCartney, to be raised by their father.

“I’ve never written about my mum and dad before,” McCartney explains. Reflecting on the turmoil of today’s world led him to think about his parents’ experiences during World War II — his father a firefighter, his mother a nurse.

“Imagine any minute now you’re expecting bombs to fall,” he says. “I wondered what that would do to you.”

Even the album’s creation began with a moment that felt almost accidental. It’s McCartney’s first record with producer Andrew Watt, known for his work with Ozzy Osbourne and the Rolling Stones. Their collaboration began five years ago over a cup of tea, when McCartney — casually strumming an acoustic guitar — stumbled upon a mystery chord that sparked the opening track, “As You Lie There.”

The album sessions were completed between legs of McCartney’s Got Back Tour.

During that tour, another piece of McCartney’s past resurfaced: his iconic Höfner bass, which had been missing for more than 50 years before recently returning to the stage.

For McCartney, it seems the past isn’t something easily left behind. Instead, it’s the well he keeps returning to — for stories, for songs, and for the memories that still shape his music.

Working with George Harrison and Joni Mitchell in the same year was an eye-opening education for a young Robben Ford — and not always in the ways a 22-year-old guitarist might have expected.

Of the two, Ford says his time with Harrison was the more surreal experience, marked as much by excess as by music-making. That brief partnership came during one of Harrison’s most turbulent creative periods: the 1974 Dark Horse tour, his first major run of shows since the Beatles’ breakup, which proved so chaotic it effectively pushed him away from touring for 17 years.

Harrison had first encountered Ford earlier that year through Joni Mitchell, for whom the guitarist had already become an unlikely rising star, contributing to The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Miles of Aisles. Impressed, Harrison described him as a rare talent who seemed to bridge blues and jazz instinctively. “Once in a blue moon,” he said, “there is an artist so natural to the blues and to jazz as Robben Ford.”

When Harrison began assembling a touring band, Ford—then just 22—was brought in.

“I was touring with Joni Mitchell, and we did two shows in London in 1974,” Ford tells Classic Rock. “I’m hanging out backstage, and I turn around and standing before me is the album cover to All Things Must Pass. You know, he had the hair, hat, gardening boots, big plaid coat.”

Ford recalls Harrison arriving at his Henley-on-Thames home the next day in similarly iconic fashion. “We got there about one in the afternoon. George was still asleep. At about four, he came into the kitchen, smoking a Gauloises, making tea—he only drank Typhoo.”

What followed, Ford says, was a night of escalating studio chaos.

“At one in the morning, the band all went up to the studio. Everyone had been drinking, smoking something, snorting something,” he says. “So we’re all set up in the studio, and there’s a shelf running along all four walls of the control room, with a box of cocaine on every shelf. So if you felt like it, you just popped over, had a little toot, and continued. And we did that until the sun came up.”

Despite the mythology, Ford has since downplayed the musical impact of the experience. He’s said he “didn’t learn anything” from his time in Harrison’s band, describing his role largely as playing simple rhythm parts each night. One of the few highlights was trading guitar lines with Harrison on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” the Beatles-era centerpiece that remained a live staple.

The Dark Horse tour itself was widely criticized for its loose structure and minimal Beatles material, and it ended up marking Harrison’s retreat from live performance for nearly two decades. Ford, however, moved on without difficulty, later working with Steely Dan — although his guitar solo for “Peg” didn't make the cut.

Elsewhere, Ford has credited another guitarist with sparking his lifelong relationship with the Fender Telecaster, and has described his stint with Kiss as one of the strangest gigs of his career. Harrison’s former bandmate Jeff Lynne has since reflected on how the Traveling Wilburys helped redefine Harrison’s post-Beatles identity.

Pattie Boyd got a reminder of her place in rock history this week. The former wife of both George Harrison and Eric Clapton revealed on Instagram that she attended a recent intimate concert by Clapton and heard him perform two songs famously written about her: “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight.”

Perhaps no woman has inspired as many classic rock songs as Boyd. The former model and actress was the muse behind Harrison’s “I Need You,” “For You Blue” and “Something,” as well as Clapton’s “Bell Bottom Blues,” in addition to “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight.”

Clapton fell for her while she was married to his friend Harrison and wrote both “Bell Bottom Blues” and “Layla” out of his unrequited love for her. She and Harrison divorced in 1977, and she married Clapton in 1979, but their marriage was over by 1989.

Clearly, time has healed wounds. As Boyd revealed in an Instagram post this week, she took in one of Clapton’s two concerts at G Live in Guildford on Monday, April 20, held as warm-up shows for his 2026 tour.

“Fabulous to see Eric in the relatively intimate G-Live venue in Guildford on Monday evening,” she wrote on Instagram. “Great to hear ‘Old Love,’ ‘Layla’ and ‘Wonderful Tonight’ (amongst others) live again.”

Boyd entered rock history in 1964 when she was cast as a schoolgirl in the Beatles’ debut film, A Hard Day’s Night. She and Harrison began dating as the cameras rolled and were married in 1966.

By then Harrison and Clapton were two years into a friendship that began in December 1964, when the Yardbirds — with whom Clapton was then performing — opened for the Beatles’ Christmas show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. The two men bonded over their shared love of guitar, leading to a close friendship that included Clapton playing on the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” in 1968.

By 1970, however, Harrison and Boyd’s marriage was strained, and Clapton had become infatuated with her, much to Harrison’s displeasure. Boyd later recounted how the two eventually fought a guitar duel over her, noting that Clapton emerged as the victor.

“George handed him a guitar and an amp — as an 18th-century gentleman might have handed his rival a sword — and for two hours, without a word, they dueled,” Boyd recalled in a 2007 interview. “At the end, nothing was said, but the general feeling was that Eric had won.

“Even when he was drunk, his guitar playing was unbeatable.”

Clearly, Clapton — or at least his guitar playing — still has a hold on her.

Despite their love for Boyd, Clapton and Harrison remained friends throughout it all. Harrison even attended Clapton and Boyd’s wedding reception on May 19, 1979, in England, some two months after they were wed in Tucson, Arizona, on March 27, 1979, and often referred to himself as their “husband-in-law.”

The romantic triangle produced more than a handful of timeless songs. Clapton and Harrison also shared an acoustic guitar — a rare 1913 Gibson Style O acoustic archtop dubbed “Pattie.” The instrument was used to write songs that include Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” and Clapton’s “Let It Rain,” as well as “Badge,” the song Harrison and Clapton co-wrote that appeared on Goodbye, Cream’s 1969 farewell album.

The guitar is currently for sale through Heritage Auctions after it failed to sell when previously listed on Reverb. It will be part of Heritage’s May 8 Vintage Guitars & Musical Instruments Auction.

George Harrison didn’t need the Beatles to prove himself. But according to his closest collaborators, he still needed a band.

In the aftermath of the group’s breakup, Harrison appeared to adapt to solo life more naturally than any of his former bandmates. He was the first to release a solo album, 1968’s Wonderwall Music, and when the group finally dissolved, he surged creatively. His 1970 triple album, All Things Must Pass, was both a commercial triumph and a personal vindication, proving that the guitarist long overshadowed by Lennon and McCartney had a world-class voice of his own.

Yet even at the height of that success, Harrison never fully embraced being a solo artist.

Instead, fate — and friendship — would pull him back into a band setting, alongside Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne in the Traveling Wilburys.

Speaking to Uncut in 2007, Harrison’s widow Olivia said the supergroup restored something he’d been missing since the Beatles’ collapse.

“George had those intense moments in his career when it was absolute bedlam,” she said (via Guitar.com), referring to periods including his turbulent final years in the Beatles and his personal upheaval involving Eric Clapton. “So there were times when he craved solitude, but he also loved being with friends.”

Lynne saw that conflict firsthand while producing Harrison’s 1987 comeback album, Cloud Nine.

“We were three-quarters of the way through Cloud Nine, and every night, as we were relaxing with a few drinks after mixing a big epic or whatever, George and I had the same conversation,” Lynne recalled. “‘We could have a group, you know?’ ‘Yeah, we could.’

“He didn’t like the idea of being a solo guy — that’s what he told me. He was never comfortable with it. He wanted a group, and, of course, George could do anything he wanted.”

Harrison’s explosive burst of creativity in 1970 suddenly makes more sense in that light. All Things Must Pass wasn’t just artistic release — it was backlog, as years of suppressed songs were finally given oxygen. But as the decades passed, his output slowed. He released six albums in the 1970s, but only three in the 1980s. Cloud Nine was his first in five years.

The Traveling Wilburys began almost accidentally, when Harrison needed a B-side for a single. What followed was something far bigger.

“George had the track done for a week or so,” Lynne said. “Then he came over again, and he was really excited. He said, ‘Let’s do nine more of these and have a band!’

“Right after that, George, Jeff and I drove down to Anaheim, where Roy was playing, to ask him to be in the band. After the set, we went backstage.

“We threw everybody out of the dressing room, and we told him, ‘We’ve got this band, and we want you to be in it.’ He said that he’d do it, and we drove home really happy, going, ‘Roy Orbison’s in our band!’”

The project quickly became a true collective. Petty even stepped aside during one session, inviting his Heartbreakers bandmate Mike Campbell to play slide guitar before insisting Harrison take over instead, effectively surrendering his own spot for the good of the song.

Operating under pseudonyms — Harrison was first Nelson, then Spike Wilbury — the group released two hit albums and, perhaps most significantly, coaxed Harrison back onto the stage for his first tour since his troubled 1974 Dark Horse Tour.

Harrison had proved he could survive and thrive without the Beatles. But the Wilburys proved something else: Even a Beatle didn’t want to be alone.

Roger McGuinn crafted the quintessential sound of folk rock in 1965 with a Rickenbacker 12-string in hand. The Byrds’ take on Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” became a rallying cry for guitarists caught between the fading days of folk and the British Invasion.

Not long after its release on April 12, 1965 — in the same month Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home, his first album to incorporate electric guitar — folk-rock became a force that would bring success to acts like Simon and Garfunkel and Buffalo Springfield.

But no artist defined it quite like McGuinn, with his chiming lines played on a Rickenbacker 360/12 and, later, his signature Rickenbacker 370/12RM. More than a decade later, his sound and style would be kept alive in the hands of new players like R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson, as well as Tom Petty gunslinger Mike Campbell and Petty himself, whose laconic drawl recalled McGuinn’s vocal style.

“The first time I heard Tom was at my manager's house in L.A.,” McGuinn told us. “He had the first Tom Petty album, or a rough of it, and said, ‘Sit down, I have something I want to play for you.’ After hearing it, I said, ‘When did I do that one?’ I was half kidding, because I knew it wasn't me.

“I thought the record was great, so we called Tom's manager and had him come over.”

McGuinn subsequently covered Petty’s “American Girl” on his 1977 album, Thunderbyrd. “After that, we became friends and toured together. He opened up for my act, and then we sang a duet at the Bottom Line and a couple of other places.”

McGuinn weighed in on other guitarists he’s known in his travels from Chicago to New York City to Los Angeles, in a career that’s spanned 60 years and counting.

Mike Bloomfield

“I went to the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago when Mike Bloomfield was there. I'd been in the school for about a year before he got there. I was one of the first people to enroll and had progressed up to the advanced class. One day Mike poked me and said, ‘I’m gonna get better than you.’

“Then he emulated a bend, saying, ‘You know that sound, that mmmuimmmmm? How do you get that?’

“So I showed him how to do that — I taught Mike Bloomfield how to bend a string.”

Bob Dylan

“He didn't play electric until after we had. ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ came out in the spring of ’65. I met him in the Village in New York. I saw him play hootenannies at Gerde’s Folk City a few times. I said hi to him once. That was about it.

“I think he liked [the Byrds’ version of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’] He said, ‘That‘s cool.’ He came over to the World Pacific studio in L.A., where we were rehearsing. After we played ‘All I Really Want to Do,’ he asked, ‘What was that?’ We changed it so radically that he didn’t recognize it!”

George Harrison

“The management people tried to dress us up like the early Beatles, with suits with velvet collars, but they got ripped off after about two weeks. We were glad to see them go.

“When we met the Beatles, they asked us, ‘How’d you guys get to wear jeans? We had to wear stupid suits.’ We told them about the suits, and they said, ‘Boy, we wish somebody had ripped our suits off.’

“Jim Dickson [the Byrds’ first manager and producer] was working at World Pacific, which was Ravi Shankar’s label. [David] Crosby hung around there all the time, and he'd heard Ravi in the studio. He turned us on to it, and we were all playing it on the 12-string.

“Once we became friends with the Beatles, they would send a limo to bring us to their house in the L.A. hills. One day we all took acid. We were sitting around on the bathroom floor playing guitars, and Crosby started doing all this Indian stuff on his 12-string. George was really interested in it. He‘d never heard it before. Then [the Beatles] went back and really got quite into it. Went wild with the stuff.

“We just jammed at the house. I remember going through early influences with him, and somehow we got on the subject of the very first thing we learned on the guitar. So I played a lead break from Gene Vincent’s ‘Woman Love’ or something like that, and he said, ‘That’s exactly what I learned first!’

“Neither of us learned chords right away; we learned how to pick out lead stuff and got into chords later. It was because we didn’t have any chord books.”

Gram Parsons

“I guess I was kind of tired by then [when Gram Parsons and Clarence White joined the Byrds]. [laughs] Gram was a strong musical force. I just let him go and went along with it because it was fun. I was having a good time with the country thing.

“We went to Nudie’s, the rodeo tailor, and got some country clothes and cowboy hats, and I got a Cadillac. I started listening to country radio and talking with a southern accent [laughs]. It was like Halloween for a long, extended period.

“Sweetheart of the Rodeo was a one-time adventure. I didn’t intend to permanently get into country music. After the album was finished, Chris [Hillman] and Gram wanted to do another country record, and I said, ‘No, no! Wait a minute. That’s enough.’

“They were so upset about it that they started the Flying Burrito Brothers. I really liked the Flying Burrito Brothers, but it wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in. I wanted to play rock and roll.”

Carl Perkins was a rockabilly pioneer who sang with Elvis Presley, hung out and toured with Johnny Cash and wrote classic rock and roll tunes like “Blue Suede Shoes,” the first recording to top the pop, country and R&B charts simultaneously.

The country-inflected guitar licks he coaxed from his 1953 Les Paul Goldtop inspired George Harrison’s early electric leads and solos with the Beatles. The group’s admiration ran deep: They covered at least seven Perkins songs onstage and in the studio, including “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” “Matchbox” and “Honey Don’t.” As Paul McCartney declared, “If there were no Carl Perkins, there would be no Beatles.”

But in less time than it takes a metal fan blade to spin, Perkins nearly lost his career. And his life.

It happened one night in 1962 at the end of a live set in Tennessee as he stepped forward to take a bow.

“We were playing on a trailer in a courthouse yard. Somebody put a big window fan on the side. It had no frame on it. I was taking the guitar off, taking a bow, when I stuck my hand in there,” he told Musician magazine’s Bill Flanagan.

“Wiped the whole hand out. The end of this thumb was off. The fingers were just danglin’, hangin’ off.”

The nearest hospital was 60 miles away. Perkins wrapped his mangled right hand in a towel and climbed into the back of a ’62 Buick for the impossibly long ride. The fan blade had severed the main arteries of his picking hand, and blood pulsed out with every heartbeat.

He recalled how “blood filled the floorboards and was running out the back doors.”

As his life literally drained away, Perkins felt himself crossing over. The car seat fell away beneath him and he saw a gray tunnel, beyond which shone a sky the colors of blue and orchid.

“I went through that passing from life,” he said. “I was just floatin’ like a feather through those beautiful colors.”

He held on long enough to reach the hospital. The surgeon on duty recommended amputating the damaged fingers, saying they would only get in Perkins’ way — if he survived. His wife begged the doctor to save them, and he reluctantly agreed to try.

Perkins woke the next afternoon in a hospital bed, his hand in a cast and his wife and the surgeon at his side. Against the odds, his hand had been saved.

“I was happy to have a thumb left — anything!” he said. “I tuned my guitar in open E, laid it across my lap and picked with the end of my thumb with that big cast on. I was gonna play!”

Over time, Perkins regained the use of his thumb and first two fingers. He never recovered full use of his pinkie, which had been essential to his intricate Chet Atkins–inspired picking style. It didn’t matter. He was grateful simply to play again.

“People have told me, ‘Carl, you play better than you ever did.’”

Over the next 36 years, until his death in 1998, he carried on playing bars, cutting dozens of albums and sharing stages with artists who revered him, including Eric Clapton, John Fogerty, Tom Petty, Joe Walsh and his old admirers Harrison, McCartney and Ringo Starr. He appreciated that his music had the power to inspire other guitarists to excel at their craft.

“Rockabilly’s simple music, but it’s not that easy to play,” he told Musician. “Rockabilly music gets under the skin, gets inside the ear and stays. You are part of that song. If it’s real, it’ll move you some way or another. If you ain’t tappin’ your foot, you’re missin’ the boat. Might as well go on to the next club.”

How Eric Clapton came to perform on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is one of the most retold stories in Beatles lore. Frustrated by his bandmates’ indifference to the song, George Harrison invited his close friend Clapton into the studio, partly for moral support and partly to ensure the Beatles took the session seriously.

But as Harrison revealed in a 1987 Guitar Player interview, that historic collaboration quickly became reciprocal. Just weeks after the September 6, 1968, Beatles session, Clapton asked Harrison to return the favor on what would become Cream’s final studio album.

Since forming in 1966, Cream had risen to the summit of hard rock, revered for their blues-rooted psychedelia and the virtuosity of its members. Yet internal tensions — particularly between bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker — had eroded the group’s stability. By May 1968, while touring the United States, the band decided to break up. Recordings from that tour, including their definitive live version of “Crossroads,” appeared later that year on Wheels of Fire.

Running largely on fumes, Cream embarked on a brief farewell tour from October 4 to November 4, before closing the book with two final concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall on November 25 and 26. In the weeks between the tour and those last performances, the band convened at Wally Heider Studios in Los Angeles to record three new songs. The concept was simple: each member would contribute one original tune, with the three studio tracks supplemented by live recordings to complete the album.

Clapton, however, was stuck. Restless with Cream’s extended solos and psychedelic excess, he was searching for a new musical direction and struggling to find a song that fit. Earlier that year, both he and Harrison had fallen under the spell of the Band’s earthy, understated approach.

They were particularly drawn to guitarist Robbie Robertson, whose work with the Hawks — Bob Dylan’s backing band during his controversial 1965 electric tour — and later on Music from Big Pink offered a blueprint for something more grounded.

Clapton had managed to get hold of rough mixes from Dylan and the Band’s Woodstock sessions and found them revelatory.

“I got the tapes of Music from Big Pink and I thought, well, this is what I want to play — not extended solos and maestro bullshit, but just good funky songs,” he said in Conversations with Eric Clapton.

To help him make that pivot, Clapton turned to Harrison, who happened to be in Los Angeles producing Jackie Lomax’s debut album, Is This What You Want?

“He called me up and said, ‘Look, we’re doing this last album, and we’ve each got to have our song by Monday,’” Harrison recalled to Guitar Player editor-at-large Dan Forte

“I finished the verses off, and he had the middle bit already, and I think I wrote most of the words to the whole song—although he was there, and we bounced off of each other.”

Harrison later added that Ringo Starr contributed a single, memorable line. “Ringo walked in drunk and gave us that line about the swans living in the park,” Harrison said in another interview. Since Starr wasn’t in Los Angeles at the time, it’s likely his contribution came during overdubs recorded a month later at IBC Studios in London.

The initial session was stripped-down and collaborative. Harrison played rhythm guitar, producer Felix Pappalardi handled piano, and Bruce and Baker supplied the rhythm section. Clapton performed the lead electric guitar parts using his the cherry red Gibson ES-335 semihollow he purchased in 1964, playing it through a rotary speaker cabinet. Some accounts claim he used a Fender Vibratone. Although Harrison said it was a Leslie, he may have been using the name generically.

“We played the song right up to the bridge,” he recalled, “at which point Eric came in on the guitar with the Leslie. And then he overdubbed the solo later.”

The song’s title, meanwhile, emerged from a now-legendary misunderstanding.

“The story’s getting a bit tired now,” Harrison admitted, “but I was writing the words down, and when we came to the middle bit I wrote ‘Bridge.’ And from where he was sitting, opposite me, he looked and said, ‘What’s that — ‘Badge’?’ So he called it ‘Badge’ because it made him laugh.”

In retrospect, Harrison believed Clapton reached out for the same reason he had invited him into the Beatles’ orbit weeks earlier.

“I wanted Eric on ‘My Guitar Gently Weeps’ for a bit of moral support and to make the others behave,” Harrison said, “and I think it was the same reason he asked me to play on that session with them.”

For contractual reasons, Harrison was credited on Goodbye under the pseudonym L’Angelo Misterioso, though his involvement quickly became known in the music press. Early U.K. pressings of the album credited both Clapton and Harrison as co-writers, while the original U.S. release listed Clapton alone.

Although its opaque lyrics have more in common with the stream-of-consciousness style found on psychedelic tunes of the time, “Badge” is musically to the point, built around a concise structure that contrasts sharply with its swirling, otherworldly guitar solo. Clapton would revisit that same dynamic the following year with “Presence of the Lord,” his lone songwriting contribution to his next band, Blind Faith, and a clear signal that he was leaving Cream’s excesses behind.

Working with George Harrison led Peter Frampton to fall in love with an effect he would go on to popularize so completely that he ultimately eclipsed one of its earliest champions.

From an early age, a life in music seemed inevitable for the English-born guitarist. By 12, Frampton was already playing in a band — the Little Ravens — alongside a three-years-older David Bowie. Two years later, he joined the Preachers (later Moon Train), a group managed by Bill Wyman, then bass guitarist for the Rolling Stones.

By 18, Frampton was fronting Humble Pie with Steve Marriott, co-writing a run of hits before leaving the band in 1970. That departure marked a shift away from traditional band life and toward session work — a move that soon placed him at the center of one of the most important albums of the post-Beatles era.

“In 1970, when I left Humble Pie, I was doing sessions for lots of different people,” Frampton told the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “And one of the best sessions I ever did was for George Harrison, who asked me to play on All Things Must Pass.”

It was during those sessions that Frampton witnessed a moment that would quietly reshape his career.

“On the second or third day, George told me he had invited Pete Drake, the Nashville pedal steel player who played on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album,” Frampton recalled.

Drake’s reputation preceded him. By the late ’50s, he was a cornerstone of the Nashville A-Team, the East Coast counterpart to Los Angeles’ Wrecking Crew, and his pedal steel appeared on countless hit records. He was also known for a curious piece of sonic wizardry: a “talking” steel guitar created using a homemade talk box — an effect he was eager to demonstrate to Harrison and Frampton.

“In comes Pete that day, and he’s setting up his pedal steel,” Frampton said. “He goes, ‘Do you want to hear something a little different?’ George and I are sitting there watching him, and he gets this gadget out. Then he puts a tube onto it and puts the other end in his mouth.

“I had this funny feeling I knew what this was going to be.”

As Drake launched into the demonstration, Frampton was both astonished and entertained.

“Me and George are laughing, because what do you do?” he said. “It’s the most incredible sound. And it’s funny. It’s humorous, which is what I like about it.”

The talk box itself dated back decades. Jazz guitarist Alvino Rey had pioneered the effect in 1939 using a microphone designed for military pilot communications. But Drake brought it to a wider audience in 1964 with “Forever,” and Frampton immediately saw its potential.

“I said to him, ‘Where did you get that? Because I’d really like to get one,’” Frampton recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, I made this one myself.’”

It would take a few more years before Frampton got his own. In 1974, he received a talk box from Bob Heil, the sound-system innovator behind touring rigs for the Who and the Grateful Dead. Heil’s version followed earlier commercial attempts — most notably the Bag, released by Kustom in 1969 — but it proved especially roadworthy. Around the same time, Joe Walsh used a talk box on his 1973 hit “Rocky Mountain Way,” while Rick Derringer employed it on “Teenage Love Affair,” recorded with Walsh and Barnstorm.

With Heil’s talk box now on his pedalboard, Frampton took the electric guitar effect further than anyone before him. On Frampton Comes Alive! — one of the best-selling and most celebrated live albums in rock history — the talk box became a signature voice, featured prominently on “Show Me the Way” and “Do You Feel Like We Do.” Though later embraced by players like Slash and Richie Sambora, the sound became inseparable from Frampton himself.

Ironically, that success came at a cost. Frampton admitted last year that the album’s runaway impact ushered in “a very difficult period” as work began on its follow-up—proof that even a career-defining moment can cast a long shadow.

Years after his impressive post-Beatles output, George Harrison found success one more time with the Traveling Wilburys. Featuring a cast that included Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne, the supergroup made a splash in 1988 with their debut single, “Handle With Care.”

But as Harrison has revealed, the band took flight spontaneously and out of necessity.

In 1987, the former Beatle was putting the touches on his eleventh studio album, Cloud Nine, his first record since 1982's Gone Troppo. Following that record, the guitarist had taken a step back from the music industry, swapping songs for comedy, as he invested in the comedy troupe Monty Python, a band of creatives who he felt shared parallels with the Beatles.

Given Harrison’s years out of the spotlight, Cloud Nine was a greatly anticipated record from a musician who seemed to thrive outside of the Beatles. But he had one more commitment to fulfill.

“In Europe, they make 12-inch singles, and they usually like them to have an extra song,” Harrison explained to Countdown in 1990. “So they asked me for an extra song, but I didn't have one already recorded.

“The easiest thing to do was go into the studio the next day, write a song quickly, record it, mix it and give it to them.”

His plan quickly became more interesting once he presented it to Lynne.

“That night, I had dinner with Jeff Lynne, who was having dinner with Roy Orbison,” Harrison explains in the video. “And I said, ‘Well, tomorrow I'm going to find a studio and go in someplace, make a tune, and make this record.’ So I said to Jeff, ‘Do you want to come and help?’”

Lynne, who made his name with Electric Light Orchestra’s rock-meets-classical fusion in the mid to late ’70s, was more than happy to get involved.

“So Roy Orbison said, ‘Oh, well, if you do something, call me. I'd like to come along and watch,’” Harrison continued.

All that remained was to find a vacant studio and an engineer.

“Then I thought, Well, Bob Dylan has a little studio in his garage,” Harrison recalled. ”So I called him and said, ‘Do you mind if we come along tomorrow?’”

Like Lynne, Dylan was more than happy to participate. To round things off, the group-to-be’s final member was recruited before the day was done.

“I had to go to Tom Petty’s house to pick up my guitar, which was around his house,” Harrison says. “He said, ‘Oh, good. I'll come. I was wondering what I was going to do tomorrow.”

“The next morning, I started to write a song, and I thought, ‘If Roy Orbison is going to come, it's silly to have him sitting there,. He's a better singer than everybody,’” Harrison adds. “So I wrote a part for Roy to sing, and Jeff thought that was a bit cheeky!”

The half-finished song was completed in the studio, with Lynne taking the lead to make it complete.

As for the title — “Handle With Care” — it came from the words written on a box in Dylan’s garage

It was only when the song was turned over to Harrison’s label, Dark Horse, that it was deemed too good to be a mere B-side. The label had an idea for the hastily assembled group to make an entire album, figuring with so many great songwriters on hand, they could churn something out quickly.

“If we did that one song in one day, all we need is nine days to make an album,” Harrison explains.

As the band grew into the Traveling Wilburys, it also expanded its personnel. Yet, when Petty’s right-hand guitarist Mike Campbell was drafted in to track an electric guitar solo for the song, he requested Harrison cut his own take instead.

Campbell’s solo has never seen the light of day, but thanks to Harrison’s slide guitar playing and the mastery of all involved, “Handle with Care” was an instant success — and the Wilburys went down in history as the luckiest supergroup of all time.

In June 1965, the Byrds released their heretical version of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." Although the song shocked folk purists who had yet to hear Dylan strum electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival, it quickly shot to number one on the Billboard Top 40, and folk-rock was officially born. The vocals and lyrics were captivating, but it was Roger McGuinn's shimmering Rickenbacker electric 12-string that mesmerized listeners.

So strong was its spell that when later guitarists like R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, Tom Petty or Mike Campbell picked up an electric 12, they referenced McGuinn's ringing riffs. Sixty years after he cut those trademark tones, McGuinn remains the undisputed king of jangle.

“I still didn't know what an electric 12-string was, but when the Beatles released ‘A Hard Day's Night,’ I had to find out how they were getting that sound,” McGuinn says. “So we made a reconnaissance run to a movie theater that was showing A Hard Day's Night and took notes.

“Ringo had Ludwig drums and John had that little Rickenbacker 325. George played a Gretsch most of the time, but he also had a Rickenbacker 360, which looked like a six-string, until he turned sideways and you could see six extra tuning pegs emerging from behind the headstock, like a classical guitar. Once I realized what it was, I traded in my Gibson acoustic 12 and bought a Rickenbacker 360/12.

"I practiced eight hours a day on that Rick,” he continues. “I really worked it. In those days, acoustic 12s had wide necks and thick strings that were spaced pretty far apart, so they were hard to play. But the Rick's slim neck and low action let me explore jazz and blues scales up and down the fretboard, and incorporate more hammer-ons and pull-offs into my solos.

“I also translated some of my banjo picking techniques to the 12-string. By combining a flatpick with metal fingerpicks on my middle and ring fingers, I discovered I could instantly switch from fast single-note runs to banjo rolls and get the best of both worlds."

After wrangling a one-single deal with Columbia, the Byrds chose "Mr. Tambourine Man,” an outtake from a recent Dylan session, as their ticket to stardom. But producer Terry Melcher deemed the group too green to lay down the groove, and only McGuinn, the Byrds' sole studio veteran, was permitted to play. Accompaniment was provided by the Wrecking Crew, L.A.’s premier session group that tracked hits for the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, Neil Diamond, Elvis Presley, Simon & Garfunkel and many others.

"I had five years of session work behind me," McGuinn elaborates, "so the record company trusted me. It was a real honor to play with the Wrecking Crew. They were so cool they drove around in Cadillacs and wore black leather jackets like a little motorcycle gang.

“Larry Knechtel played that great bass part. He tuned his lowest string down to D, so he could start the ascending slide from an open string. I remember hearing the playback for the first time. We were in Columbia's Studio A — a huge room — sitting on the floor, listening to six-foot speaker cabinets. I went, ‘Whoa, did we do that?’ It was so creamy and rich, and, with Larry’s bass line, I knew we had something.

“We recorded 'Mr. Tambourine Man in January, but it was six months before the single came out, and that was frustrating. I almost left the Byrds for another band because it didn't seem like the record would ever get released."

While tracking with the Wrecking Crew, McGuinn discovered a key ingredient of his signature sound.

"The Rick by itself is kind of thuddy," he details. "It doesn't ring. But if you add a compressor, you get that long sustain. To be honest, I found this by accident. The engineer, Ray Gerhardt, would run compressors on everything to protect his precious equipment from loud rock and roll.”

McGuinn laughs at the memory. “He compressed the heck out of my 12-string, and it sounded so great we decided to use two tube compressors [likely Teletronix LA-2As] in series, and then go directly into the board. That's how I got my jingle-jangle tone. It's really squashed down, but it jumps out from the radio.

“With compression, I found I could hold a note for three or four seconds, and sound more like a wind instrument. Later, this led me to emulate John Coltrane's saxophone on 'Eight Miles High.’ Without compression, I couldn't have sustained the riff's first note."

The arrangement of the Rickenbacker 360/12's octave strings has a profound effect on McGuinn's chimey timbres.

"The pairs are reversed," he explains, "compared to typical 12-string guitars. After experimenting with the traditional setup, [former Rickenbacker head] F.C. Hall decided that having the high octave strings come after the low strings made for a bigger sound. Tom Petty had the high strings first on his 360/12, and it doesn't sound the same as my guitar. I prefer the stock low-high configuration."

The strings themselves are also significant, McGuinn asserts: "I use Pyramid strings, which are handmade in Germany with great attention to detail. They have a similar tonal quality as Rickenbacker strings from '64 and '65, which were also made in Germany, and were crucial to the Beatles' 12-string sound as well as the sound we were getting early on.

“Gradually, Rickenbacker strings changed in texture. They became a little more round wound — not quite as flat, not quite as smooth, and not quite as lustrous. Not to put down other strings, but Pyramid 12-string sets really sound better. They're also a little heavier, so you have to adjust your setup a bit. But their gauge works well for me, because for the last 15 or 20 years, I've been tuning down a half-step. While that's mostly for my voice, detuning has advantages for the Rick: It makes the action a little lower, puts less stress on the neck and adds more bottom."

Fans of ringing Rics will recall that McGuinn covered the Beatles' "If I Needed Someone" on his 2004 album, Limited Edition. The song was written and sung by Harrison, who played a 12-string on the track.

“George was a good friend," McGuinn says, "and when he passed away, I wanted to pay him a musical tribute. To tackle a Beatles song is daunting, but I feel connected to 'If I Needed Someone.’ After George wrote the song, he gave a recording of it to Derek Taylor, the Beatles' former press officer who was then the Byrds' publicist. Derek came over to my house with the tape and said, 'George wants you to know he wrote this song based on your lick in "The Bells of Rhymney."" So we had some cross pollination."

Music producer Don Was has worked with the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and WIllie Nelson, to name just a few, so he knows a thing or two about guitarists. Now he has singled out John Mayer as they player he believes is the modern-day equivalent of the Beatles' George Harrison.

The producer first linked up with Mayer for his 2012 album, Born and Raised. He worked on its followup, Paradise Valley a year later, and returned for Sob Rock in 2021. Throughout those experiences, Was says, one thing consistently struck him.

“The thing that separates John from everybody else that I've worked with, in terms of the process we go through, is that I've never seen anyone with that many ideas for arrangements,” he says in a new interview with the Everything Mayer Podcast.

“He's never short of ideas. We know we have to do something in a section, and he'll find 10 different, really elegant ways of making that section work. My job is never to tell him what to play; it's to help him sort through the wealth of information that he's laid down to choose the most effective.”

However, while Mayer’s well of ideas seems never to run dry, it’s another aspect of his musicianship that leads to the Harrison comparisons.

“His guitar tones are unparalleled,” he goes on. “They're not just evocative, cool sounds, but they're thick, and they're warm, and they jump out of speakers. I'm not sure how he does it.

“Yes, he's got the best gear you can have, but I've played his guitars, and I don't sound like him,” he adds, quick to dispel any cynical comebacks. “I think people might take that for granted.

“George Harrison was good at stuff like that, getting distinctive sounds that you only hear once on a certain song. That's a strength of John’s. It’s the same thing.”

Harrison provided a guitar solo on the title track of Bob Dylan’s Under the Red Sky in 1990, which Was produced. In that moment, he was able to see the Liverpudlian conjure magic in real time, which is why he says the parallels are so stark. And they might even see Mayer go one better than a man who could extract some rather one-of-a-kind sounds out of his collection of guitars and amplifiers.

“I was loath to say John's better than George Harrison,” Was says. “It ain't gonna sit well with people, but he might be better than George Harrison.”

Indeed, Was’s time in the studio with Dylan and Harrison was an eye-opening experience, with Dylan sitting in the producer’s chair as the session got underway.

“He didn't play the song for George, he didn't tell him what key it was in, and George hadn't tuned his guitar; he just fast-forwarded to the part where the solo would be,” he once told Kenny Aronoff. “George is scrambling to play something, and all things considered, it was pretty decent. But it was out of tune.

“Bob said, ‘Okay, that's great, man,’ and George was flabbergasted. So George turns to me and says, ‘What do you think, Don?’ and Bob Dylan goes, ‘Yeah, what do you think?’

“Time slowed down,” he continues. “My mind flashed to the time I was going to sell my career so I could go to the Concert for Bangladesh. And I was terrified.

“Then a voice went off in my head: ‘He's not paying you to be a fan.’ So I said, ‘It's good, George, but let's tune up and see if you can beat it.’”

Harrison, in return, thanked the producer. Right there, he learned “to tell the truth, but don't be a dick about it,” — something that would help when he teamed up with the Stones for Voodoo Lounge four years later.

Meanwhile, Mayer's guitar tone wizardry was pushed to new limits as he figured out an ingenious solution to the strict noise rules of the Las Vegas Sphere.

Two legendary albums recorded in the same year using the same musicians, but released by completely different artists... Such an abundance of musical riches could have happened only in the early 1970s, before rock became corporate and was still in a state of communal bliss.

We are talking, of course, about George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and Derek and the Dominos’ Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs. The two albums were created simultaneously, with the latter’s recording sessions taking place while Harrison was in the final stages of completing his first post-Beatles’ solo work.

It’s well known that Derek and the Dominos grew out of Harrison's backing band for All Things Must Pass. The Dominos — Eric Clapton, Bobby Whitlock, Carl Radle and Jim Gordon — were among the many musicians who played on Harrison’s triple-LP magnum opus. Having just completed work on Clapton’s self-titled solo album that March, they joined the former Beatle in May to begin work on what turned out to be a three-album set, comprising two albums of new songs and a bonus disc of studio jams, dubbed Apple Jam.

On August 23, as work continued on Harrison’s album, Clapton, Whitlock, Radle and Gordon flew to Miami to begin work on their own debut, with Tom Dowd producing. But as Whitlock explained in an interview for the 40th anniversary edition of Layla, they had next to nothing to record.

“We didn’t have enough songs for one album, let alone a double,” Whitlock recalled.

He and Clapton had written some songs together the previous spring, before they worked on Harrison’s album. As Whitlock recalled, they had three originals: “I Looked Away,” “Anyway” and “Tell the Truth.”

But Whitlock had an idea that he managed to sell to Clapton. Throughout the recording of All Things Must Pass, producer Phil Spector kept the tape running. As a result, he captured many of the extended jams that took place between songs and during rehearsals. A selection of those were presented — including two from a June 18 session that marked the official formation Derek and the Dominos — on the Apple Jam bonus disc.

“‘Keep the tape running!’ — that’s the one thing we did get from Phil Spector,” Whitlock said, noting that was how the producer “got all those jams on All Things Must Pass.

“Eric and I discussed it and decided to also keep the tape running on our sessions, no matter what happened and who came in. That’s how we wound up with all those jams and alternate masters and stuff,” which were included in subsequent reissues.

Once Duane Allman joined the band’s sessions, the jams really came to life, with Clapton and Allman playing off each other like a pair of seasoned blues musicians.

“Eric and Duane just went off like a firecracker,” the late Butch Trucks, drummer for the Allman Brothers Band, recalled. “You could tell it was like long-lost brothers had found each other.”

Whitlock saw that bond up close, both in the studio and away.

“They were like two old, sage Black blues guys talking it over with a bottle of whisky, and then playing the music, right there,” he said of an impromptu gathering with Allman that took place in Clapton’s hotel room following one of their sessions. “It was the one time I felt truly privileged to be there, at the right time, the right place, and in the right frame of mind.”

In an era when listeners craved hearing guitarists rip it up together and play off one another, albums like Layla and Apple Jam were satisfying audio documents of those raw, unrehearsed moments where magic happens when the tape is rolling.

Eric Clapton’s guitar solo on the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" is among the most noteworthy moments in the band’s history. It marked the first time an outside guitarist contributed to the group's recordings.

Classical musicians had played on their tracks over the years, and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, as well as Marianne Faithfull, sang on their 1966 hit "Yellow Submarine." But Clapton's solo on the George Harrison composition was a game changer.

Even Clapton was surprised when Harrison made the invitation. "I can't do that," he said. "Nobody ever plays on the Beatles' records."

Remarkably, many of those involved in the recording have no recollection of the session. That includes the man behind the recording console that day in Abbey Road Studio Two: engineer Ken Scott.

“I remember absolutely nothing about it,” he says in conversation with Rick Beato [via Guitar World]. “When I was writing my book [Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust], I asked the question, ‘What was it like, Eric playing on that? How did they react?’ and I had to answer, ‘I can’t remember.’”

He even underwent hypnotherapy, which uses relaxation and focus to access the mind's subconscious, to try to get his memories back.

He was surprised to find he's not alone.

“I went to John Smith, who was my assistant engineer, [who said], ‘I don’t remember anything about it.’

"I went to Chris Thomas, George Martin’s assistant, who was producing at that point because George was on holiday, and [he said], ‘I don’t remember anything about it.’

“The one thing I vaguely remember is Eric saying that the only way he’d play on it is if he sounded like the Beatles, as opposed to Eric Clapton.”

The guitar part was later treated to ADT — Artificial Double-Tracking — to pull its sound further away from the guitarist’s usual realm. The device — which used a tape delay with a variable-speed oscillator to create a slightly mismatched copy of a recorded track — had been dreamed up by the engineer Ken Townsend at the request of John Lennon, who was looking for a way of avoiding double-tracking his vocals.

When applied rather heavily to Clapton’s electric guitar part — which he played on Harrison’s “Lucy” Les Paul — it gave his solo its rather peculiar, wobbling sound.

There is at least one member of the Abbey Road crew who recalled Clapton's session. The late engineer Brian Gibson spoke about the recording with Beatles biographer Mark Lewisohn for his book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions.

His memory was quite clear, and it may explain why the session passed without making much of an impression on those involved.

"Eric behaved just like any session musician," Gibson said. "Very quiet. Just got on and played. That was it... There were no theatrics involved."

"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" would kick off a fruitful creative period for Harrison, who had begun collaborating with Clapton to escape the creativity-stifling atmosphere in which he found himself in the Beatles. Their partnership spawned Cream’s "Badge" as well as "Here Comes the Sun," another Harrison hit, from 1969's Abbey Road.

In related news, the 1913 Gibson acoustic the pair frequently wrote on surfaced on Reverb earlier this year with a hefty $1 million price tag. It's currently up for auction.

The Beatles’ Anthology 4 dropped on November 21, adding another volume of outtakes and rarities to the three Anthology albums released in the 1990s. Now, as the Anthology docu-series returns to screens this week — along with a revealing new Episode 9 — it’s worth remembering that the group churned out a core catalog of 213 songs between 1962 and 1970.

That’s a lot of tracks in just eight years. And, as you might imagine, the Beatles themselves weren’t fans of everything they produced.

That goes double for John Lennon. In the latter years of his career, the most critical Beatle took a particularly dim view of many songs in the group’s catalog, including his own.

His most withering condemnations were saved for the songs he stamped out in cookie-cutter form or peeled off as nonsensical filler. "It's Only Love" is an example of the former, a Help! track he called “abysmal”, while the latter includes Abbey Road's "Mean Mr. Mustard," a bit of light-hearted fluff he denounced as “a piece of garbage.”

And then there's the song Lennon called his “least favorite.” It appeared on the group's 1965 album Rubber Soul, which may seem odd, given that record's status as the group's first conceptual work, in which every song received its own well-considered musical arrangement.

Released on December 3 of that year, it was the Beatles' sixth album and the second to come out in 1965, following Help! As long-players go, it was something of a rush job, with 13 of its 14 songs written and recorded in two month's time following the Fab Four's U.S. tour. (Another two original songs — "We Can Work It Out" and "Day Tripper" — were also created for a single release during this time, such was the Beatles' remarkable creative output.)

Even so, the band took care in the studio to give the songs exactly what they required, experimenting with folkier sounds and new instruments, including George Harrison's sitar on "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" and Paul McCartney's fuzz bass on Harrison's "Think for Yourself."

As for that 14th song? It was "Wait," a leftover from the Help! sessions. It was revived and added to Rubber Soul's lineup when no one could muster the strength to write and record one more song to meet the long-player's requisite 14-track quota.

And John Lennon's least favorite song? It's the very first song recorded for Rubber Soul and the last one featured on the album: "Run for Your Life."

“I never liked ‘Run for Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off," he explained to Rolling Stone in 1970. "It was inspired from [Elvis Presley’s] ‘Baby, Let’s Play House.’"

Released in April 1955, "Baby, Let's Play House" was Presley's fourth single for Sun Records. It was written Arthur Gunter, who cut and issued his own version of it in late 1954. Lennon was particularly enamored of its line "I'd rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man." He took it for the opening phrase of "Run for Your LIfe," and drove the point home in the chorus refrain: "Catch you with another man, that's the end, little girl."

"So I wrote it around that," he told Rolling Stone, "but I didn’t think it was that important.”

Important or not, Lennon's song, and it lyrical appropriation, said a lot about his insecurities at that time in his life. He could be extremely possessive in his relationships. And as Paul McCartney explained in his memoir, Many Years From Now, Lennon was also unhappily married at the time.

“John was always on the run, running for his life," McCartney wrote. "He was married; whereas none of my songs would have 'catch you with another man.' It was never a concern of mine, at all, because I had a girlfriend and I would go with other girls....

"I wasn't as worried about that as John was. A bit of a macho song."

Regardless of Lennon's disregard for it, "Run for Your Life" had little chance of being cut. With Christmas around the corner, the rush was on to have a new Beatles disc in shops in time for the holidays.

The album's final session — a marathon that began at 4 p.m. on November 11 and ended at 7 a.m. the next morning — saw the group record two songs — McCartney's "You Won't See Me" and Lennons' "Girl" — as well as add overdubs to "Wait." There was simply no time left for anything more.

Although Lennon might have wished that "Run for Your Life." had been excised from Rubber Soul's track listing — calling it his “least favorite Beatles song” and one he “always hated” — there was one Beatle who loved it: George Harrison.

“[It was] sort of throwaway song of mine that I never thought much of, but it was always a favorite of George’s,” Lennon told author David Sheff in 1980. Most likely Harrison loved the chance it offered to play the twanging rockabilly riffs that punctuate its solo interludes, giving it an upbeat motif that stands in stark contrast to Lennon's dark threats.

In related news, John Lennon's 12-string Framus that was featured on "Help!" has been reissued following its landmark sale last year, while McCartney has explained how his left-handed playing forced himself and Lennon to become ambidextrous.

That follows the auction of a letter Lennon had written to Eric Clapton in 1971 when he made an ill-fated attempt to start a supergroup with him.

John Fogerty is an icon of 1960s rock and roll, a songwriting powerhouse with numerous hits to his name. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get starry eyed when it comes to meeting some of his peers.

As Fogerty recently explained, he had a chance to perform with Bob Dylan and George Harrison at a Taj Mahal concert in 1987. Mahal was playing at the Palomino in Los Angeles when he called each of the guitar heroes onto the stage. That night’s spontaneous grouping led Fogerty to play one of his Creedence Clearwater Revival hits — “Proud Mary” — for the first time in years.

“[Dylan] turns to me and he goes, ‘John, if you don’t play ‘Proud Mary,’ everybody’s gonna think it’s a Tina Turner song,’” Fogerty recalled.

But as the 80-year-old rocker recently revealed to Stephen Colbert, that night also brought him a compliment from Harrison. The two had met a month or two earlier at Warner Bros., the label to which they were each signed at the time. (Harrison’s Dark Horse label was a subsidiary of Warner.)

“I had gone to this club called the Palomino in Los Angeles to see Taj Mahal and I got inside, and the word was kind of spreading that George Harrison was there,” Fogerty tells Colbert. “And I found this little cloak room. He seemed to be hiding. I came in and I said, ‘Hey, George!’

“And we got to chatting — because he was, you know, he was so famous, he just couldn't go anywhere without being beseeched.

“We're talking away, and then suddenly George says, ‘The band really loved Creedence.’”

“Where are you going to go with that? The band was the Beatles, and he was talking about me and Creedence. And those words have just stuck with me.”

The Beatles‘ admiration for Fogerty was first revealed by John Lennon in his extensive 1970 interview with Rolling Stone.

“I like Creedence Clearwater,” Lennon said, “They make beautiful Clearwater music — they make good rock ‘n’ roll music.”

Fogerty’s night at the Palomino was a turning point in his career. At the time he had successfully relaunched himself as a solo artist with his 1985 album, Centerfield. He subsequently, and rather bizarrely, found himself being sued by his former label — and the owner of his back catalog — for sounding too much like himself.

As a result, he refused to play Creedence hits, like “Fortunate Son” and “Have You Ever Seen the Rain.” Dylan’s push for him to perform “Proud Mary” reminded Fogerty of the joy he got from his old tunes.

It would take many years and the repurchasing of his catalog — not to mention the reacquisition of the Fireglo Rickenbacker 325 semi-hollow electric guitar with which he’d written and recorded many of those tunes — before he would decide to make his first new album in many years: Legacy — The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years, a 20-track effort that features re-creations of his classic tracks.

The Beatles' music and career returns to the spotlight this week with the re-release of the group's 1995 Anthology project. The docu-series returns to screens over the Thanksgiving holiday with a new Episode 9 that relates the reunion of Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in the 1990s and the more recent creation of "Now & Then," the song McCartney and Starr completed from a John Lennon demo the other three former Beatles first worked on in 1995.

While Anthology will serve to remind everyone that the Fab Four were trailblazers, there was a time when the Liverpudlians were doing the idolizing. For George Harrison, in particular, no one was better than Buddy Holly.

To be clear, Holly held sway over the entire group. Lennon and founding bassist Stuart Sutcliffe took inspiration for the Beatles' name from Holly's group, the Crickets. His songwriting style would be equally inspirational to Lennon and Paul McCartney's early compositions.

But it was Harrison who, as the group's lead guitarst, felt Holly's influence most keenly in his playing.

“I think one of the greatest people for me was Buddy Holly,” he told Rock Around the World in 1974. “He was very good — exceptionally good.”

Harrison recalled trying to learn guitar with the help of a book that was far from complete. "A few months or a year later, I found, ‘Those stupid buggers have given me a manual that doesn’t show me all the notes!’ " he complained. "So then I had to start learning again.”

Holly’s influence was paramount to filling in the gaps in his knowledge.

“Buddy Holly was the first time I ever heard A to F-sharp minor,” he told the BBC in 1974. “Fantastic! He was opening up new worlds there. And then A to F, A, D, E, F and F# minor. He was sensational.”

Speaking to Guitar Player 13 years later for an interview in the magazine's November 1987 issue, Harrison showed that his passion for Holly’s music hadn’t diminished. He told contributing writer Dan Forte how he had created the emotive volume-swelling chords on the Beatles' 1965 tracks "Yes It Is," "Wait" and "I Need You": Unable to coordinate strumming the chords and raising his guitar's volume control at the precise moment, Harrison enlisted Lennon to turn the knob.

“So some of those," he said, "I played the part, and John would kneel down in front of me and turn my guitar's volume control.”

It was Forte who pointed out that Holly had done something similar for his 1957 hit "Peggy Sue." Unable to flick his pickup switch in time for his solo, Holly had Crickets guitarist Niki Sullivan move the switch from the neck position to the bridge position and back at the crucial junctures.

“Yeah, that's great stuff, isn't it?” Harrison replied. “That's still one of the greatest guitar solos of all time. Right till this day I could play you the 'Peggy Sue' solo any time, or 'Think It Over' or 'It's So Easy.' I knew all them tunes.”

And lest anyone forget, Harrison purchased his first electric guitar — a Futurama — in 1958 because it looked similar to the Fender Stratocaster that Holly played. Harrison would use the Futurama through many of the Beatles' early Hamburg gigs and on their first professional recordings with Tony Sheridan in June 1961. Although Harrison thought little of the guitar, it's now expected to fetch between $600,000 and $800,000 when it heads to the auction block in November.

Throughout his career, Harrison's admiration for other musicians proved as strong as ever. Former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore has recently recalled the time in 1984 when Harrison sheepishly asked to jam with the band. Together, they treated an Australian crowd to a rendition of a Little Richard classic, with Harrison so deeply in his element that he didn’t notice Blackmore was playing in the wrong key.

The Beatles Anthology begins streaming with Episodes 1–3 on Wednesday, November 26 on Disney+, followed by Episodes 4–6 on Thursday, November 27 and Episodes 7–9 on Friday, November 28.

For 15 years, John Fogerty refused to play the hits and timeless tunes he wrote and recorded with Creedence Clearwater Revival. Driven by bitterness over the exploitative contracts he had signed and the legal battles with his former label boss, Saul Zaentz, Fogerty turned his back on CCR classics like “Bad Moon Rising,” “Fortunate Son” and "Proud Mary.” He felt that if he performed them, the enemy would profit, and that was simply intolerable.

His long, self-imposed ban finally ended spontaneously one night in Hollywood — with a little help from Bob Dylan.

The year was 1987 and the location was North Hollywood’s Palomino Club, a revered venue known for its country-rock heritage. Onstage, the acoustic blues legend Taj Mahal was playing an electric set. In the audience, three rock icons were watching him play: George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Fogerty.

“I’d gone there to see Taj Mahal, who I love, and sat down,” Fogerty recalled in a video newly posted to TikTok. “And at some point I heard a rumor that George Harrison was there, that he was in this cloak room. So I went in and talked to George for a little bit.

“Then I heard a rumor that Bob Dylan was somewhere in the room. I didn’t know until later that George and Bob were great friends — they were really tight — and they had arrived together.”

Mahal was aware of the famous guests in attendance, and soon, Fogerty recalls, Harrison and Dylan had joined the performer onstage.

“I’m usually kinda shy, but for some reason [I thought], Man, I hope they have another guitar!” he said with a laugh, recalling the event. “Please call me up there!”

Soon enough, Mahal told Fogerty to come up and join them.

At some point the crowd started calling out for the musicians to play their own tunes. Dylan led the group through “Watching the River Flow,” and Fogerty recalled Harrison playing “Honey Don’t,” a Carl Perkins hit the Beatles recorded in 1964.

“And then the crowd starts, ‘John, John! C’mon! Play ‘Proud Mary’!” he recalls. “And this was during the time that I had sworn off playing my own songs from the Creedence Days because of legal and emotional entanglements.”

Fogerty admits he was feeling “stubborn.” He had avoided this moment for half his career. He wouldn't do it.

But then, standing to his left, the famously reclusive Bob Dylan — a man who himself had often wrestled with audience demands to perform his classic tunes — leaned over to Fogerty.

“He turns to me and he goes, ‘John, if you don’t play ‘Proud Mary,’ everybody’s gonna think it’s a Tina Turner song.’”

The air went out of Fogerty's stubborn resistance. He realized Dylan was absolutely right.

“Proud Mary” had been CCR’s first big hit, a tune Fogerty had written in the throes of an almost mystical inspiration.

“I realized I had just written what you’d call a classic,” he told Guitar Player in 2024, reflecting on the song. “I was awestruck. I was excited, trembling. I was almost scared of it. It was almost as if you’d walked into a room and discovered some amazing treasure and secret. And at that first moment, I was terrified that this might be it, that I would never get to do this again.”

CCR took the tune to number two on the singles chart, the group’s first significant showing there. It was one of the many hits Fogerty composed and released with CCR — and performed with his Fireglo Rickenbacker 325 semi-hollow electric guitar — in 1969.

But it was Ike and Tina Turner’s 1971 rendition of the song that brought it to an entirely new level. Although it didn’t reach the chart heights of CCR’s version (number four was the best it could do), their take on “Proud Mary” was explosive and quickly became a show-stopping number in their concerts.

Turner had made the song her own by opening it with one verse performed at a slow, bluesy pace before launching into a fast funk that got every member of the audience out of their seat. Tina and her trio of background singers, the Ikettes, shimmied in their sparkling mini dresses, while Tina, gyrating furiously, held the spotlight.

By the late 1980s, Turner was a solo artist at the peak of her game, with monster hits and sell-out shows where “Proud Mary” remained a centerpiece. Fogerty was enjoying a resurgence of his own with his hit album Centerfield.

But Dylan’s logic was — as Fogerty would later admit — “irrefutable.” No one was talking about the original “Proud Mary.” Tina Turner owned it now.

Stunned by Dylan’s argument, Fogerty finally gave in. He looked out at the cheering audience, looked back at his fellow legends onstage, and with a laugh and a profound sense of release, introduced the song with a grin.

“We’re going to do this because Bob Dylan asked me to,” he stammered. “Holy mackerel!”

“Proud Mary" erupted from the stage, performed by its author for the first time in 15 years. It was a joyous, cathartic moment, and according to Fogerty, he had a “great time” playing his own work again.

While Fogerty didn't immediately embrace his CCR catalog, this impromptu jam session — spurred by Dylan’s insightful comment — was the moment the dam broke. Afterward, Fogerty began the long process of reclaiming his musical legacy for himself and his fans.

The event would go down in history for another reason. Soon after, Harrison and Dylan formed the Traveling Wilburys with Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne. The Palomino quartet became known as the Silver Wilburys, a nod to the Silver Beatles, the embryonic precursor to the Beatles that featured Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Stuart Sutcliffe.

Music's landscape changed dramatically in the late 1960s, as the electric guitar became a greater force of expression in rock. That was due as much to developments in amplification and effects as it was to the players who dominated the scene, like Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix.

Prior to then, rock and roll belonged to guitarists like Keith Richards and George Harrison, each of whom had one foot in the styles preceding the British rock boom and the other in a more expressive, blues-inspired way of playing. Harrison, in particular, eventually became enamored of the slower, single-note style of lead guitar that emerged in the playing of the Band's Robbie Robertson and his pal Clapton.

But he wanted nothing to do with the heavier rock that followed. As far as he was concerned, Clapton took electric guitar to a new and more forceful place with his rock trio Cream.

Where it went after that was simply all too much.

“As far as listening to it, I’d rather hear someone like Little Richard or Larry Williams,” he once recalled (via Rolling Stone). “I never liked all that stuff in the late '60s after Cream had broken up — all those Les Paul guitars screaming and distorting.”

Clapton had been at the heart of the British blues explosion following his departure from the Yardbirds in 1965, when he joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. But when he left to form his own loud and lively power trio, inspired after seeing Buddy Guy play in London, he took the blues to new, rather more aggressive places.

Although Cream was a blues-rock band with strong elements of jazz mixed in, the group's fusion proved instrumental in paving the way for the hard rock and heavy metal scenes that followed. Even Clapton came to understand as much in the years after.

“I think we were one of the early heavy metal bands without knowing it,” Clapton has previously said. “After we disbanded, Led Zeppelin filled the void.”

While hard rock would give us plenty of fine virtuoso players, Harrison preferred the more expressive side of guitar work that preceded them.

“I like subtlety, like Ry Cooder and Eric Clapton,” he said. “Eric is fantastic. He could blow all those people off the stage if he wanted to, but he’s more subtle than that.

“And personally I’d rather hear three notes hit really sweet than to hear a whole lot of notes from some guitar player whose ears are so blown out he can’t hear the difference between a flat and a sharp.”

Harrison’s high praise for Clapton came just a few years after the two men reportedly performed a guitar duel over their mutual love for Pattie Boyd, Harrison's wife at the time. Clapton had become infatuated with her in 1970, leading to his anguished love letter to her, the song "Layla," from Derek and the Dominos' Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs. (although that tune is now shrouded in plagiarism claims).

Intriguingly, in his Rolling Stone interview, Harrison failed to mention the guitarist he felt was responsible for the “greatest guitar solo of all time.”

With the Byrds, Roger McGuinn gifted us chiming electric 12-string anthems like “Turn, Turn, Turn,” riff-laden cuts like “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘N’ Roll Star,” and proto-country-rock classics like Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

Beyond that, there’s his appearance alongside Bob Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue, wild LSD trips with John Lennon and George Harrison, and notable collaborations with Tom Petty, not to mention his profound influence over Petty and his partner in crime, Mike Campbell.

All of this is to say that McGuinn isn’t just an unassuming electric and acoustic guitar (and banjo) hero — he’s also lived one hell of an eventful life. It was with that in mind that McGuinn dialed in with Guitar Player to peel back the curtain on his relationships with his early mentor, the 1960s singer Bobby Darin, as well as David Crosby, Lennon and Harrison, Dylan, Petty and Campbell.

Bobby Darin 

“I first met him at the Crescendo Club, where he offered me a job. I took it because I was looking to, well, actually, Barry Maguire [“Eve of Destruction”] had invited me to be part of the New Christie Minstrels, and I got my picture taken with them on the cover of TV Guide with the band. But I told Bobby that, and he said, ‘Nah, that’s a bad idea. That’s too big a group. You’ll get buried in a group that size.’

“Bobby offered me twice as much, so I took the gig and stayed with him for about a year and a half. Then he quit performing for a while, moved to New York, and became a songwriter in the Brill Building.

“But he was a mentor to me. I followed him around, and I used to ask him questions about the music business, and I told him I’d like to get into the movies. He came up with a script from [American actor and director] Jackie Cooper at one point, and it turned out to be something I didn’t want to do. But I did move to New York, and I became a studio musician at that point.

“But the script from Jackie Cooper was about a banjo player. I said, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ And then, I read the whole script, and it was about a banjo player. Bobby had remembered that I wanted to get into a movie, so he wrote this movie for me to be the lead in, but it was about a heroin addict. [laughs]

“I said, ‘Oh, Bobby, I don’t think I can do this,’ so I turned him down. I never did a movie with or for anybody. I didn’t work in Hollywood, but I’m still a banjo player.

“Bobby was a boss. It wasn’t like a friendly, ‘we’re buddies’ relationship. But he was kind and mentored me. He really cared about my growth as a musician and artist. I was with him the night he discovered Wayne Newton [the famed Las Vegas singer, known for his signature hit “Danke Schoen”].

“We were in Vegas, had a show in the main showroom, and were walking around the casino. Around the corner was the lounge where the acts who don’t play in the main room perform. And it was the Newton Brothers [Wayne and Jerry]. Bobby saw Wayne, and said, ‘Him. I’m gonna sign him.’ And he did.”

David Crosby

“He taught me how to drive. [laughs] I didn’t drive when I lived in Chicago — and this is 1960 — while I was working with [the folk group] the Limeliters. But after I left Chicago, David had this old Chevy convertible with four-inch seat belts that he got out of a DC-3. You know, he was really into safety.

“So he taught me how to drive in that. And with a good sense of humor, he took me to the corner of La Cienega and Sunset with a stick shift, and I wasn’t familiar with clutching and putting the thing in first gear and getting around the corner, but I did it.

“But in the Byrds, I think for the vocals, he was definitely important. And guitar-wise, he was a good rhythm player, but he didn’t play any lead, and I didn’t like his songwriting all that much. It was different from what we wanted to do. So I’d say his vocals were the main asset.

“And he and I were friends. I met him in 1960, and then, when we were getting the Byrds together, we were still friendly and having a good time. But tensions rose when people were getting songs on the record and other people weren’t.

“It became difficult. I think the final blow to me was when he said, ‘You guys are not good enough musicians to be playing with me.’ I didn’t think it was right, so Chris [Hillman] said, ‘We’ve gotta get rid of David.’ I agreed, and we went up and asked him to leave, and that was that. But we did him a big favor because he got into a ‘better’ band after that with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash.”

John Lennon and George Harrison

“I first met them in London in late ’65 or ’66. They were all really friendly, and they just loved the Byrds. We were having a great time together, and so I maintained a friendly relationship with all of them. I don’t think there was a rivalry. We were all friends. I don’t remember being rivals with the Beatles, or anybody! And the Bible says to seek one’s own glory is not glory, so I don’t think like that.

“But they were inspirational. Everybody I ever ran into inspired me to do something. I did take acid with them in Laurel Canyon, but my first LSD experience was in San Francisco in 1960, when it was still legal. The acid came from the Sandos Labs. It was on a sugar cube wrapped in aluminum foil and cost $10. [laughs] I was living in a commune in Russian Hill. That was my first acid experience.

“But when we and the Beatles took it in Laurel Canyon, I don’t think it really helped anything musically. It just got you high. [laughs] For me, it was just recreational. But I quit doing it because I had a bad trip. It was iffy. You could have a really fun time or a really bad time.

“I remember, later on, when Paul McCartney was playing at the Forum in LA. It was sold out, and I called up the Forum, and somebody backstage picked up the phone. I said, ‘This is Roger McGuinn from the Byrds.’ He got Paul, and Paul said, ‘Oh, come on down. I’ll get you in!’ So we were friendly.

“And I remember back during John Lennon’s Lost Weekend in LA, with Harry Nilsson. I was at the Record Plant. They were in one of the studios, and I walked by, and they invited me in. I played with them. I said, ‘You know, I didn’t fill out a W-4 form…’ [laughs] I just did it for old times’ sake, just to be friendly. John said, ‘Well, you’re the only one…’ I think that was the last time I talked to John.

“And then George I saw quite often when he was hanging out with Tom [Petty] at his house. We talked about guitars and stuff, and George really got into the ukulele and gave one or two to Tom. They’d be playing it, and we all really had a good time. We were just all hanging out and being friends.”

Bob Dylan 

“Bob and I were neighbors in Malibu. He used to come over to my house, and he liked my house! I remember I was on the road, and I’d just bought this house in Malibu, and I got a call from my real estate agent, and she said, ‘I’ve got Bob Dylan here. He wants to talk to you.’

“Bob got on the line, and he said, ‘I want to buy your house.’

“I said, ‘Well, I just bought it, man. I wanna keep it. I love it.’ [laughs] He would come over to my house, and I don’t know if he wanted to see me or the house, you know? [laughs]

“But he’d come over, and we’d play pool. At one point he saw a basketball hoop out in the back, and he asked me if I had a basketball. I didn’t, but I got one the next day.

“So we we’re playing basketball in the back by the carport, and he said, ‘I want to do something different.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, man?’ He said, ‘I don’t know… like a circus.’

“And that’s what the Rolling Thunder Revue was. I got to New York, and I saw him again, and he invited me on the Rolling Thunder tour, and that was how that worked.

“If you’ve ever seen The Big Bang Theory, Bob is like Sheldon. [laughs] It’s like… he’s out there. He thinks in abstractions. And social graces are different. He doesn’t really have a conversation with you; he talks in abstractions a lot. I love the guy like a brother. But… he’s a little… challenging to have a friendship with.

“So he likes me at times. [laughs] He goes hot and cold. He liked me when we were hanging out together in Malibu. He liked me on the Rolling Thunder tour. He liked me when I did the 30th anniversary thing at Madison Square Garden with him. He was happy about my performance at that. I remember he told Tom Petty and George Harrison, ‘Wow, Roger really stole the show!’ He was very positive about that.

“So I know he’s liked me at times. I love the guy. And I loved performing with him. I loved singing ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ with him.”

Tom Petty and Mike Campbell 

“I met Tom in 1976, when I was getting ready to do an album for Columbia Records. I had most of the songs ready to go, but I needed a couple of extra songs to fill it out. And my manager was around the corner playing records and tapes, and I couldn’t see what he was putting on. And he put ‘American Girl.’

“I said, ‘When did I record that?’ [laughs] And he said, ‘It isn’t you!’ And I said, ‘I know. It’s a great song. Who is it?’

“And he said, ‘It’s this new guy, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.’ I said, ‘I want to meet him.’

“So the next day they arranged a meeting, and I got to meet Tom. We became friends, and I invited them to come to New York to play at the Bottom Line with me. We remained really good friends until his death.

“And I was honored because when I read Mike Campbell’s book [the 2024 memoir Heartbreaker]: There was one point where he was talking about playing like Roger McGuinn. I thought that was fun, you know? Mike’s a good friend, too, and I congratulated him on a really fun book to read. It brought back a lot of good memories.

“But Tom was great. He was very gracious, very kind, and a friendly person. Some of my favorite memories are hanging out with him and George Harrison at his house in L.A. and just jamming. It was great working with him on [McGuinn’s 1991 album] Back From Rio. And the way that came about was a direct result of being on the Temples and Flames tour in Europe with Tom and Bob.

“We had a day off in Gothenburg, Sweden, and I had a tune, but I didn’t have any words for it. I showed the tune to Tom, and he liked it, and we sat there in the hotel room and wrote down ‘King of the Hill.’ And Mike Campbell had a four-track cassette recorder — a little kind of mini studio in a briefcase — so he came into the hotel room and recorded the demo of ‘King of the Hill.’

“That somehow got to Clive Davis, and they gave us a record deal, so it came out of that. Tom was a great songwriter. He described it as being from outer space. He didn’t want to investigate it too hard because he thought it might go away. I’ve had that, too. Some songwriters say that it comes from maybe from God, where you’re just getting the Holy Spirit telling you to write stuff.”

George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh has gone down in history as the first all-star benefit rock concert. The former Beatle called upon many of his famous musical friends to perform at the two shows for humanitarian relief in the war-torn country, which were held August 1, 1971, at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

Fellow ex-Beatle Ringo Starr played, as did Bob Dylan, guitarists Jesse Ed Davis and Don Preston, keyboardists Billy Preston and Leon Russell, and the rock group Badfinger, among a host of others.

One person who was invited but didn’t play? Peter Frampton.

The guitarist was five years away from becoming a megastar with the release of his 1976 live smash, Frampton Comes Alive! At the time he was still performing in Humble Pie, which is why he was in New York City. The band was touring England and the U.S. that summer and spending what free time remained at Electric Lady Studios, where they were mixing their 1971 live breakthrough, Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore, recorded the previous May 28 and 29.

“On the weekends, we’d fly off to perform, opening the bill for many different artists, and on weekdays we’d be at Electric Lady Studios in New York with Eddie Kramer, mixing the Rockin’ the Fillmore album,” Frampton recalls to Guitar Player.

Frampton knew Harrison. He had performed lead electric guitar alongside him on singer Doris Troy’s self-titled album, produced by Harrison for the Beatles’ Apple Records. He had also played acoustic guitar on All Things Must Pass, Harrison’s first post-Beatles solo album.

“I knew I was going to see George’s shows, and I asked if he needed me to play guitar,” Frampton explained, “but they were overbooked with guitarists.”

Indeed they were. In addition to Harrison, Davis and Preston, the shows would feature Eric Clapton, who was making his first live appearance since his late 1970s shows with Derek and the Dominos.

Depressed over that band’s failure, the death of Duane Allman and his unrequited love for Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, the guitarist had fallen into heroin addiction and withdrawn from recording and touring. Harrison had recruited him for the concerts, hoping it would help pull him out of his decline.

Frampton accepted the news with grace. “I wished him all the best with the show,” he says, “and told him I’d come see it.”

Unexpectedly, the guitarist soon found himself invited to dine with Harrison and Pattie, while they were in Manhattan.

“Afterwards, we went back to the Pierre [Hotel], and he invited me up to their suite,” Frampton continues. “There were two electrics sitting by the window, and maybe one or two little amps. George asked if I wanted to play some guitar, and I said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ trying to keep my excitement under control.

“And without a word, he just started running through the songs they were going to do. My mind started going 14,000 miles an hour. I couldn’t understand why we were doing this if the guitar positions for the concert were filled.

“We must’ve played six to 10 songs, and he was checking me out to see if I was up to speed, which, of course, I was. How can you not be when it comes to the Beatles’ songs?”

But to Frampton’s confusion, Harrison said nothing about performing at the concert. In the days afterward, the guitarist flew south to play a couple of shows with Humble Pie.

Meanwhile, in New York City, the behind-the-scenes drama around Clapton escalated as the August 1 concert date arrived. The guitarist, suffering through heroin withdrawal was bedridden throughout his stay in the city and had been unable to make any of the rehearsals.

Frampton returned to New York on the day of the show. “I’d missed the first one, but I planned to go to the second, and so I picked up my tickets and backstage pass,” he says. “I watched the entire show, and at the end, I made my way to the side of the stage.”

When he got there, he didn’t get the welcome he expected.

“Terry Doran [Harrison’s personal assistant] saw me, and his eyes got really big,” Frampton continues. “He said, ‘Where have you been!?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? I’ve been on the road.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but we had no way of getting hold of you!’

Frampton was thoroughly confused.

“And Terry says, ‘Well, George wants to speak to you!’

“So as he takes me backstage, he pulls me right into Bob Dylan, who gives me the ‘I could slice your head off with the back of my hand’ kind of look.”

Doran delivered the guitarist to Harrison, who explained their growing terror as the concerts approached and Clapton appeared unable to perform.

“This was during his heavy drug phase,” Frampton says. “Whether he had some or was trying to give them up, I don’t know. But when he wasn’t able to rehearse, they tried to get hold of me, because they wanted me there — just in case.

“I asked George and Terry, ‘You mean you wanted me to play?’ And they said, ‘Yeah.’”

In the end, a cameraman from the crew hired to film the shows provided Clapton with methadone, which made him well enough to perform both shows.

“I’m glad that Eric was able to play somehow, since a lot of people would’ve been very disappointed if he didn’t, especially George,” Frampton says.

“The last thing I wanted to be was a stand-in for Eric Clapton. I would’ve done it if George had gotten hold of me and the situation was more dire. But I’ll never know how dire it actually was.”

“If Dylan hadn’t said some of the things he did, nobody else was going to say them,” George Harrison once noted of the folk-rock icon. “Can you imagine what a world it would be if we didn’t have a Bob Dylan? It would be awful.”

At the very least, a world without Dylan would have made a poorer existence for Harrison. While much is made of his long and complicated friendship with Eric Clapton — one that saw them duel with guitars for the hand of Pattie Boyd — Harrison’s relationship with Dylan was something approaching a spiritual connection.

Harrison had first heard the folk icon while the Beatles were in Paris in 1964, after a DJ gave a copy of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan to Paul McCartney. All four of the Fabs fell in love with the album, which included classic tracks like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

“He was doing what everybody else tried to do after him — saying whatever he wanted to say in song,” Harrison wrote of Dylan in his 1980 autobiography, I Me Mine.

The Beatles and Dylan met later that year, in August, while the group was performing in New York. Although, initially, Lennon bonded with Dylan more closely than the others, Harrison’s quiet nature resonated with the folk guitarist’s reserved personality. Harrison later told Rolling Stone that Dylan “was like me in many ways, a bit of a loner.”

Dylan felt the connection too. Unlike Lennon, Harrison wasn’t copying his music or sartorial style. Dylan also seemed to sense that Harrison wasn’t getting his due in the group, where his songwriting talents were overshadowed by Lennon’s and McCartney’s.

“George got stuck with being the Beatle that had to fight to get songs on records because of Lennon and McCartney,” Dylan noted to Rolling Stone. “Well, who wouldn’t get stuck?

“If George had had his own group and was writing his own songs back then, he’d have been probably just as big as anybody.”

From the start, Harrison had been the odd man out in the Beatles. The youngest member of the group, he stood in the creative shadow of Lennon and McCartney, whose songwriting talents outshone his own.

His embrace of the sitar in late 1965 was the first sign that Harrison was a stray among the flock. His attempts to learn the instrument marked the start of his journey away from guitar. Between late 1966 and the summer of 1968 he studied the instrument with sitar master Ravi Shankar, and only picked up the guitar when required for recording.

His long walk back to the instrument began in June 1968, while he was in California filming Shankar for Raga, the 1971 movie about the sitarist released by Apple Films. Despite two years of rigorous sitar study, Harrison realized he would never come close to mastering the instrument.

Flying home to England, he made a stop in New York City, where, by coincidence, he happened upon his pal Clapton and the guitarist who had come to define everything that rock guitar was in 1968: “I checked in the hotel in New York,” Harrison wrote. “Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton happened to be staying there.”

Enjoying the familiarity of his fellow guitarists, it seemed to Harrison that he had at last found a place where he fit in, and where he was accepted as an individual, not as a Beatle.

“I thought, Well, maybe I’m better off to get back into being a guitar player, songwriter, whatever I’m supposed to be,” he recalled. “Because I’m never gonna be a sitar player. Because I’ve seen a thousand sitar players in India who are twice as better than I’ll ever be!”

But Harrison was still insecure about his contributions to the Beatles, and the growing creative tensions within the group were fraying his nerves. That September, seeking the companionship he’d enjoyed with Hendrix and Clapton, he invited Clapton to perform the lead electric guitar parts on the Beatles’ recording of his song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” one of four songs he had on the group's 1968 White Album. It was the first time any of the Beatles had dared to make a move without the approval of the others.

But his sense of confidence was about to get a huge boost. In November, Dylan invited him to spend Thanksgiving in Woodstock with him and the Band, the Canadian-American roots group that had briefly served as his backup band. Harrison eagerly accepted. Beyond his love for Dylan's music, he, like Clapton, was taken by the fluid electric lead guitar work of the Band’s guitarist, Robbie Robertson, which approximated the sound of slide guitar.

It was there, in Woodstock, that Harrison and Dylan made their lifetime connection during a visit that lasted several days. But in spite of their familiarity, things didn’t begin smoothly.

“I was hanging out at his house, with him, [his wife] Sara and his kids,” he wrote in I Me Mine. “He seemed very nervous and I felt a little uncomfortable — it seemed strange, especially as he was in his own home.

Around the third day, he wrote, “we got the guitars out, and then things loosened up.” Harrison encouraged his host to give him some lyrics, something along the lines of “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” his rapid-fire proto-rap 1965 folk-rock tune.

“I was saying to him, ‘Write me some words,’ and thinking of all this: Johnnie‘s in the basement, mixing up the medicine type of thing, and he was saying, ‘Show me some chords, how do you get those tunes?’”

Before too long, they were composing the music and words to their first of two songs: “I'd Have You Anytime.”

“I started playing chords, like major sevenths, diminisheds and augmenteds,” Harrison wrote, “and the song appeared as I played the opening chord and then moved the chord shape up the guitar neck. The first thing I thought was: Let me in here / I know I’ve been here / Let me into your heart.

“I was saying to Bob, ‘Come on, write some words.’ He wrote the bridge: ‘All I have is yours / All you see is mine / And I’m glad to hold you in my arms / I’d have you anytime.’

“Beautiful! — and that was that.”

Years later, in Martin Scorsese’s documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, his wife, Olivia, said he was “talking directly to Bob” in the song.

“He’d seen Bob, and then he’d seen Bob another time, and he didn’t seem as open. And so that was his way of saying, ‘Let me in here, let me into your heart.’

“And he was very unabashed and romantic about it in a sense. I found that he had these love relationships with his friends. He loved them.”

Warmed by his experience in Woodstock, Harrison returned to England with a new sense of purpose and confidence. It was not lost on Harrison that, by writing with Dylan, he had achieved something his Dylan-loving bandmates had not.

Roughly a month later, in early January 1969, as the Beatles got to work recording Let It Be, Harrison began to assert himself for the first time. Unhappy with McCartney’s bossiness and the sour mood of the sessions, on January 10, he walked out and briefly quit the group.

Harrison’s departure was a wake-up call to the others. Almost immediately afterward, Lennon and McCartney had a discussion about how they had disregarded his musical contributions for years. When Harrison returned, he had a new sense of purpose and self-assuredness, which became apparent with the recording of the group's final album, 1969's Abbey Road. Among its many tracks, Harrison's — "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" — stand out as two of its finest.

That fact wasn't lost on his bandmates. In September 1969, Lennon put forth a proposal that would have given himself, McCartney and Harrison four songs apiece on any future Beatles album. Given what had transpired in the past, it was a remarkable show of equity, although unfortunately, one that came too late.

Scottish folk guitarist Donovan may not be the most famous musician to emerge from the British Isles in the ’60s, but his influence proved vital to a score who went on to eclipse his career. So much so that two household names sought to capture a little of his genius for themselves, while another praised his inventiveness.

Jimmy Page, glam-rock pioneer Marc Bolan, David Gilmour, Nick Drake and Beatles John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison all admired his songwriting talents. His genre-blurring work, which fused folk, pop, psych rock, and jazz, became a totem of the flower-power movement.

Other musicians took notice, and for Harrison and Gilmour, in particular, it had a lasting effect on them. They didn't shy away from telling Donovan that.

When Louder Sound recently asked the 79-year-old guitarist what he considered his greatest achievement, he shared something Harrison had said about his music.

“I suggested you could do with blending and fusing styles of music — and write more than just ‘I love you, why’d you make me blue?’ in a popular song," he said.

"I didn’t know what to call that achievement, but I worked it out when George Harrison said, ‘Donovan is a catalyst.’ A catalyst can put two things together and create something completely different.”

The fact that Harrison, who outsold his Beatles bandmates when they embarked on solo careers in the early ‘70s, saw Donovan as an innovator alone is impressive. But he then turned his attention to an interaction he once had with David Gilmour.

“He said, ‘You know I bought your cottage?’” Donovan adds, recounting the moment. “I said, ‘Yeah? Why’d you buy my cottage?’ He said, ‘You wrote all those bloody songs there.’

“One song on Sunshine Superman [his third album, from 1966] was called ‘Three King Fishers,’ and he said, ‘When I heard that song, my future with the band I was with' — which I suppose was Floyd — 'I knew my direction.'

“That’s the effect of a catalyst: He bought my cottage. He said, ‘Maybe all that happened there would rub off on me.’”

Gilmour had joined Pink Floyd in 1967, shortly after the group made a peculiar trip to the U.S., where they house-shared with Alice Cooper. That makes it possible Gilmour is referencing his early days with the band here.

The song certainly has the kind of slow-burning, hazy quality that the band would later forge a reputation for with Gilmour at the songwriting helm, although the folk elements are a little out of the Floydian remit.

Later in his career, Donovan had both Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones play on his 1968 track “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” But it was another member of Led Zeppelin who took a leaf out of Gilmour’s book.

“Robert Plant said to me one night, ‘You know I bought your 1965 Aston Martin.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Cause it was so beautiful. You had a headlining put in it [in the car roof] and it was custom-made.'”

Donovan was convinced there was an ulterior motive. When he pushed the singer for the real reason he bought the sports car, he confessed, “Maybe you wrote a couple of songs in that car.”

While Donovan’s contributions haven’t received the attention given to those of his contemporaries, his impact on music in the latter half of the 1960s is evident. Although the folk music scene had long faded long before, he managed to keep it alive not by combining it with folk rock as the Byrds had, but by fusing it with psychedelia and Indian music, making it a distinct facet of the 1960s scene during a time when popular music was branching off into myriad new directions, including hard rock, heavy metal and progressive rock.

Gilmour, meanwhile, has admitted he never resonated with Pink Floyd's prog rock tag, while naming one prog guitarist who can “really do their stuff.”

He's also looked back at how blues players were key influences of his sound, with his infamous vocal-like playing style ultimately born from an inability to shred.

Despite all the bad feelings around the Beatles’ breakup in the final months of 1969, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were back on good terms as early as 1974. Lennon — newly separated from his wife, Yoko Ono — was in the throes of his drunken Lost Weekend. May Pang, his girlfriend, reunited the two former Beatles on March 28 of that year, in Los Angeles, where Lennon was producing Harry Nilsson’s album Pussy Cats at Burbank Studios.

McCartney and his wife, Linda, dropped by, resulting in an impromptu jam session featuring both former Beatles, Nilsson, Stevie Wonder, Jesse Ed Davis on electric guitar, Ed Freeman on bass, and saxophonist Bobby Keys, as well as Pang and former Beatles roadie Mal Evans.

Although it was unproductive, the jam was enough to mend their broken relationship. Sometime later, back in New York City, Lennon and McCartney dropped in at the Pierre Hotel for a 3 a.m. visit to David Bowie. As Bowie recalled in an interview with Marc Riley, the three men discussed the possibility of working together, an idea that faded with the morning light.

As far as anyone knows, Lennon and McCartney never again considered re-teaming — except once, in 1976. And it was all thanks to Lorne Michaels, producer of Saturday Night Live.

The show was in its first season, delivering 90 minutes of sketch comedy and music “live from New York” beginning at 11:30 p.m. SNL had become an instant hit with its youthful cast, edgy humor and smart choice of musical guests.

Then, as now, part of the show’s appeal was its satirical take on topical issues. And in early 1976, one of the biggest stories in music was about attempts to reunite the Beatles.

Concert promoter Bill Sargent had offered the band $10 million in 1973 and upped his offer to $50 million in January 1976. According to an article in the April 5, 1976 issue of People magazine, a "top-level rock functionary" said he knew "for a fact that George, John and Ringo have talked among themselves about a reunion, and their attorneys say it is possible."

With perfect timing, Michaels made a tongue-in-cheek proposal to get the Beatles back together on SNL — for the humorously low price of $3,000. (He would sweeten the offer to $3,200 on the May 22 episode.)

Appearing onscreen, Michaels made his pitch on the April 24, 1976 episode.

“Please allow me, if I may, to address myself to four very special people: John, Paul, George and Ringo. The Beatles. Lately there have been a lot of rumors to the effect that the four of you might be getting back together.

“Now, we’ve heard and read a lot about personality and legal conflicts that might prevent you guys from reuniting,” he said. “That’s something which is none of my business. That’s a personal problem. You guys will have to handle that.

“But it’s also been said that no one has yet to come up with enough money to satisfy you. Well, if it’s money you want, there’s no problem here. The National Broadcasting Company has authorized me to offer you this check to be on our show. A certified check for $3,000.”

As the audience laughed, Michaels continued.

“All you have to do is sing three Beatles songs. ‘She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah’ — that’s $1,000 right there. You know the words. It’ll be easy.

“Like I said, this is made out to ‘the Beatles,’” he said, holding the check. “You divide it any way you want. If you want to give Ringo less, that’s up to you. I’d rather not get involved.”

John Lennon, an avid fan of the show, was watching as the skit aired, and he loved it.

Although it’s often said Lennon and McCartney were both at Lennon’s house at the time, McCartney says he didn’t visit until the following Saturday.

“I was at John's place and Saturday Night Live was on. And John said to me, ‘Have you seen this?’ I said, ‘No’ — I’m living in England; he was living in America.”

Lennon told him about Lorne’s “offer.”

“And he said, ‘We should go down, just you and me. We should show up. There’s only two of us — take half the money.’

“And for a second, it was like —” McCartney said, indicating they gave it a thought.

What stopped them? Apparently it would have been too much effort, even though Lennon’s home was a five-minute cab ride from the NBC studios at 30 Rock.

“It would have been work,” McCartney said.

“We were having a night off. So we elected to not go and go to work.

“It was a nice idea. We nearly did it.”

They didn’t, but George Harrison did. On the November 20 episode later that year, he appeared in the cold open, complaining to Michaels that he had showed up to play and wanted his share of the money, only for Michaels to remind him that the pitch was for all four Beatles, not one.

As a consolation, Harrison got to announce the show, and then went on to perform with the night’s host and musical guest Paul Simon.

As 1999 was rolling to a close, George Harrison should have been ringing in the new year with his family at his Friar Park Estate in Henley-on-Thames, England.

Instead, the former Beatle was lying in a hospital with 40 stab wounds after an intruder broke into his home on December 30 and left him fighting for his life.

British comedian Eric Idle recalls the incident on the latest episode of the Adam Buxton Podcast. A founding member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Idle was both Harrison's friend and associate. Harrison appeared in Idles' satirical Beatles take-off All You Need Is Cash and even re-mortgaged his home to help finance Monty Python's 1979 film Life of Brian.

The attacker was Michael Abram, a 34-year-old suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. After breaking in, Abram encountered Harrison, leading to a prolonged fight in which the guitarist suffered a punctured lung and multiple head injuries.

As Idle tells Buxton, the incident shook Harrison to his core.

“He was very disturbed,” he says. “I have never, ever seen him more disturbed. It was really shocking, because they fought for 20 minutes.”

Idle adds that he had been attacked “with a butcher's knife,” and was “bleeding to death.”

He describes Abram as “a crazed guy, off his meds." Abram's was initially looking to kill Paul McCartney but decided to make Harrison his target. "He couldn't find Paul, so it's easier to find Henley," Idle says.

“He came over the wall, smashed in the window, and George, I think, came out because George was the bold one, who told the Hell's Angels to fuck off."

Idle is referring to Harrison throwing Hells Angels members out of the Beatles Apple Corps in the 1960s, after they became disruptive: "He was always the one who came and said, 'No, you've got to fuck off.'"

When it came to dealing with his intruder, “I think he did the same thing," Idle says. "He went at the top of the stairs and told him to fuck off. And then he yelled 'Hare Krishna!' and the guy came at him up the stairs with a knife. It would have been wiser, perhaps, to lock the door and call the police.”

Over the next 20 minutes, Harrison and Abram fought. Harrison's wife, Olivia, hit Abram with a fireplace poker but was unable to subdue him.

“Liv, in the end, bashed him over the head with a Tiffany lamp, and they were all passed out when the police arrived, and blood everywhere," Idle says. "It was like a scene from a horror film.”

Recalling the attack afterward, Harrison recalled, “I felt exhausted and could feel the strength draining from me,” he said. “I vividly remember a deliberate thrust to my chest. I could hear my lung exhaling and had blood in my mouth. I believed I had been fatally stabbed.”

Once he was well enough to return home, Harrison led a puja, a Hindu ceremony sometimes used for healing after trauma to help process emotions and find meaning. Idle was among those present for it .

“We went round and went through the attack, bit by bit, up the stairs, and still blood on the walls and things,” he remembers. “It was, like, really awful and shocking, and kind of therapeutic.”

Although Harrison survived his injuries, they may have contributed to his death from lung cancer two years later. Following the attack, part of his punctured lung had to be removed, which made an operation to remove cancer on his lungs soon after far more risky.

Abram was ultimately judged not guilty by reason of insanity. He avoided jail time and was instead sentenced to indefinite confinement in a psychiatric hospital. In 2002, just eight months after Harrison’s passing, he was discharged.

Harrison's friendship with Idle was long and enduring. As he once explained, he saw similarities between the Beatles and Monty Python in their shared efforts to change the status quo. Idle was by his bedside when Harrison died in 2001, alongside Olivia, their son, Dhani, and Ravi Shankar, his wife and their daughter.

Before he even owned a guitar, a teenage George Harrison was obsessed with them. But it took a sizable loan from his mother to turn his daydreaming into a tangible reality.

The guitar in question was an Egmond 105/0 Toledo, a Dutch-made beginner’s acoustic guitar with steel strings. It was bought second-hand from a school friend when Harrison was either 13 or 14. It was a humble beginning, and it proved to be a pivotal moment in his life.

“I used to be at the back of the class drawing guitars, big cello cutaway guitars with f holes; little solid ones with pointed cutaways and rounded cutaways. I was totally into guitars,” he once said.

A little playground gossip then got him one step closer to owning one of his own.

“I heard about this kid who had a guitar, and it was £3.10,” Harrison explains. “It was just a little acoustic round, hall-type guitar, and I got the £3.10 off my mother. That was a lot of money in those days.”

Using an inflation calculator, £3.10 in 1957, when Harrison would have been 14, amounts to approximately £95/$130 in today’s money. Comparatively, it’s significantly cheaper than the £10 John Lennon’s mother parted with for his first guitar, a South African Gallotone Champion flattop acoustic. In 2025, that would equate to around £308/$420. It was bought from a magazine advert.

By 1958, Harrison had turned to a Hofner President. The single-cutaway acoustic featured a compensator tailpiece and, with a little help from the Bank of Mom once more, it was his for £30 before, eventually, he purchased a Futurama.

The British government had outlawed the import of guitars in a bid to protect British manufacturers, meaning the guitar he truly craved, a Fender Stratocaster, was off the menu. While the Futurama was built in Czechoslovakia, the instrument was made for British importer Selmer, thus slipping through the net to end on the wall of Hessy’s Music Centre in Liverpool.

Harrison had idolized Buddy Holly and the music he made with his American-made electric guitar, and the Futurama represented the next best thing. The guitar would feature extensively during the band's Hamburg days in the early '60s, after a slightly calamitous test drive in the store.

Recalling the moment in the Beatles' Anthology book, McCartney had said they'd noticed how the guitar had three pickups, and corresponding buttons on the treble side of the strings. When Harrison pushed one of them, “there was an almighty boom through the amplifier, and all the other guitars fell off the wall.”

After the Hamburg tour, Harrison bought a Gretsch Duo Jet, starting a love affair with the firm that led to one of his most iconic Beatles guitars, his Country Gentleman. That guitar was believed to have been destroyed in 1964, but new evidence suggests that might not be the case.

Vintage guitar dealer Norman Harris has since revealed he had the chance to buy the guitar off the Beatle during his formative years, but turned it down for one particular reason.

A new Beatles Anthology release has recently been announced, which also sees a ninth chapter added to its companion documentary.

With a fourth Beatles Anthology on the way, a previously unseen interview with George Harrison discussing the creation of the first in the series from 1995 has surfaced online.

The so-called philosophical Beatle discussed the breadth of the comprehensive Anthology 1 release, which featured 60 tracks, including “Free as a Bird,” the first new song from the Fab Four in 25 years. The project saw surviving members Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr trolling the archives, right back to the group's formative days as the Quarrymen.

“Long before we came to Abbey Road, we recorded 'That'll be the Day' in a studio in Liverpool,” Harrison tells bass player Mo Foster in the clip. “It was just a place you go in and go straight onto disc, and we paid for it ourselves. We're going really from A to Z.”

The exhaustive collection, which includes outtakes and rarities from across the band's lifespan — including a live cover of Chuck Berry's “Roll Over Beethoven” — ensured the release represented every era of the band. But the further back in time the three musicians travelled, the more difficult their task became.

“We've sifted through the early tapes, but you see, a lot of the early tapes were done in mono,” he explains. “The only tapes remaining are the actual masters. All the outtakes were thrown away long before people thought we were any good.”

The band had pored through the tapes at Abbey Road, the London studio with many ties to the band. That included their audition tapes they tracked for Decca Records, when they were eying their first record deal.

“We got turned down, and they signed Brian Poole and the Tremeloes instead,” Harrison laughs. “Somebody said to Brian Epstein, ‘Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein,’ and that was probably the biggest error in music history.”

There are also stark parallels with how the Struts' record label told the band not to have too many guitars on their new Brian May-powered reworking of their biggest song. They, too, were told that guitar music was on its deathbed.

“It's a great room,” Harrison says of the studio. “At the very first session we did here, which was before Ringo was in the band, in June 1962, we recorded ‘Love Me Do’ with Pete Best.”

The band then returned in October of that year to rerecord the song again with Starr behind the kit. “But George Martin didn't know about Ringo, and he'd hired a session drummer. That's the famous story,” says Harrison, again with a chuckle. “He put out the single without Ringo playing on it! So, we're going to put out the version with Pete Best on it, because it never did come out.”

The second Abbey Road session was also memorable for all the wrong reasons. Harrison had been in a fight with some Liverpool locals who were upset about Best being replaced by Starr. Harrison recalls: “I had a black eye because people were shouting, ‘Get Ringo out. Ringo never, Pete Best forever.’

“We did so many takes of ‘Love Me Do.’ In those days, we never had light gauge strings; we used to have to have a really high action and very heavy gauge strings. After take 20, it was pretty hard on the fingers.”

Two new songs featured on the Anthology releases, with both “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” coming from John Lennon demos handed to the group by his widow, Yoko Ono.. It was the first time the trio had worked on a song together since 1970, and McCartney believes that John Lennon’s spirit often made itself known during the sessions on several occasions.

For Beatles fans, new music a quarter of a century after the heartbreak of their breakup was headline news. For Harrison, the biggest takeaway from those sessions was that water was passing under the trio’s proverbial bridge.

“The thing that's the most pleasing is that we're all friendly again,” he says. “I mean, we had some turbulent years in the meantime. It's just fun to have your old friends back again.”

John Lennon, however, felt the individual members flourished after the band broke up, even if it took several attempts for McCartney to get his solo career off the ground.

During a whirlwind decade, the Beatles were transformed from a group of four fresh-faced Liverpudlians into the biggest band in the world. Across 12 studio albums, they built a legacy that, over half a century later, remains largely unchallenged.

But despite that, John Lennon believes the Fab Four “flowered” after the group’s demise in 1970. In particular, he says his lyric-writing talents grew “a millionfold,” and he singled another member out for the way he came into himself away from the band environment.

When it came to establishing themselves as solo artists, each of the Beatles — Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — moved quickly. In 1970, the same year they released their final album, Let It Be, each of the four released solo albums. Harrison, having grown frustrated by having his wings clipped in the Beatles, released his triple album, All Things Must Pass, a commercial success that saw him establish himself outside the shadow of the Lennon-McCartney tandem.

Although All Things Must Pass performed the best of the group's solo albums that year, Lennon got high marks for his John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album, and quickly shot back with his second full-length, 1971's Imagine. The album was a huge success, selling double Platinum in the U.S. while its title track, "Imagine," became Lennon's signature tune and the song most associated with his solo years.

Starr, meanwhile, was having success as a solo artist with his hit song "It Don't Come Easy" and attempting to build a second career as a film actor in eccentric comedies, like his spaghetti-western film, Blindman.

“Imagine how we've flowered since then,” Lennon told Hit Parader in February 1972, a few months after the release of Imagine. “George is suddenly the biggest seller of all of us. I think my music's improved a millionfold lyric-wise, and Ringo's coming out and writing 'It Don't Come Easy,' and now he's going to write the title song for this cowboy thing he's in. It's really beautiful.”

Interestingly, Lennon had no praise for McCartney. At that point, the bass guitarist was having a rough time launching his solo career. His solo albums McCartney and Ram were critical and sales disappointments, and Wild Life, the debut album from his band Wings, fared even worse. Another year would pass before his well-timed TV special coincided with a turning point in his fortunes.

"The fact is, the Beatles have left school, and we have to get a job,” Lennon had told Hit Parader. “That's made us work — really work harder. I think we're much better than we ever were when we were together.

“Look at us today. I'd sooner have Ram, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, George's album, and Ringo's single and the movies than Let It Be or Abbey Road,” he said, referring to the group's final two albums.

Yoko Ono, sitting in the interview for her part in Imagine, added rather diplomatically, “If the four of them had gone on, then they would have suffocated each other.”

Talking to the magazine about Imagine, Lennon revealed that he had intended it to feature three-quarters of the Beatles.

“George is on half of my new album playing guitar. The only reason Ringo wasn't on it was because he was abroad, making his movie,” he had said. “So then the three of us would have been on, but then it wouldn't have been the Beatles. It would have been Plastic Ono because I would have had the final say.

“There would be no decision-making by George or Ringo, other than if I liked an idea I'd take it — which is what happened with the Beatles — but then it was more diplomatic.”

Of course, fans would have to wait until the 1990s for the release of any new material featuring the four Beatles. The Anthology series, issued in 1995 and 1996, brought with it two new singles — "Free As a Bird" and "Real Love" — created from Lennon's unfinished demos. Although he had been murdered in 1980, Lennon was present at those sessions like a ghost, according to McCartney.

More recently, Starr and McCartney labored to finish an old Lennon demo the guitarist had said would be “great” for the drummer.

Last month, a new, ninth chapter in the Beatles Anthology documentary, and a fourth album in the same series were announced. The release includes 13 previously unreleased demos, session recordings, and other rare recordings.

And in a new development, radio and TV personality Elliot Mintz has revealed what he believes to be the last meeting between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, coming two years after what was, for years, thought to have been their last.

When the surviving Beatles — Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — reunited in the studio in the mid ’90s, the band members felt they weren’t alone, as “strange goings-on” hinted at John Lennon’s supernatural presence.

The trio’s team-up, coming 25 years after the Fab Four disbanded, and a decade and a half after the death of John Lennon, represented the time they’d worked on new music together as they set about bringing the unreleased John Lennon song “Free as a Bird” to life.

It was one of two new songs, alongside “Real Love” — also born from John Lennon’s mind — to feature on 1995’s Anthology box set. As news of a fourth addition in the Anthology series broke last week, McCartney’s reflections on the unusual incidents that surrounded the recording of “Free as a Bird” have come to light.

“There were a lot of strange goings-on in the studio — noises that shouldn’t have been there and equipment doing all manner of weird things,” McCartney once told OnHike.com (via The Mirror). “There was just an overall feeling that John was around.”

Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, had given the rest of the band the two of his demos with the view of transforming them into finished songs. The unexplainable occurrences weren't exclusive to "Free as a Bird" either; the "Real Love" sessions were just as creepy.

“We put one of those spoof backward recordings on the end of the single for a laugh, to give all those Beatles nuts something to do,” McCartney said with a laugh. “I think it was the line of a George Formby song.” Formby was a popular entertainer when the Beatles were growing up and a favorite of the group's members, particularly Harrison.

“Then we were listening to the finished single in the studio one night, and it gets to the end, and it goes, ‘zzzwrk nggggwaaahhh jooohn lennnnnon qwwwrk.’ I swear to God.

“We were like, ‘It’s John. He likes it!’”

Lennon once told his son Julian if he ever needed to contact him from beyond the grave, he'd send a white feather. That wasn't lost on McCartney when the three musicians stepped outside the studio for an impromptu photo opportunity. At the last minute, a white peacock entered the frame.

“That’s John. Spooky, eh?” McCartney reflects. “It was like John was hanging around. We felt that all through the recording.”

Those kinds of instances might have given them the chills, but in truth, the band had welcomed Lennon's presence into the studio. Starr himself had said they kept hitting a wall when they pushed on as a trio, with Lennon’s absence a gaping hole.

“I invented a little scenario,” McCartney later said (via the HollyHobs YouTube channel). “He’s gone away on holiday, and he’s just rung us up and says, 'Just finish the track for us, will you? I’m sending the cassette, I trust you.'

“That was the key thing, 'I trust you, just do your stuff on it.'

“I told this to the other guys, and Ringo was particularly pleased. It was very nice, and it was very reverent toward John.”

Years later, after Harrison had also passed on, Starr would reunite with McCartney for his solo track "Grow Old With Me." As things stand, it is the only track from one of the four's solo releases to feature songwriting credits from the entirety of the Fab Four, with another old Lennon demo revitalized, and a touching tribute to Harrison woven into its music.

As hoped for, the band's latest Anthology release includes outtakes and rarities, and the band's now nine-part documentary has been expanded with another episode that charts the making of the first Anthology in 1994 and 1995. The ghost of JohnLennon will undoubtedly haunt that, too.