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by Mark Edwards
There’s a new George Harrison compilation in the shops — Let It Roll: Songs of George Harrison, on Capitol/EMI — that tells us two things. First, it reminds us what a great songwriter the “third best writer in the Beatles” actually was. Then, as the first compilation to truly span the man’s career, it serves as a rebuttal to the idea that he made one great solo album, All Things Must Pass, and that nothing much after that is worth bothering with. (Although it also, sensibly, traces his work back into the Beatles era, with live versions of Here Comes the Sun, Something and While My Guitar Gently Weeps — taken from the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh.)
The one thing that never gets said about Harrison, however, is this: he was the greatest rock guitarist of all time.
It’s a contentious view, I know. I don’t suppose Harrison has topped a poll of guitarists in the past 40 years. When Rolling Stone listed the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time a few years back, he wasn’t even in the top 20. Predictably, and inevitably, Jimi Hendrix came first, with the likes of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Duane Allman not far behind.
The usual criteria for being considered a great guitarist are clear: noise, speed, flashy showmanship and obvious virtuosity. The Rolling Stone poll, like most, chose the best guitarists in the same way a toddler would decide what to run towards on entering a new room: oooh, shiny!
Harrison wasn’t particularly loud, wasn’t particularly fast and was never knowingly flashy. While he was clearly a virtuoso on the instrument, he never did anything to draw attention to the fact. Harrison had a different talent, an extraordinary talent. Harrison never played a wrong note, and never played a note that wasn’t necessary. Every single note he ever played made the song better.
Let’s use a football analogy here. Barcelona are the champions of Europe. Their star player is Lionel Messi. He can do amazing — almost unbelievable — things with a football. But if you told most football managers in the world that they could sign just one player from Barcelona, they’d choose Xavi, the rarely spectacular, but always, always effective midfielder whose passing holds the team together. Messi can turn a game, but Xavi controls virtually every game.
Similarly, the flashy guitar gods can blow you away with a few notes at the end of a solo; but Harrison makes every song work. Harrison is then, to use another sporting term, rock’s Most Valuable Player. His “stats” are incredible.
Here’s the proof. Ask yourself: have you ever heard a cover version of a Beatles song that is better than the original? You can’t think of one, can you? And that’s extraordinary. If we take any of the band’s peers — the great artists of the 1960s — we find that the same isn’t true. Dylan? Well, Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower is better than his. Leonard Cohen? Many people will choose Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah or REM’s First We Take Manhattan over the originals. Lou Reed himself said that the Cowboy Junkies’ version of Sweet Jane was better than the Velvets’.
So why can’t you think of a Beatles cover that tops the original? Yes, they were the best songwriters around, but we’re not talking about the songs here, we’re talking about the performance. The reason is this: to do a better version of a Beatles song than the band themselves, you have to come up with a different — and better — guitar part than Harrison played on the original. And that just can’t be done. He always made exactly the right decisions.
One day someone will invent a software program to prove this, but for now we must use the evidence of our ears. The half-dozen notes that introduce Something — what else could you put there? The riffs that drive Ticket to Ride and Day Tripper — how exactly would those songs work without them? Or the vicious guitar break in Paperback Writer — if Keith Richards had played it, that would be revered as one of the great guitar riffs, but Harrison plays it, so it’s not considered on its own as a great riff, it’s taken simply as part of a great song. The same is true of the intricate figure in I Feel Fine. Harrison doesn’t draw attention by going off on mazy runs, but he’s always there for his team-mates.
In fact, Harrison’s aversion to guitar heroics was so great that on the one song he wrote that just begged for a showy solo — its very title, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, demanded one — he got his mate Eric Clapton in to play it.
One reason Hendrix always tops polls of guitarists is the idea that he “invented” rock guitar, that he was the great innovator. Yes, he was an innovator, but so was Harrison. Think about it. The Beatles, after all, did virtually everything first, and even if that innovation was, at first, driven by Lennon and McCartney, I don’t believe there are any recorded instances of Lennon snatching Harrison’s guitar and saying “No, like this”. Harrison was always ready to match them, as they moved from pop to rock, by venturing into dissonance, aggression and feedback; and, pretty soon after the band began pushing back the horizons of pop, he revealed an innovative spirit of his own. Putting down your electric guitar and picking up a sitar instead would seem a little quirky if the lead guitarist of a chart-conquering band did it today; back in the mid-1960s, it was stunning.
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It's about time someone said it. Mark Edwards of The Times I salute you
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