George Harrison wasn’t named ‘The Quiet Beatle’ by accident. From day one in the Fab Four, Harrison was never looking to be very animated, finding it easy to lay into the background of the group and play his lead guitar fills whenever the time called for it. Even though Harrison was never the easiest person to impress, he admitted that one artist knocked him out the first time he heard him.
Then again, Harrison was never shy about propping up artists that he thought were great. When The Beatles put together the beginnings of their record label, Apple, he was happy to lend his skills to his friends’ bands, contributing lines to the Cream song ‘Badge’ and playing on tracks by Jackie Lomax and Badfinger.
Even when the band started meeting to jam for the tentatively titled Get Back project, Harrison was used to running through different Bob Dylan songs. Having worked with Dylan on fine-tuning different songs for himself, Harrison would eventually become friendly with the folk-rock legend, making tracks like ‘I’d Have You Anytime’ when collaborating with Dylan.
While Harrison was known to be enamoured with all types of rock music, one of his greatest musical loves didn’t come from traditional Western music theory. When working on the film Help!, he became fixated on the sounds of Indian music after hearing various musicians play the music during one of the scenes.
Featuring a sitar on the group’s next album on the tune ‘Norwegian Wood’, Harrison eventually became aware of the sitarist Ravi Shankar, known for making bold experiments with traditional Indian music. Although rock may have given Harrison his first love, Shankar was the first person to give Harrison a jolt of energy when working off him.
When talking about his development as a musician, Harrison thought that Shankar was one of the few who truly inspired him in their first meetings, saying in Living in the Material World, “I’ve met loads of people, but I don’t think that I’ve met one person who’s really impressed me. The only person to ever impress me was Ravi Shankar, and he did it without trying. He leads by example.”
In the coming years, Shankar would become Harrison’s sitar teacher, showing him how to internalise Eastern music and infuse it into The Beatles’ music. Although the effects of Indian music are readily apparent in songs like ‘The Inner Light’ and ‘Within You Without You’, Harrison would later incorporate the different time signature changes into his songs, featuring a massive rhythmic rollercoaster during the song ‘Here Comes the Sun’.
Outside of being his teacher, Shankar would become a dear friend to Harrison for years afterwards, with Harrison playing his now-legendary shows for the relief of Bangladesh because of Shankar’s insistence. While Harrison was more than capable of taking music into new directions in The Beatles, Shankar was the one responsible for opening his eyes to the possibilities that lay outside conventional music theory.
