Most people who know me know I’ve been a devoted Beatles fan since I was 13 years old.  Before I discovered them, I mostly ignored music and didn’t understand the attraction (mine is not a musical family).  Before I knew what was happening, The Beatles opened my heart and mind to the power of music, and became a gateway for me to discover many other phenomenal musicians, both past and present.

My favorite Beatle always vacillates between John Lennon and Paul McCartney.  They had the most charm, talent, and charisma.  They also wrote and performed the majority of my favorite songs, and were activists for causes I believe in.  Ringo is best as a backup artist, highly respected in the music world if less so by mainstream culture.  And then there is George.

George Harrison started in the Beatles as a guitarist.  It wasn’t expected for him to be a singer or a songwriter.  He had an impressive talent for music, but couldn’t compete with the Lennon/McCartney hits of the early ’60s.  A year into their success and 6 years after joining the band, George wrote his first song to be released on an album (“Don’t Bother Me”, With the Beatles, 1963).

I personally liked it a great deal and for a while as a child it was my favorite song, but by the standards of the group he was in it was just good enough.  Time passed, George continued to write, struggling to compete for space with the Lennon/McCartney juggernaut.  When John and Paul were writing songs like “Norwegian Wood”, “In My Life”, and “Nowhere Man”, George was writing “If I Needed Someone” (Rubber Soul, 1966).

It wasn’t until Revolver that Harrison’s true writing ability started to become evident.  The songs he wrote that made it to the album had a new level of intricacy and depth, but they were on the same record that had “Eleanor Rigby”, “For No One”, and “Here, There, and Everywhere” (not to mention “Yellow Submarine”) and didn’t garner much attention.

It’s at the very end of the Beatles, on Abbey Road, the last album they recorded, that George Harrison’s songs stand above and beyond the rest of the music on the album (with “Come Together” being a possible exception, but not in my opinion).  “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” both live on as classics, and George went on to have a prolific and honored career as a solo artist, including being inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of fame in 2004 (three years after his death).

Here are the lessons I’ve gathered from George Harrison’s story:

• Talent (even at the highest level) still requires the development of skill
• Everybody has a growth curve
• When you work with the best, you become the best
• Be persistent  (about 80% of the songs George wrote in the Beatles were rejected, especially at the beginning)
• Let who you are inform what you do:  The Beatles started as a traditional pop group; George Harrison was a philosopher and seeker of enlightenment.  He could never write a hit song like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”, so he wrote “My Sweet Lord” instead.