FIFTY YEARS AGO, George Harrison was basking in the afterglow of his late-1970 debut album, All Things Must Pass, which is still (in some circles) considered the greatest studio album by a former Beatle. But put yourself in George’s shoes. What do you do, now that ATMP’s three discs have claimed most of your best compositions, some of which you’d been squirreling away since 1966? Well, being George, you dive into the relatively stress-free business of playing guitar on other people’s records. (Of course, being George, you also dive into some seriously stressful business, namely organizing the Concert for Bangladesh that August). Harrison released only two songs in ’71 — “Bangla Desh” and “Deep Blue.” The rest of the year, he found himself in studios with two old Beatle buddies, plus Billy Preston, Badfinger and other artists. Sure, Harrison always gave it his all when playing for other people, but the fact that so many ace performances took place during the same year is remarkable; it’s comforting to think that, while he might’ve been temporarily out of gas on the songwriting front, he never lost that fire as a guitarist. Below, Guitar World Senior Music Editor Jimmy Brown helps us dig into some of Harrison’s finest intros, solos and licks from ’71.
JOHN LENNON, “GIMME SOME TRUTH” When people think of John Lennon’s Imagine album, they often forget that Harrison plays on half the tracks, thus creating one of the greatest “at least two Beatles in the studio” post-breakup pairings. One highlight is Harrison’s polished, vocal-like slide playing on this song. His bright, raspy guitar enters at 0:48, and it sounds like he used open E tuning, as evidenced by the overlapping, or “bleeding” together, of chord tones, which is uncharacteristic of his signature “single-notes-only” slide style and something you hear mostly with slide licks played in open tunings such as E, D, A or G, where allowing notes on adjacent strings to ring together often produces harmonically and melodically desirable results, as opposed to playing slide in standard tuning, where one needs to be much more careful about preventing unwanted notes from tagging along. George’s slide approach is also uncharacteristically bluesy here, which is interesting because Lennon’s chord progression is clearly not based on blues changes.