George Harrison, the so-called "Quiet Beatle," who added both rock `n` roll flash and a touch of mystic to the band, died on Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles after a long battle with cancer.
For millions of people, now grey and respectable, the news will trigger a flood of memories of days long gone, of flares and mop tops, of peace and love and war in Vietnam, of JFK, Malcolm X and the Maharishi, of mods and rockers, hippies, Panthers, protests, the pill and acid. For it was the Beatles, also known as `the Fab Four`, more than any other of the great rock `n` roll acts of that era, who provided the sound track for the 1960s, their unforgettable songs became the musical milestones of the `baby boomer` generation.
The youngest Beatle, Harrison was born in Liverpool on February 25, 1943. His father, Harold, was a bus driver, and his mother, Louise, a housewife who looked after George and his two brothers and one sister. It was Harrison`s love of guitars that spurred a friendship with an older school chum named Paul McCartney. Paul introduced George to the Quarry Men, a Liverpool band founded by John Lennon.
After several lineup changes and a name change, Harrison, Lennon and McCartney brought drummer Ringo Starr aboard.
While McCartney and Lennon wrote the bulk of the Beatles` hits, Harrison did have his share of nuggets, including `Taxman,` `Something,` `Here Comes the Sun` and `While My Guitar Gently Weeps.`
He also helped introduced Indian culture to pop music, playing the sitar on `Norwegian Wood` and getting the Beatles - and an entire generation - interested in Eastern religion and a new set of spiritual values. He was known as the "quiet" Beatle but Harrison also had a wry sense of humour that helped shape the Beatles` irreverent charm, memorably fitting in alongside Lennon`s cutting wit, McCartney`s boyish charm and Starr`s cartoonish appeal.
Harrison`s guitar work, modelled on Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins among others, was essential.
Although his songwriting was overshadowed by the great Lennon-McCartney team, Harrison did contribute such classics as "Here Comes the Sun" and "Something," which Frank Sinatra covered. Harrison also taught the young Lennon how to play the guitar.
At their first recording session under George Martin, the producer reportedly asked the young musicians to tell him if they didn`t like anything. Harrison`s response: "Well, first of all, I don`t like your tie." He was even funny about his own mortality. As reports of his failing health proliferated, Harrison recorded a new song - Horse to the Water - and credited it to "RIP Ltd. 2001."
He always preferred being a musician to being a star, and he soon soured on Beatlemania - the screaming girls, the hair-tearing mobs, the wild chases from limos to gigs and back to limos.
Like Lennon, his memories of the Beatles were often tempered by what he felt was lost in all the madness. "There was never anything, in any of the Beatle experiences really, that good: even the best thrill soon got tiring," Harrison wrote in his 1979 book, I, Me, Mine`. "There was never any doubt. The Beatles were doomed. Your own space, man, it`s so important. That`s why we were doomed, because we didn`t have any. We were like monkeys in a zoo."
By the late `60s, Harrison was clearly worn out from being a Beatle and openly bickered with McCartney, arguing with him on camera during the filming of "Let It Be."
In 1966, after the band had ceased touring, Harrison went to India, where he studied the sitar with Ravi Shankar. The following year, he introduced his bandmates to the teaching of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and all four took up transcendental meditation.
The sheer volume of material on that 1970 release confirmed the feelings of Harrison fans that he was being stifled in the Beatles. Despite the occasional hit single, including the Lennon tribute song "All Those Years Ago," Harrison`s solo career did not live up to initial expectations.
But in a 1992 interview with the Daily Telegraph, Harrison confided: "We had the time of our lives: We laughed for years." Fame continued to haunt him.
In 1999, he was stabbed several times by a man who broke into his home west of London. In 1966, he married model Patti Boyd, who had a bit part in "A Hard Day`s Night."
They divorced in 1977, and she married Harrison`s friend, the guitarist Eric Clapton, who wrote the anguished song "Layla" about her. Harrison attended their wedding.
Harrison died at a friend`s Los Angeles home at the age of 58. His second wife, Olivia Harrison, and son Dhani, 24, were with him.
With Harrison`s death, there remain two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.
Bureau Report