woodcut radarscope: Remembering George Harrison 10 years later

Friday, December 2, 2011

Remembering George Harrison 10 years later

Ten years ago today, George Harrison died at age 58. To mark the occasion, we've collected a few classic images of the legendary musician?and excerpted his bio from our friends over at Rolling Stone.

Juergen Vollmer / Getty Images

George Harrison in Hamburg, Germany, in April, 1961.

Known first as "The Quiet Beatle," George Harrison was a great songwriter who had the misfortune to be surrounded by two stone cold geniuses whose work often obscured his talents. Yet Harrison compositions such as "Something" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" are as good as anything the Beatles ever recorded. And with his solo debut All Things Must Pass, he stepped completely out of the shadows of his Beatle band mates to reveal himself a powerfully spiritual songwriter with an expansive sense of melody. Harrison was also a gifted, fluid guitarist and hugely influential in introducing the Beatles ? and, by extension, the entire Sixties generation ? to Eastern religion and musical influences.

Before all that, Harrison was a teen guitarist in thrall to Britain's 1950s skiffle revival ? a working class kid with a band called the Rebels. It was Paul McCartney, a schoolmate one year ahead of Harrison, who invited the 15-year-old to jam with the Quarrymen, a group led John Lennon. (Harrison had come three years behind Lennon at his previous school.) This band would become the Beatles ? and Harrison would himself become, like Lennon and McCartney, one of his generation's great seekers. His response to fame, however, was to direct that search inside of himself

Read the full bio here.