In early 1964, the Beatles rolled out of JFK Airport, on to the stage of The Ed Sullivan Show and into the frenzied hearts of millions of teenagers.
What were four identical musicians to parents were quickly individuated by their children. My two older sisters locked horns in debate: John vs Paul.
I was 6, and most of my school peers favoured Ringo: But whether it was because of his cartoon monobrow, his terse self-possession or the simple fact that the other three seemed taken, I was drawn to George Harrison.
The irony is that Harrison, “the quiet Beatle”, was in many ways the most outspoken in private life. He was more critical to the group and to cultural history than is generally acknowledged.
Without him, the Beatles might never have happened. The band’s earliest iteration, the Quarrymen, had broken up until George reformed them for a key club date.
Their initial 1962 meeting with EMI producer George Martin was going south until Harrison broke the ice by insulting Martin’s necktie.
Who was the first rocker to explore Eastern spirituality and broker what would come to be called world music? George Harrison.
Who spurred the Beatles to quit live performance and expand their sonic palette in the studio? George Harrison.
Who awoke rock’s social conscience and invented the all-star charity event with the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971? You’re catching on.
This is part of the impetus behind Philip Norman’s new biography, George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle – the self-styled “dark horse” of the 20th century’s most important pop act.
The other part seems to be completism: Norman authored the first serious book about the Fab Four, Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation, which was published in 1981, and has since written biographies of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Not surprisingly, much of the author’s research had been done when it became time to write the new volume, especially as it pertains to the “Beatles decade” of 1958 up to 1970.
These passages do feel warmedover, as if Norman were reciting a familiar story while reminding himself to keep the focus on the lead guitarist.
It is in the chapters on Harrison’s childhood – George was arguably the poorest of the Beatles but came from the warmest and most supportive family – and on the post-breakup years that we get closer to the particulars and paradoxes of this enigmatic man.
And there are paradoxes aplenty, chief among them what Ringo described as his bandmate’s battle between “the bag of [prayer] beads and the bag of cocaine”.
To the public, George was the most saintly of rock stars, but in private he sinned as much as his A-list peers, and to read of his extramarital affairs – including sleeping with Ringo’s wife, Maureen Starkey, and chasing after his own wife’s teenage sister – is to understand why Pattie Boyd, aka “Layla”, left him for Clapton.
The overarching irony, as Norman notes, is that the more George meditated, the more uptight he seemed to get.
But “The Reluctant Beatle” is also a biography of an excluded man – a good songwriter in a band with two all-time greats, and a talented musician whose talents were rarely acknowledged.
The book is mostly a dutiful recounting of the life of a poor but happy kid who loved rock-and-roll with a purity that precluded the need to get famous and whose response to becoming one of the four most celebrated people on the planet turned him into a seeker, a mystic and a misogynist.
Tellingly, Norman interviewed everybody he could except Harrison’s widow, Olivia, and their son, Dhani; he speculates they may have been put off by a less-than-glowing obituary he wrote after George’s death in 2001.
Sir Michael Palin of the Monty Python troupe relates how Harrison mortgaged his mansion to underwrite Monty Python’s Life of Brian and went on to become one of the most important independent film producers of the 1980s.
Leave it to Palin to counter the myth of George Harrison “the quiet Beatle”.
“When he was around us, you could hardly get him to shut up.”
Ty Burr writes the movie newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List.