George Harrison could possibly hold the distinction as the Beatle who went the furthest after the band ended.
Even though people were concerned about seeing the quiet, handsome kid turn into one of the biggest spiritual gurus of his time, the importance for him was to keep reinventing himself and moving on to the next phase of what life has to bring. But that’s not to say that he didn’t still have the kind of affection he had when rock and roll first came to town.
Because when all of the Fab Four first listened to rock and roll, they may as well have had a lightning bolt surge through their body. The likes of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley were unlike anything they had ever heard before, and the first thing that they wanted to do was grab their guitars and start learning the licks that made ‘Johnny B Goode’ sound so cool or track down a piano to figure out the boogie behind a tune like ‘Tutti Frutti’.
It may have all been new to them, but for anyone that was deeply ingrained in American music, this was the kind of music everyone knew like the back of their hand. They had been used to making the best blues musicians in the world in the American South, and with only a few tweaks, rock and roll was born when Berry took the makings of the blues shuffle and twisted it in his head and gave it a bit more rhythm.
And for all of the genre boundaries that everyone liked to put around themselves, The Beatles never were concerned with what part of the record store one of their favourite albums came from. While there was already enough racial tension in America between different styles of music, the Fab Four were never afraid shouting the praises of Motown artists and other R&B legends to kids that considered Frankie Avalon to be the heaviest thing they ever listened to.
But even by R&B standards, rock and roll started to feel a little bit different when Ray Charles got behind the piano. He was far from the first person to play soul music like that, but when he started adding a bit more swagger into his delivery on tracks like ‘Let The Good Times Roll’ and ‘What’d I Say’, fans were transfixed every time it came on the radio.
Although Charles also managed to endear himself to the country crowd as well, Harrison felt that ‘What’d I Say’ will forever be lodged in his brain thanks to it playing at a party he attended when John Lennon and Paul McCartney were still in art school, saying, “The great thing about the(and I’m sure John and Paul would agree) was that somebody had a copy of ‘What’d I Say’ by Ray Charles, a 45rpm with Part Two on the B side. That record was played all night, probably eight or ten hours non-stop. It was one of the best records I ever heard.”
The track was already a fantastic slice of R&B, but it turned out that record would become a lot more important later in life when they first started breaking in Ringo Starr. He was far from a full-time member of the group, but when sitting in for Pete Best, Starr’s performance of ‘What’d I Say’ was what made McCartney turn his head and figure that maybe they would sound better with him behind the kit.
And considering Harrison’s love for soul later in life trying to match artists like Smokey Robinson, he never forgot the kind of lessons that he learned from Charles. The most important part of playing in a band is that camaraderie, but to make any song bounce, it needs that sense of musical swagger to it.
