The third part of the equation that would become the Beatles fell into place on Feb. 6, 1958. George Harrison joined the Quarry Men, the John Lennon-led group that Paul McCartney had joined as a second guitarist and singer the previous summer. Harrison, who was a few weeks shy of his 15th birthday, had known McCartney for about a year. The two were students at the Liverpool Institute and frequently took the same bus to and from school. A friendship blossomed, and the two began jamming together, even after McCartney had moved from Speke to Allerton. When the Quarry Men – named after the Quarry Bank High School where the band was formed the years earlier – were looking to bring in a third guitarist (they had the idea long before Lynyrd Skynyrd), McCartney suggested his friend. The audition took place, strangely enough, on the top of a double-decker bus. At McCartney’s prompt, Harrison took out his guitar and played Bill Justis’ R&B instrumental ‘Raunchy,’ a No. 2 hit on Sun Records in 1957. Lennon was impressed with the note-perfect rendition. But the 17-year old Lennon, who was already at Liverpool Art College, had reservations about being in a group with such a youngster. As McCartney put it in ‘Anthology,’ “It seemed an awful lot at the time. If we wanted to do anything grown-up we worried about George looking young. We thought, ‘He doesn’t shave…can’t we get him to look like a grown-up?’” Typically, Lennon, also in ‘Anthology,’ put it more bluntly. “George looked even younger than Paul — and Paul looked about 10, with his baby face.”
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 08:40:34 +0000
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