Artists never want limitations placed on their creativity. Driven by the desire to keep making music, they often explore various styles, hoping to find one that resonates with listeners. George Harrison, known for embracing diverse musical influences, admitted that despite his broad explorations, he struggled to master blues licks later in his career.
Then again, telling a rock player not to play blues licks is like telling someone to try to breathe without using their lungs. Everyone in the world starts with a traditional blues foundation to get started, and even some of the greatest rock players of all time, from Chuck Berry to Jimi Hendrix, always had the same approach of the blues to get started on every single track they worked on.
Harrison certainly had a fascination with the blues, but he became a little more eclectic as The Beatles went on. Aside from the purists, he was also fascinated with Carl Perkins’s country approach to playing, which involved bending the notes and taking a few cues from people like Chet Atkins along the way.
Once Harrison learned the wonders of Eastern music, though, a lot of his slide guitarwork in his solo career was him trying to get in touch with that sound. He knew that he was never going to be the greatest sitarist in the world, so he may as well try to find a way to make his guitar speak in the same way that he heard other Indian players like Ravi Shankar perform. Now, it was about playing from the soul rather than relying on any scale.
But when Tom Petty talked about Harrison’s technique, he remembered the guitar maestro saying that he intentionally stifled himself, telling Paul Zollo, “It was just the two of us there, and it was really late at night. And he started playing electric guitar, and he started playing the blues. And he just played the shit out of the blues. And I had never heard him do that. I asked him, ‘Why have you never done that? I had no idea you could do that.’ And he said, ‘Oh, that’s Eric [Clapton’s] thing.’”
While Harrison had a point of Clapton having the blues down to a science, he always tended to use someone else for blues solos on his records, even electing to bring in Gary Moore on the second Traveling Wilburys album for the solo on ‘She’s My Baby’. ‘The Quiet One’ was usually a little too hard on himself as well, saying in the documentary Get Back that he’s not that good at playing that flavour of blues.
Even if he never touched a blues scale ever again, it was because he didn’t really need to anymore. Whether it was working on his solo career, with his best mates, or the occasional guitar solo put on someone else’s record, Harrison was looking to say more than just a typical musical passage. He made the guitar speak whenever he played, and every time that he performed, fans were getting a close look at Harrison’s soul.
