George Harrison earned the name Quiet Beatle because of a sore throat
When the Beatles landed in America in early 1964, George Harrison had strep throat and a fever, and doctors told him to talk as little as possible before The Ed Sullivan Show. Reporters read his silence as temperament. The nickname stuck, which amused him, and it has shaped how people picture him ever since.
Harrison was born in 1943 in a Liverpool terraced house with an outdoor toilet and a single coal fire, the last of four siblings born to a bus conductor and a shop assistant. His mother, a loud and enthusiastic singer, reportedly tuned in to Radio India every Sunday while pregnant with him, hoping sitar and tabla would calm her baby. She also paid for his first guitar at about 14, after he had heard Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel drifting from a neighbour's house while cycling past.
He met Paul McCartney on the school bus. John Lennon first judged him, just turned 15, too young for the Quarrymen, but a second audition on the upper deck of a bus, playing the instrumental Raunchy, won him over. Youth caught up with him again in Hamburg in 1960, when he was deported for being underage to work in nightclubs, cutting short the band's first residency.
Inside the Beatles he became the scout for new American records and the route to other sounds. He met the sitar on the set of Help! and played it on Norwegian Wood, and his Love You To is credited with presenting Indian music respectfully rather than as parody. Within You Without You, on Sgt. Pepper, featured no other Beatle. Though Lennon and McCartney wrote most of the songs, he contributed Taxman, Something and Here Comes the Sun, and in January 1969 he walked out for 12 days in frustration at how the band was run.
After the split, the triple album All Things Must Pass gave him My Sweet Lord. With Ravi Shankar he organised the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, a forerunner of Live Aid, and he co-founded HandMade Films in 1978 to rescue Monty Python's Life of Brian.
Source: George Harrison
