George Harrison

By BJ Heinley

Key Moments

Born in Liverpool (February 25, 1943): 12 Arnold Grove, Wavertree. A two-up two-down with an outside toilet.
John meets Paul (July 6, 1957): St Peter's Church fête, Woolton. Paul, fifteen, shows John how to tune a guitar and plays 'Twenty Flight Rock' from memory.
Auditions for John (February 6, 1958): On the top deck of a Liverpool bus, playing 'Raunchy'. John thought he was too young and took him anyway.
First Hamburg residency (August 17, 1960): The Indra Club. The name has settled on The Beatles and they play something like eight hours a night.
Ed Sullivan debut (February 9, 1964): 73 million Americans watch. The British Invasion begins.
Shea Stadium Concert (August 15, 1965): First stadium show in rock history. 55,600 attendees.
Sitar on Norwegian Wood (October 12, 1965): An instrument he had bought in a London shop on a whim, played badly, on a number one record. Indian music enters Western pop.
Last live concert (August 29, 1966): Candlestick Park. They retreat to the studio permanently.
Sgt. Pepper's (May 26, 1967): The concept album, and the record that made the studio itself an instrument. Roughly 700 hours of studio time across five months, against the 10-hour single session that produced the debut LP four years earlier.…
Rooftop concert (January 30, 1969): Impromptu 42-minute set on Apple Corps' roof. Their last public performance.
Abbey Road (September 26, 1969): Recorded last. The Side B medley closes the career.
All Things Must Pass (November 27, 1970): A triple album of everything the others had turned down. Seven weeks at number one — the first solo Beatles chart-topper and the best-selling of them all.
Concert for Bangladesh (August 1, 1971): Madison Square Garden, two shows, organized in five weeks at Ravi Shankar's asking. The template for every benefit concert since.
Dies at 58 (November 29, 2001): Los Angeles. His ashes were scattered in the Ganges.
Now and Then (November 2, 2023): Fifty-three years after the split. Machine learning separates John's voice from the piano on a 1977 demo.

Every event

Born in Varanasi (April 7, 1920): Into a Bengali Brahmin family; trained under Allauddin Khan for six years.
Born in Liverpool (February 25, 1943): 12 Arnold Grove, Wavertree. A two-up two-down with an outside toilet.
Born (March 17, 1944): Taunton, Somerset; raised partly in Kenya.
Born (May 18, 1948): Los Angeles.
Dien Bien Phu falls (May 7, 1954): French colonial rule in Indochina ends. The country is partitioned at the 17th parallel.
Brown v. Board of Education (May 17, 1954): School segregation ruled unconstitutional. The same September, Paul meets George on a bus in Liverpool.
'That's All Right' (July 5, 1954): Sun Studio, Memphis. Three years before John and Paul met.
Meets Paul on the bus (September 1, 1954): The 86 to the Liverpool Institute. George is eleven.
Rosa Parks arrested (December 1, 1955): Four days later, the Montgomery bus boycott begins.
Ravi Shankar first tours the West (January 1, 1956): A decade before a Beatle picked up a sitar, and he had been playing for thirty years before that.
'Heartbreak Hotel' (January 27, 1956): His first national number one. John Lennon bought a guitar.
John meets Paul (July 6, 1957): St Peter's Church fête, Woolton. Paul, fifteen, shows John how to tune a guitar and plays 'Twenty Flight Rock' from memory.
Sputnik (October 4, 1957): The space age opens three months after John and Paul meet at Woolton.
Auditions for John (February 6, 1958): On the top deck of a Liverpool bus, playing 'Raunchy'. John thought he was too young and took him anyway.
Drafted into the Army (March 24, 1958): Two years away at the exact moment British teenagers needed something to replace him.
Berry Gordy founds the label (January 12, 1959): Detroit, on an $800 family loan.
Sharpeville massacre (March 21, 1960): 69 killed at a pass-law protest. South Africa leaves the Commonwealth the following year.
First Hamburg residency (August 17, 1960): The Indra Club. The name has settled on The Beatles and they play something like eight hours a night.
Deported from Hamburg (November 21, 1960): Seventeen and working under-age in a district he was not allowed in after ten at night.
Gagarin orbits the Earth (April 12, 1961): First human in space.
Kennedy commits to the Moon (May 25, 1961): Before this decade is out.
The Berlin Wall goes up (August 13, 1961): Overnight. The Beatles are in the middle of their Hamburg years, a few hundred miles west.
First gig at the Marquee (July 12, 1962): Five weeks before Ringo joined the Beatles.
Mandela arrested (August 5, 1962): Two weeks before Ringo joined the Beatles.
Surfin' Safari (October 1, 1962): Released the same week as 'Love Me Do'.
Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16, 1962): Thirteen days. 'Love Me Do' had been out for eleven of them.
Please Please Me session (February 11, 1963): The whole debut album cut in one day at Abbey Road — ten hours and forty-five minutes, with John singing 'Twist and Shout' last because it would wreck his voice.
Please Please Me (March 22, 1963): Debut LP, recorded in a single 10-hour session at Abbey Road.
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (May 27, 1963): The Beatles played it constantly in Paris the following January.
With the Beatles sessions (July 18, 1963): Recorded in snatched days between tours and TV dates.
Partial Test Ban Treaty (August 5, 1963): Atmospheric nuclear testing banned by the US, USSR and UK.
March on Washington (August 28, 1963): 'I Have a Dream'. Three months before the band's first American single.
'Don't Bother Me' (September 11, 1963): His first recorded song, written in a Bournemouth hotel bed while ill, mostly to prove he could.
'I Wanna Be Your Man' (November 1, 1963): Written for them by Lennon and McCartney in about twenty minutes, in front of them. Keith Richards said it was the moment the Stones decided to write their own.
Royal Variety Performance (November 4, 1963): Prince of Wales Theater, in front of the Queen Mother. John tells the cheap seats to clap and the rest to rattle their jewelry.
With the Beatles (November 22, 1963): Released at the peak of UK Beatlemania.
The Beatles cover three Motown songs (November 22, 1963): With the Beatles carries 'Please Mr. Postman', 'You Really Got a Hold on Me' and 'Money'.
Kennedy assassinated (November 22, 1963): Dallas. With the Beatles was released in Britain that same day.
A Hard Day's Night sessions (January 29, 1964): Started at Pathé Marconi in Paris, finished at Abbey Road around the film shoot.
Ed Sullivan debut (February 9, 1964): 73 million Americans watch. The British Invasion begins.
Washington Coliseum (February 11, 1964): First US concert, two days after Ed Sullivan. 8,092 people, a boxing ring stage, Ringo's kit turned by hand between numbers.
Meets George on A Hard Day's Night (March 2, 1964): Cast as a schoolgirl on the train. He asked her out the day they met, and she said no.
Rivonia Trial: life sentence (June 12, 1964): Mandela and seven others to Robben Island. He would be there for eighteen years.
Civil Rights Act signed (July 2, 1964): Segregation in public accommodation outlawed — mid-way through the Beatles' first American tour, on which they refused to play segregated venues.
A Hard Day's Night (July 10, 1964): First LP entirely by Lennon–McCartney.
Gulf of Tonkin (August 2, 1964): The incident that produced the resolution, and with it an American war. Six months after Ed Sullivan.
'You Really Got Me' (August 4, 1964): A slashed speaker cone, and arguably the first hard rock record.
Beatles for Sale sessions (August 11, 1964): Squeezed between two tours. The exhaustion is audible and largely the point.
Supremes: 'Where Did Our Love Go' (August 22, 1964): The first of five consecutive American number ones.
Meets the Beatles at the Delmonico (August 28, 1964): New York. He introduced them to cannabis, having misheard 'I can't hide' as something else entirely.
Beatles for Sale (December 4, 1964): Written and recorded between tours.
Brian Wilson stops touring (December 18, 1964): A panic attack on a flight to Houston. He stays home to write — two years before the Beatles do the same.
Help! sessions (February 15, 1965): Film soundtrack first, then the rest — including 'Yesterday' with a string quartet.
Selma to Montgomery (March 7, 1965): 'Bloody Sunday' on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
First combat troops land (March 8, 1965): 3,500 Marines at Da Nang. The band is in the middle of Help!
Bringing It All Back Home (March 22, 1965): Half electric. The line between folk and rock stops existing.
Banned from touring America (June 1, 1965): Four years, for reasons never made entirely clear. It cost them the American market at the moment it mattered most.
'(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' (June 4, 1965): The riff Keith Richards wrote in his sleep.
Goes electric at Newport (July 25, 1965): Booed off after three songs.
Meets Ravi Shankar (August 1, 1965): George's introduction to Indian classical music.
Help! (August 6, 1965): Second film soundtrack, contains 'Yesterday'.
Shea Stadium Concert (August 15, 1965): First stadium show in rock history. 55,600 attendees.
The Beatles visit Elvis (August 27, 1965): Bel Air. Awkward for an hour, then they played together. No recording was made, which everyone involved later regretted.
Rubber Soul sessions (October 12, 1965): Four weeks against a Christmas deadline. The studio starts becoming the instrument.
Sitar on Norwegian Wood (October 12, 1965): An instrument he had bought in a London shop on a whim, played badly, on a number one record. Indian music enters Western pop.
'My Generation' (October 29, 1965): Recorded four weeks before the Rubber Soul sessions ended.
Rubber Soul (December 3, 1965): The studio pivot. Sitar debuts on 'Norwegian Wood'.
Marries George (January 21, 1966): Epsom register office, with Paul as best man.
Revolver sessions (April 6, 1966): Opens with 'Tomorrow Never Knows' — tape loops, Leslie-cabinet vocal, artificial double tracking.
Pet Sounds (May 16, 1966): Made in answer to Rubber Soul. Paul called it the record that made him want to make Sgt. Pepper's.
Begins teaching George (June 1, 1966): First in London, then six weeks in Srinagar and Bombay, starting with how to sit and hold the instrument.
Shankar begins teaching Harrison (June 1, 1966): Six weeks in London, Srinagar and Bombay, starting with how to sit.
Nippon Budokan (June 30, 1966): First rock act to play the martial-arts hall. Nationalist protests and 35,000 police on duty.
Motorcycle crash (July 29, 1966): Woodstock, New York. He disappears from public view for eighteen months.
Revolver (August 5, 1966): Tape loops, reversed tape, Indian drone in a pop song.
South Africa bans Beatles records (August 8, 1966): Over John's remark about Christianity. The ban was not lifted until 1971.
Last live concert (August 29, 1966): Candlestick Park. They retreat to the studio permanently.
The television show debuts (September 12, 1966): Built on A Hard Day's Night, down to the running.
India — sitar study (September 14, 1966): Six weeks in Bombay and Kashmir studying sitar with Ravi Shankar.
Arrives in London (September 24, 1966): Chas Chandler brings him over. Within weeks Clapton, Townshend and Beck have all come to watch.
'Good Vibrations' (October 10, 1966): Seven months, four studios and around ninety hours of tape for three and a half minutes.
Sgt. Pepper's sessions (November 24, 1966): Nov 1966 – Apr 1967. 700 studio hours across five months.
Four No. 1 albums in a row (January 1, 1967): 1966–67. The story that they outsold the Beatles and the Stones combined came from Nesmith, who later admitted it wasn't true.
Apollo 1 fire (January 27, 1967): Three astronauts killed on the launch pad, during the Sgt. Pepper's sessions.
Magical Mystery Tour sessions (April 25, 1967): Runs straight out of Pepper and through Epstein's death in August.
Smile abandoned (May 1, 1967): Wilson hears Sgt. Pepper's and shelves the record meant to answer it. It stayed shelved for thirty-seven years.
'Waterloo Sunset' (May 5, 1967): Released three weeks before Sgt. Pepper's and largely buried by it.
Are You Experienced (May 12, 1967): Released three weeks before Sgt. Pepper's and kept off the top by it.
Headquarters (May 22, 1967): The one they actually played on. It went to number one and was immediately displaced by Sgt. Pepper's, where it stayed for eleven weeks.
Sgt. Pepper's (May 26, 1967): The concept album, and the record that made the studio itself an instrument. Roughly 700 hours of studio time across five months, against the 10-hour single session that produced the debut LP four years earlier.…
Opens with 'Sgt. Pepper's' (June 4, 1967): Saville Theatre, nine days after the album came out, with Paul and George in the audience. Paul called it one of the great honours of his life.
Burns his guitar at Monterey (June 18, 1967): The introduction to America.
Shankar at Monterey (June 18, 1967): Three hours on a Sunday afternoon, and a standing ovation from an audience that had come for rock.
Monterey Pop (June 18, 1967): They smashed their equipment; Hendrix followed and set fire to his.
Jagger and Richards sentenced (June 29, 1967): Drug convictions, quashed on appeal. The Times: 'Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?'
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (August 4, 1967): Recorded at Abbey Road in the studio next door to Sgt. Pepper's. The Beatles dropped in.
Brian Epstein dies (August 27, 1967): Manager's death at 32 changes the group dynamic forever.
Magical Mystery Tour (November 27, 1967): Soundtrack to a widely-panned TV film. But: 'I Am the Walrus'.
Tet Offensive (January 30, 1968): The turn in American opinion. Runs through the weeks the band spent in Rishikesh.
Rishikesh (8 weeks) (February 15, 1968): George stays until April with John. Rethinks his spiritual approach.
Rishikesh (February 16, 1968): His idea, and the reason the others went. He stayed longest but one.
Maharishi's Rishikesh course (February 16, 1968): Sixty students including four Beatles, Donovan, Mia Farrow and Mike Love. Around thirty songs came out of it.
Martin Luther King assassinated (April 4, 1968): Memphis. The band had returned from India eight days earlier.
Syd Barrett leaves (April 6, 1968): They stopped picking him up for gigs. He was twenty-two.
White Album sessions (May 30, 1968): May–Oct 1968. Recorded across five London studios amid fraying relationships.
Soviet tanks enter Prague (August 20, 1968): The Prague Spring crushed. 'Back in the U.S.S.R.' had been recorded ten days earlier.
First gig (September 7, 1968): Denmark, billed as the New Yardbirds, while the Beatles were finishing the White Album.
Head (November 6, 1968): A film built to demolish their own image, co-written by Jack Nicholson. It worked.
The Village Green Preservation Society (November 22, 1968): Out the same day as the White Album, and sold almost nothing.
The White Album (November 22, 1968): Sprawling double LP recorded amid fracturing relationships.
The Comeback Special (December 3, 1968): Black leather, back on television, seven years after his last live show.
Marvin Gaye: 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' (December 14, 1968): Seven weeks at number one.
Get Back sessions (January 2, 1969): Twickenham then Apple. Culminated in the rooftop concert.
Quits for five days (January 10, 1969): Walks out of Twickenham after a row with Paul. Comes back on condition they leave the film set and bring in Billy Preston.
Led Zeppelin I (January 12, 1969): Released the same month as the rooftop concert. The decade turns over.
Yellow Submarine (January 17, 1969): Half unreleased Beatles material, half orchestral score.
Rooftop concert (January 30, 1969): Impromptu 42-minute set on Apple Corps' roof. Their last public performance.
Abbey Road sessions (February 22, 1969): Recorded after the abandoned Get Back sessions were shelved.
Tommy (May 23, 1969): A rock opera, arriving as the Beatles were recording Abbey Road.
Brian Jones drowns (July 3, 1969): Aged twenty-seven, a month after leaving the band he founded.
Hyde Park free concert (July 5, 1969): Two days after Brian Jones died; a quarter of a million people.
Apollo 11 lands (July 20, 1969): Six weeks before the Abbey Road sessions finished. Roughly 600 million people watch.
Woodstock (August 18, 1969): Monday morning, most of the crowd gone, and 'The Star-Spangled Banner'.
Abbey Road (September 26, 1969): Recorded last. The Side B medley closes the career.
'Something' and 'Here Comes the Sun' (September 26, 1969): Two songs on Abbey Road that settle the question of whether he could write. Frank Sinatra called 'Something' the greatest love song ever written.
Moratorium march on Washington (November 15, 1969): Half a million people. Pete Seeger leads them in 'Give Peace a Chance', written in a Montreal hotel room five months earlier.
Altamont (December 6, 1969): A stabbing in front of the stage, four months after Woodstock. The counterculture's other bookend.
The split (April 10, 1970): He had a backlog of songs and, by his own account, relief.
Kent State (May 4, 1970): National Guardsmen kill four students. Three weeks after the Beatles' split is announced.
Let It Be (May 8, 1970): Recorded before Abbey Road, released after.
All Things Must Pass sessions (May 26, 1970): Abbey Road and Trident, produced with Phil Spector, with Clapton and most of what became Derek and the Dominos.
Lola released (June 12, 1970): Banned by the BBC until Coca-Cola became cherry cola.
Dies at 27 (September 18, 1970): London, five months after the Beatles announced the split.
All Things Must Pass (November 27, 1970): A triple album of everything the others had turned down. Seven weeks at number one — the first solo Beatles chart-topper and the best-selling of them all.
Sticky Fingers (April 23, 1971): First on their own label; the tongue logo arrives.
Marvin Gaye: What's Going On (May 21, 1971): Gordy thought it would fail. A soul record about Vietnam, poverty and ecology.
Asks for the Bangladesh concert (June 25, 1971): Hoping to raise perhaps twenty-five thousand dollars. It raised roughly a quarter of a million on the night.
Concert for Bangladesh (August 1, 1971): Madison Square Garden, two shows, organized in five weeks at Ravi Shankar's asking. The template for every benefit concert since.
Who's Next (August 2, 1971): Salvaged from an abandoned science-fiction project.
Surf's Up (August 30, 1971): The title song, shelved since SMiLE, finally surfaces.
Led Zeppelin IV (November 8, 1971): Untitled, four symbols, and one of the best-selling records ever made.
Exile on Main St. (May 12, 1972): Recorded in a basement in the south of France, in tax exile.
Aloha from Hawaii (January 14, 1973): Beamed by satellite to more than a billion people.
Paris Peace Accords (January 27, 1973): American withdrawal agreed.
The Dark Side of the Moon (March 1, 1973): Fifteen years on the American chart, recorded in the same building as everything above.
Living in the Material World (May 30, 1973): His second US number one, and the most explicitly devotional record any Beatle made.
Quadrophenia (October 26, 1973)
Meets George at Dark Horse (January 1, 1974): She was working at A&M, handling his new label's business.
Dark Horse tour (November 2, 1974): The first North American tour by an ex-Beatle, played with laryngitis and a set that refused to be a nostalgia show. Reviewers were merciless.
Partnership dissolved (December 29, 1974): The legal end, nearly five years after the public one. John signs last, at Disneyland; the court makes it final on 9 January.
Blood on the Tracks (January 20, 1975)
Fall of Saigon (April 30, 1975): The war ends, twenty-one years after Dien Bien Phu.
Soweto uprising (June 16, 1976): Schoolchildren protest against Afrikaans-medium instruction; hundreds are killed.
Loses the 'My Sweet Lord' case (September 7, 1976): Found to have subconsciously copied 'He's So Fine'. He said afterwards he became paranoid about writing anything at all.
Divorced (June 9, 1977): She married Eric Clapton two years later; George went to the wedding.
Dies at 42 (August 16, 1977): Graceland. Lennon: Elvis died the day he went into the Army.
Founds HandMade Films (January 1, 1978): Mortgages Friar Park to finance Life of Brian after EMI pulls out four days before shooting. Eric Idle called it the most expensive cinema ticket ever bought.
Some Girls (June 9, 1978): The answer to punk and disco in the same record.
Born (August 1, 1978): Windsor. His father was thirty-five.
Marries George (September 2, 1978): Henley-on-Thames, a month after Dhani was born.
Keith Moon dies (September 7, 1978): Aged thirty-two. He had given Ringo's son Zak his first proper kit.
George Harrison (February 14, 1979): Made after marrying Olivia and becoming a father. The happiest-sounding record he ever released.
Monty Python's Life of Brian (August 17, 1979): The film that existed because he wanted to see it.
Slow Train Coming (August 20, 1979): The first of the gospel records.
The Wall (November 30, 1979)
Cincinnati stampede (December 3, 1979): Eleven fans died in the crush before the show.
John Bonham dies (September 25, 1980): The band ends within three months.
Led Zeppelin disband (December 4, 1980): We could not continue as we were.
Tattoo You (August 24, 1981): Start Me Up, salvaged from a shelved reggae take.
Dennis Wilson drowns (December 28, 1983): The only Beach Boy who surfed.
Mona Lisa (June 13, 1986): One of some two dozen features HandMade made across fifteen years.
Cloud Nine (November 2, 1987): Produced with Jeff Lynne. 'Got My Mind Set on You' put him back at number one after fourteen years.
The Never Ending Tour begins (June 7, 1988): Concord, California. It has not really stopped.
Motown sold to MCA (June 28, 1988): The end of Gordy's independent Detroit-born label.
Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 (October 18, 1988): With Dylan, Petty, Orbison and Lynne, assembled in about nine days around a B-side that never stayed a B-side.
Kokomo reaches No. 1 (November 5, 1988): Their first chart-topper in 22 years, without Brian.
Steel Wheels (August 29, 1989): The reconciliation record; the tour that reinvented the stadium business.
HandMade sold (January 1, 1994): After a partner's mismanagement and a long, costly lawsuit.
Voodoo Lounge (July 11, 1994): First without Bill Wyman.
Anthology 1 (November 20, 1995): Outtakes, demos and 'Free as a Bird' — the three surviving members recording over a John Lennon cassette.
Throat cancer diagnosis (July 1, 1997): He blamed the cigarettes of his twenties.
Time Out of Mind (September 30, 1997): The late-career resurrection; Album of the Year.
Stops the attack at Friar Park (December 30, 1999): An intruder breaks in and stabs George forty times; she beats the man off with a lamp and a poker.
Dies at 58 (November 29, 2001): Los Angeles. His ashes were scattered in the Ganges.
John Entwistle dies (June 27, 2002): The night before a tour was to open.
Brainwashed (November 19, 2002): Finished by Dhani and Jeff Lynne to his notes, released a year after his death.
Concert for George (November 29, 2002): Royal Albert Hall, a year to the day after his death, with Clapton musical director and Dhani on stage with the band.
Live 8 reunion (July 2, 2005): Waters and Gilmour on one stage, once.
A Bigger Bang (September 5, 2005): Followed by the highest-grossing tour yet staged.
Reunion at the O2 (December 10, 2007): One night, with Jason Bonham on drums.
The SMiLE Sessions released (November 1, 2011): The great lost album, 44 years late.
That's Why God Made the Radio (June 5, 2012): The 50th-anniversary reunion with Brian back at the center.
50th anniversary shows open at the O2 (November 25, 2012): Fifty years and four months after the Marquee.
Dies at 92 (December 11, 2012): San Diego, eleven years after George.
Nobel Prize in Literature (October 13, 2016): For having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.
Blue & Lonesome (December 2, 2016): Back to Chicago blues covers — where they came in.
WHO (December 6, 2019): Townshend and Daltrey, still at it.
Rough and Rowdy Ways (June 19, 2020): A 17-minute song about the Kennedy assassination went to No. 1.
Charlie Watts dies (August 24, 2021): The quiet center of the band, 58 years at the kit.
Hackney Diamonds (October 20, 2023): First originals in eighteen years; Paul McCartney plays bass on one track.
Now and Then (November 2, 2023): Fifty-three years after the split. Machine learning separates John's voice from the piano on a 1977 demo.
Hackney Diamonds tour opens (April 28, 2024): Houston. Still touring, sixty-two years in.

Eras

Liverpool (1943–1960): Childhood, guitar, and the bus rides with Paul that led him to John.
The Beatles (1960–1970): George’s Beatles years, from Hamburg to the split.
Solo (1970–2001): All Things Must Pass, the Concert for Bangladesh, Dark Horse, film producing and the Traveling Wilburys.
Afterwards (2001–2013): After his death: Concert for George, Living in the Material World and his reissues.
India (1965–1971): From his first sitar to Rishikesh and the Concert for Bangladesh: Ravi Shankar, Indian music and Hindu faith.
HandMade Films (1979–1994): The film company he started to rescue Monty Python’s Life of Brian, behind Time Bandits and Withnail and I.
Wilburys (1988–1991): The Traveling Wilburys, with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne.

George Harrison

Key Moments

Every event

Eras

Sources

Original Horizontal (Phone) · mockup