Hey folks, my name is Joe Bithorn I work with a band called Rain: A Tribute To The Beatles
and we're doing a piece here for Music Radar and I'm going to try and demonstrate some
of the things that I picked up from the late, great, George Harrison and try to kind of
feel my way through where I guess some of his influences might have come from. The song,
Till There Was You was very much a standard song, and standard song books, but the Beetles
were known for doing quite a lot of different kinds of music, show tunes was part of that
too. So this is the intro to it and again the melody is sounding out. And that's interesting
the way that he used the chords right around right around, where he's using that sort of thing.
Almost a Latin feel to it. And the solo, that, you have it bad now. You know the rest of
the song. Ok and this is going to be parts of the solo stuff for All my Love the first
I want to play what John Lennon plays on the rhymth part because it's very important, it's
almost like an Elvis kind of a thing. So let's see he goes...
[music]
And the solo goes...and way that I look at that solo, I kind of think of Sky Lure and Elvis playing rhythm guitar
you've got kind of a feel of sun record either playing between the sky lure did along with
Elvis' rhythm playing. They did some really great stuff back then and of course those
guys were huge Elvis fans.
Some of the things that George did on a song called I Need You which was in the film Help!
and also on that album as well. One of the interesting things about it is that you
can see his form on his left hand, fingering wise, this is what I'm hearing. So he's keeping
the A up on top with his pinky, then doing that, then when it gets to the other part. So
this is really a neat tone, tonality that goes with doing kind sort of thing, that sort
of chord. And so he's going from that to... once again that's the, he liked to use a minute chord
quite a bit, D chord, E and then back to that form. I'm just going play the D chord
but he's playing this inversion up here, that's the E and then the E like that unless it's
of course, that's the 7 and so the tail end of it, he's doing this, this is where it gets really interesting
and look at this then this wonderful thing. And I've been told or read it somewhere and been told,
I read somewhere that the volume control was actually being handled by John Lennon just
turning up the volume on the guitar while George stood there and played the part. Maybe
you think he got wise getting a volume pedal later on but that's what I heard, that's how
I heard it was done. Neat guitar part this little thing, especially to me. It's also
a Steely Dan if we shoot over to the piano I'll show you where part of those
influences that is very jazzy to me, I can think of a Chet Adkins but also this...
Steely Dan and that form, let's see, is something like... so it's something that's used in jazz predominently,
so that's why I'm thinking maybe Chet, maybe that's where George picked it up, but boy
just to do that at such an early time, I mean those guys must have been listening to some
pretty good music back then.
I wanted to show you something that the Beatles were quite fond of, they, and I'll show you
the solo to the song too, on Drive My Car they really start on the off beat but then
it seems to come in right and it takes a little bit of trickery or however you want to call
it to feel it but the, if the beat was here on 1,2,3...
[music]
And then you're on the beat. Ok the solo goes...and at the tail end of that solo he's got some kind of slide, maybe it's a pinky slide.
And that's the way I hear it, that's the way I hear what George did there for that song.
It's a very very interesting cool song amongst of the many cool songs and cool solos and
things that Mr George Harrison contributed to the Beatles. Ok and now we've played the
Drive my Car before, and I showed you that little slide thing that George does and I
think a lot of the technique, it starts sounding Hawaiian, I think there was an Indian influence
much in the way that Derek Trucks is very much influenced by a lot of the Indian style
slide players which not a lot of us knew but George had a way of bringing to the forefront
some other types of instruments and one of them of course we all know is the sitar which
I'm going to reach over and grab and pick up and play hopefully. Hopefully it's going
to be in tune. The very things that he brought to the plate, brought to the Beatles and brought
to all over us, I mean as far as music is concerned is pretty astounding. Anyway this is some of
Love You Too or Love To You or here it goes.
[music]
Anyway, some of that, the way it starts out is actually harmonic here, you hear that note,
right there, there's actually 2 notes there. That's just the way I've tuned this guitar, this is just a
scale down. One of the other songs is...so I mean George really brought a lot to the
plate. Ravi of course...Anyway a lot of rabbi and things of that nature, not that I'm a sitarist at all,
just from what I've listened to like Ravi and the Monterey Pop Festival, Ravi was the teacher
that really taught George to get a little bit more skill base on this instrument and
of course we have Anoushka Shankar I've seen on a tribute to George piece it's quite amazing,
I'm nowhere near, not by any stretch of the instrument a sitarist but I have a lot of
fun with this instrument so...