George Harrison Said Delaney and Bonnie and Indian Sitar Music Influenced His Slide Guitar Style
George Harrison said Delaney and Bonnie and Indian sitar music influenced his slide guitar style. The former Beatle never thought of playing slide guitar. However, after playing only sitar for a while, he needed to learn to give his guitar playing a fresh sound.
George Harrison first started playing slide guitar in 1969
In the mid-1960s, George met sitar legend Ravi Shankar and immediately began receiving lessons from him. Indian music took hold of George so much that he left his guitar behind. However, George realized he’d never become as good a sitar player as Shankar. So, he returned to the guitar.
When George picked up the instrument again, he discovered he was out of touch with it. Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix did unprecedented things on the guitar. So, George needed to freshen up his sound and thought slide guitar would help.
In 1977, George told Crawdaddy (per George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters), “All the young kids coming up were all playing so good and I hadn’t been involved with it for so long, both being in the Beatles, just playing the same old tunes, and playing Indian music. So I felt a long way behind, that was one reason why I had all the instruments.
“I suddenly realized ‘I don’t like these guitars’ and Eric gave me this Les Paul which really got me back into it because it sounded so funky. That was one of the reasons I started playing slide, you know, because I felt so far behind in playing hot licks. With slide I didn’t have any instruction, I just got one and started playing.”
George said Delaney and Bonnie and Indian sitar music influenced his slide guitar style
When George first started playing guitar as a teenager, his influences (to name a few) were Big Bill Broonzy, Jimmie Rodgers, and Carl Perkins. In The Beatles, George became one of rock ‘n’ roll’s best guitarists.
Then, Shankar came along during an especially uninspiring period in George’s life. No one wowed him, and neither did The Beatles’ music. Learning sitar changed George’s guitar playing and made him more creative. Delving into the sitar too much was dangerous for his guitar playing, but the sitar was always there.
Still, George couldn’t identify what influenced his slide guitar playing. He guessed it had something to do with playing with Delaney and Bonnie and, of course, Indian music.
“I’m not sure of the influences,” George told Timothy White at Musician Magazine. “The first time I ever played slide was in 1969. I suppose I stuck one of those things on my finger somewhere before that, but in 1969 Eric Clapton got his manager to bring Delaney and Bonnie over to England, and Eric was in the band.”
The former Beatle explained that he saw Clapton and the duo perform and wanted to be in the band. They invited him to join, and he did. During one show, Delaney gave George a slide bottleneck and asked him to play the slide guitar on “Comin’ Home.”
“I’d never attempted anything before that, and I think my slide guitar playing originated from that,” George recalled. “I started writing some slide songs on that tour, one of which later came out on ‘Thirty Three & 1/3,’ called ‘Woman Don’t You Cry For Me.’ Then I started playing that way at home, and I suppose I was always trying to pretend to be a blues player in my style.
“Another thing that influenced me was, during the ’60s, I played the sitar and got heavy into Indian music. That may account for some quality that you can’t quite put your finger on; it’s in there somewhere and comes out. For two or three years I was only playing the sitar.”
The former Beatle sometimes ‘blacked out’ during slide guitar solos
George practiced his slide guitar on John Lennon’s Imagine. He told White he sometimes blacked out a bit whenever he played a good slide guitar solo.
George explained, “I was earnestly trying to be a slide guitar player at that time but I always blacked out at solos, especially live ones. I seemed to have no control over what was happening and my mind’d go blank.”
George said he hit a few good notes, and it “happened to sound like a solo.” He never stopped playing slide guitar. While recording Cloud Nine, George added it to his song “This Is Love.”
In 1992, George told White at Goldmine that the song has some of his best slide guitar work.
“There’s also a great slide guitar sound on ‘This Is Love,'” he explained. “At one point when our engineer was unavailable for the week, I took the tapes up to Jeff Lynne’s house, where he’s got a little studio in one bedroom.
“I overdubbed the guitar while he did his thing with the radical EQ, and it gave a smooth, subtle wah-wah effect.”
George eventually became known for his slide guitar work, and it was all thanks to his influences.
