Paul McCartney and George Harrison Have Conflicting Stories About Which Beatle Scarred Himself While Hitchhiking
In the days before they were massively famous, Paul McCartney liked to take George Harrison and John Lennon hitchhiking. They made trips inside England, but they also traveled to other countries. McCartney looks back on these trips fondly and recalled an accident involving Harrison and a car battery. Interestingly, Harrison remembered the moment very differently.
Paul McCartney took George Harrison and John Lennon hitchhiking
Before they were recognizable everywhere they went, McCartney enjoyed taking hitchhiking trips with his bandmates.
‘I was a big hitchhiking fan, so I would persuade George and John, mainly, to come on holidays,” Harrison told GQ in 2020. “So George and I hitchhiked one time to Wales. We went to Harlech and stayed in a little place there and played a little gig, just me and George. Then me and John went down to Reading, where my uncle had a pub. And we played a little gig there as The Nerk Twins. And then me and John hitchhiked to Paris…”
He recalled hitchhiking so often on the trip that his thumb was sore.
“Once we’d finished, we’d have sore thumbs,” he said. “Just all of these memories, there are just so many of them….”
Paul McCartney and George Harrison have conflicting stories about who injured himself
Both McCartney and Harrison remember that on a hitchhiking trip, one of them burned themselves on a car battery. Where they can’t agree, though, is on who actually sat on the battery.
“That was George who did that!” McCartney told The New York Times. “I have a very clear recollection. He showed me the scar. Let’s set the record straight: It was George’s a**, and it was a burn the exact shape of a zip from his jeans.”
Harrison, however, told a different story.
“Going north through Wales we got a ride on a truck,” Harrison says in The Beatles Anthology. “The trucks didn’t have a passenger seat in those days so I sat on the engine cover. Paul was sitting on the battery. He had on jeans with zippers on the back pockets and after a while he suddenly leapt up screaming. His zipper had connected the positive and negative on the battery, got red hot, and burnt a big zipper mark across his arse.”
It’s unclear who actually sat on the offending battery, but McCartney seems to be sticking to his story.
The bassist said memories like this make him believe in magic
Regardless of who burned himself, McCartney said memories like this one make him feel that magic is real. The way the four members of the band fit together convinced him of it.
“I do like to go on about The Beatles, because it was magical,” he said. “People say, ‘Do you believe in magic?’ And I say, ‘I’ve got to.’ And I don’t mean, you know, Gandalf or wizardry or that sort of thing necessarily. For me, it’s how life can be magical, these things that just came together.”
