It may seem the four Beatles were fated to be together. But in reality, the group's lineup was defined from the beginning by the members accepting their individual limitations and bringing in players who could make up for them.
It’s well known that, in the beginning, the Beatles had three guitarists: John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney. Along with bassist Stuart Sutcliffe and drummer Pete Best, the five-piece Beatles landed in Hamburg in 1960, where for roughly two years they honed their skills.
But when Sutcliffe left the group in July 1961 to continue his art studies, it fell to McCartney to take over bass guitar duties. The instrument was beyond Lennon's abilities, and Harrison’s lead guitarist skills were too valuable.
But perhaps most crucial to that decision was McCartney's ill-fated attempt at a guitar solo on his first gig with Lennon. It not only put him off playing lead guitar — it also led directly to Harrison being hired as the group's lead guitar. And it all happened one fateful night in January 1958.
It's not that McCartney lacked the talent to grow into the role. One of Lennon’s first observations when he met his future bandmate on July 6, 1957, was his skill as a guitarist. McCartney showed his strengths by spontaneously performing Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” for Lennon and his group, the Quarrymen, nailing both the lyrics and, more importantly, its twanging electric guitar riff. It was precisely why Lennon invited him to join the Quarrymen in 1957.
“I was very impressed by Paul playing ‘Twenty Flight Rock,’” Lennon told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies. “He could obviously play the guitar. I half thought to myself, ‘He’s as good as me.’ I’d been kingpin up to then… But he was good, so he was worth having.”
McCartney was so good, in fact, that it was decided he should handle lead guitar duties, something well beyond the skills of Lennon, who was still playing banjo chords he’d learned from his mother, Julia. (It was McCartney who would teach him proper chord fingering.) McCartney welcomed the role and stepped into it confidently and without hesitation.
But one bad night changed it all. It was, by sorry coincidence, McCartney’s very first gig with the Quarrymen. It happened Friday, October 18, 1957, at the Clubmoore Conservative Men’s Club, on Broadway, in the north of Liverpool.
McCartney’s big solo was a piece called “Guitar Boogie,” by Arthur Smith and His Cracker-Jacks. Smith was an American musician, composer and record producer, as well as a radio host and the man behind The Arthur Smith Show, the first nationally syndicated country music show on television.
Smith wrote and recorded “Guitar Boogie” in 1945, and the song went on to sell three million copies, earning him a Gold disc at the time and making him famous as Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith. The song was so popular that, the year after the Quarrymen were performing it, a U.S. group called the Virtues worked up a rock and roll version that became an international hit.
As McCartney explained in the Beatles’ Anthology book, the song and its solo were well within his adolescent grasp.
“I could play it easily in rehearsal,” he recalled, “so they elected that I should do it as my solo. Things were going fine, but when the moment came in the performance I got sticky fingers; I thought, What am I doing here?”
McCartney stumbled onstage and — worse — in front of John Lennon. Just 17, Lennon was nearly two years older than McCartney and looked more like a man than a teen. It was a humiliating defeat for the 15-year-old.
“I was just too frightened,” he explained. “It was too big a moment with everyone looking at the guitar player. I couldn't do it. That's why George was brought in.”
It’s no coincidence that McCartney almost immediately began pushing Lennon to let Harrison join. Having been humiliated once, he was eager to let his younger and more experienced friend take the spotlight.
Lennon wasn’t convinced at first. George was nearly two and a half years his junior and, at 14, looked younger than his years.
"George looked even younger than Paul," Lennon once remarked. "And Paul looked about 10, with his baby face."
Everything changed when Lennon agreed to let Harrison audition. The deed went down on the night of February 6, 1958 — about three weeks before Harrison's 15th birthday — on the top deck of a Liverpool bus.
“I told John and the other Quarrymen about this guy at school called George,” McCartney recalled in Anthology. “ ‘He is a real good guitar player, so if you're thinking of guitar — this is your boy.’”
George’s showpiece was “Raunchy,” a greasy guitar vamp by American guitarist Bill Justis. The song had been released just months earlier, on September 23, 1957, and quickly became an international hit.
“George could play 'Raunchy' so well, it really sounded like the record,” McCartney recalled. “We were all on the top of an empty bus one night and I said, 'Go on, George.' He got his guitar out and sure enough he could play it, and everyone agreed, 'You're in. You've done it.’ ”
Despite McCartney's fear of soloing, he did eventually get his courage back. By early 1965, he was taking the lead on the Help! tracks "The Night Before," "Another Girl" and "Ticket to Ride." He would go on to play solos on numerous other Beatles recordings, including Harrison's own song "Taxman," from 1966's Revolver.
As McCartney has revealed in previous interviews with Guitar Player, despite playing bass as his main instrument, he’s always felt that acoustic guitar is his main instrument. It was on acoustic that he composed “Blackbird,” from the Beatles’ White Album, using Bach’s Bourée in E minor as the springboard. Ultimately, McCartney more than acquitted himself as a guitarist in the Beatles and demonstrated a range and diversity that grew more impressive by the band's end.
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