![]() The Duo was indeed a massive step up from any of his previous guitars. It was my first real American guitar-and I’ll tell you, it was secondhand, but I polished that thing. “One night I saw an advert in the Liverpool Echo,” Harrison later said in an interview, “and I rushed right over to see it… I bought the Gretsch Duo from a sailor who had bought it in America and brought it back. In 1961, he purchased what he later called his “first good guitar,” a 1957 Gretsch Duo Jet that he bought from a sailor returning from America. Harrison’s guitar prowess was developed during long sets the band played in Hamburg, Germany when they were establishing themselves as a group. In defiance of his father, George dropped out of high school at age 16 and the group started going by The Beatles and touring seriously by 1960. ![]() ![]() John Lennon is said to have not wanted Harrison in the band because he was “too young,” but his persistence paid off and was later accepted into the group. George was just 15 years old when he first auditioned for The Quarrymen, the band that would later become The Beatles. He met Paul McCartney on a fateful bus trip to school. The guitar was not fancy by any means, and it was purchased for £3.10, which is about $150 in today’s currency. Later that year, his father bought him a Dutch Egmond flat-top acoustic guitar and his life was changed forever. This disappointed him, and he later said the school “molded boys into feeling frightened.” In 1956, he heard Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” and became obsessed with guitars. He attended the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys where a music class was offered, but with no guitars. ![]() According to Pattie Boyd, George’s first wife, his mother was particularly supportive: “All she wanted for her children is that they should be happy, and she recognized that nothing made George quite as happy as making music.” His mother is said to have been hugely supportive of his musical interests from an early age. When you learn that his mother worked as a shop assistant and his father was a bus driver, his success and profound impact on music becomes even more incredible. Born in Liverpool, England in 1943, he was the youngest of four children. ![]()
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