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That hosannas from the beknighted would be sung for George Harrison, born the son of a Liverpool bus driver during the darkest days of World War II, is in keeping with the kind of miracles the Beatles made for themselves. The most famous of the Beatles' fated hookups involves McCartney wandering by a summer festival at St. Peter's Parish Church in Liverpool's Woolton district on a hot day in 1957, and being transfixed by a skiffle band called the Quarry Men. Paul happened to have brought his guitar and impressed the band's leader, a cocky lad named Lennon, with raucous renderings of Eddie Cochran and Little Richard songs. That's the big cosmic moment, but in official Beatles lore there's an even earlier bit of predestiny. It is 1955, and George Harrison, just 12, is a miserable student putting in an hour's commute on his dad's bus, traveling from the family home in Speke to the Liverpool Institute. He is engaged in conversation by a boy a year ahead of him in school, the son of a cotton salesman from Allerton. Paul McCartney is just as crazy about guitars and American rockabilly stars as is Harrison, and soon he is joining young George in the evenings to practice their distinctive versions of Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O and Besame Mucho.
Without rehashing the many permutations of the evolving Quarry Men of the late '50s--the Moondogs, the Silver Beatles, the endless series of exploding drummers--we arrive in the Reeperbahn, the famous cabaret district in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 1960s with a band whose front line is Lennon-McCartney-Harrison because Lennon, in his wisdom, had decided that he would put at risk his dominance to build the strongest group. The way to think of those early Beatles is as one of the grittiest, nastiest, best punk bands ever, getting tighter by the night during sets that might last eight hours. "We were frothing at the mouth," Harrison remembered in The Beatles Anthology, a scrapbook of photos and reminiscences published last year, "because we had all these hours to play and the club owners were giving us Preludins, which were slimming tablets. I don't think they were amphetamine, but they were uppers. So we used to be up there foaming, stomping away." On many occasions he said that the best Beatles shows were in the clubs of Hamburg.
Harrison was the baby of the band, and if the inner dynamic of the Beatles had been different, his age might have cost him his place in history. During the group's first five-month gig in Germany, authorities discovered that Harrison, at 17, was too young to be working in the Reeperbahn nightclubs. They had him deported. Guitarists can be replaced, but by then McCartney and Lennon were protective of their little brother--the Beatles were as much a fiercely insular family as they were a ferocious rock band--and a few weeks later the boys were playing together again in England. Sounding better than ever, and much better than other Liverpool pop bands, the Beatles became local legends through their shows at the Cavern Club. They got a record contract, replaced their drummer with the talented Starr and were on their way.