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For Harrison, much more quickly than for the others, the magic of the moment flickered and died. "At first we all thought we wanted the fame and that," he said in 1988. "After a bit we realized that fame wasn't really what we were after at all, just the fruits of it. After the initial excitement and thrill had worn off, I, for one, became depressed. Is this all we have to look forward to in life? Being chased around by a crowd of hooting lunatics from one crappy hotel room to the next?"
During the Beatles' grand conquest of America in 1964, when their initial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show drew an astonishing 73 million viewers and made them an overnight phenomenon, Harrison spent his days holed up in the Plaza Hotel with a high fever while the fab other three paraded around town, wowing the world's press with their vitality and wit. Then it was on to Washington for a concert at the Coliseum before more than 7,000 screaming fans. "It was bloody awful," Harrison told biographer Geoffrey Giuliano. "Some journalist had apparently dug up an old quote of John's that I was fond of jelly babies and had written about it in his column. That night we were absolutely pelted...Imagine waves of rock-hard little bullets raining down on you from the sky. Every now and then one would hit a string on my guitar and plonk off a bad note as I was trying to play. From then on, everywhere we went it was exactly the same."
Harrison's guitar idols had included not only rocker Carl Perkins but also Andres Segovia, and he had worked hard to master an intricate, precise technique (his later experiments with 12-string guitars, not to mention his sitar playing, would be vastly influential in rock music). Now concertgoers couldn't even hear him, and, worse, they didn't care. Harrison, who turned 21 just after that first brief American tour, wondered to the others on the flight home, "How f______ stupid it all is. All that big hassle to make it, only to end up as performing fleas."
It wasn't long before the other Beatles shared that opinion, and the band's last public concert was at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on Aug. 29, 1966. (The city had wanted to give the group a ticker-tape parade, but the boys nixed the idea. They were terrified by the crush of Beatlemaniacs and thinking not only of John F. Kennedy's assassination but also of death threats the Beatles had received in the wake of Lennon's recent "We're more popular than Jesus" comment.) With the end of live performance, the band, and Harrison in particular, moved on to what he considered more serious endeavors. His marriage to Patti Boyd in early '66 had altered his perspective, as had what he called "the dental experience," which, he said, "made us see life in a different light."