How George Harrison and Eric Clapton helped each other
The story of George Harrison and Eric Clapton’s deep friendship became a focal point once again with the news that the two men shared a rare 1913 Gibson Style O guitar. The acoustic guitar, which went up for sale on Reverb.com this week for nearly $1 million, was used while Harrison and Clapton composed “Badge,” their joint composition from Cream’s Goodbye, and was nicknamed Pattie in a crude reference to Pattie Boyd, who married first Harrison and then Clapton.
Few people, including Beatles fanatics, were aware of the guitar’s existence before the guitar surfaced on Reverb, adding a new, if minor, instrument to the men’s history.
What often gets lost in the story of Harrison and Clapton’s friendship is how both men were supports for each others growth in 1968, a year in which each was working through new developments in their career. Cream had reached its end, and Clapton was insecure about his prospects for a solo career.
Harrison, having spent the past two years studying sitar and paying scant attention to guitar, had once again turned his focus to the instrument, having decided he would never master sitar. Moreover, Harrison had reached his breaking point as the Beatles’ third, and disregarded, songwriter.
This had become evident just one month before the October 1968 writing session for “Badge,” when, on September 6, Harrison invited Clapton to record his uncredited lead guitar work on Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gentle Weeps,” from the Beatles’ White Album. The group had recorded it once already, but Harrison was unhappy with their unenthusiastic performance — an unfortunately typical response to Harrison’s work.
His decision to bring in Clapton unannounced was the first indication that he was willing to break out of the quartet’s insular groupthink.
Harrison and Clapton's friendship dates back quite a bit further than their White Album session. They first met in December 1964, while Clapton was in the Yardbirds, who were on the bill of the Beatles' Christmas show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. The two guitarists struck up an acquaintance that would grow over the years.
Exterior view of The Pheasantry, club and house at 152 King's Road, Chelsea, London, UK, 26th August 1970. Eric Clapton lived here in 1968 when he and George Harrison were building their friendship The Pheasantry, where Eric Clapton lived in 1968, seen here in 1970. George Harrison was a frequent visitor as he and Clapton became close friends.
At the time of the White Album sessions, Clapton was living at the Pheasantry, an 18th-century building in London’s Chelsea district that had long been popular with artists and celebrities and had recently been converted into apartments and a nightclub. Harrison was a regular visitor and would share acetates, or demonstration discs, of the Beatles’ latest songs.
“Sometimes I would go down to George’s house in Esher and we’d play our guitars and take acid, and bit by bit a friendship began to form,” the guitarist wrote in Clapton: The Autobiography.
Source: guitarplayer.com/Christopher Scapelliti
