Harrison remains a seriously underrated guitarist, but even to call him a "guitarist" feels wrong. He played the songs, and the guitar was what he happened to use. As a soloist, he had a beautifully clean melodic style, one almost completely devoid of the blues-riff clichis that almost every rock guitarist falls back on. He was a master of sophisticated chord voicings and gorgeous intros, like the roaring, cascading opening guitar line in "And Your Bird Can Sing." He was disconcertingly versatile: from the tricky pick-and-fingering country-twang Chet Atkins style of some of his early work, to the sitar and tamboura experiments on "Norwegian Wood" and "Within You Without You," to the gut-shaking straight rock in "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Clubs Band (Reprise)."

But his signature style (which the above solos share in -- Harrison had an identifiable voice from the beginning) is unclassifiable: It's the orchestral approach found on songs from "Fixing a Hole" to "Tomorrow Never Knows," an osmosis-like style in which the phrasings soak up the musical context like a sponge. Many of Harrison's solos sound like they were worked out in advance. This can sometimes take away from their sense of spontaneity, but it gives them great depth and subtlety. He played guitar like a composer, unhurried, willing to use silence, making every note count: He himself retreats until he becomes almost invisible, and what is left are musical passages that are so perfectly crafted that it is impossible to imagine them any other way.

Harrison was also an exceptionally gifted and varied songwriter, whose light was somewhat obscured by the supernovas he kept company with. His Indian-mystic efforts never quite sent me into whatever empyrean they were intended to, but the soft poignancy of "Here Comes the Sun," the muscular empathy of "If I Needed Someone," with its great chiming 12-string chords, and the satisfyingly nasty rant "Taxman" bear witness to a talent that at its best stands comparison with Lennon and McCartney. I don't know whether he had in him more than the two or three songs he was allotted per album or not (most of his post-Beatles work seems to indicate he didn't), and I don't really care. "Rubber Soul" and "Revolver" and "Beatles '65" and all the rest are his legacy, along with that of his mates, and they will do.

Above all, Harrison epitomized taste -- a commodity we don't readily associate with rock 'n' roll. He knew how to listen. He was a consummate team player, both as a calming influence on the stormy Lennon-McCartney sea and as a creative collaborator. And when dozens of his peers who ran off those pyrotechnic solos are long forgotten, George Harrison will still be there, deeply ingrained in songs that in their honesty, their strangeness, their enduring loveliness, will form his permanent epitaph.

For those of us who grew up when the Beatles were the very face of invincible youth, George Harrison's death, like that of John Lennon so many tragically long years before him, is inevitably a memento mori. The shock and pain of Harrison's passing is not as great as Lennon's, of course: Lennon was cut down at 40, and his murder ended the dream -- the illusion -- that the era of the Beatles could somehow go on forever. Dying of cancer at 58 is different. Yet something of the same pain, a pain mixed with an old wonderment, is stirred by George's death -- because in some corner of our hearts, he will always be George, that shy, fearless boy whose unlined face looked out at us so many years ago. So when we're thinking about it all we will ask each other: Do you remember the opening chords of "Getting Better"? Do you remember that bit when he comes wailing in at the end of "Got to Get You Into My Life"? And when the tears come, as they will for many of us, they will be tears not just of sadness but of joy, of a profound gratitude.

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