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The story of how Eric Clapton and George Harrison first met each other
George Harrison and Eric Clapton are certainly two of the greatest guitarists of all time and besides that they were also great friends. Their friendship continued even after Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd left him and married Clapton.
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Their connection was also in music, since they performed and recorded together many times over the decades. But how did that friendship start? Clapton recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine back in 1991.
When Eric Clapton talked about his friendship with George Harrison:
“We jostle a lot. It’s a very jostling relationship. He’s about a year or two older than me, and because he was there first, there’s a bit of swagger that never goes away. I love him very dearly, and I know he loves me, but it’s like we’re always testing each other. At the same time, there’s this total support. He’s like my older brother, really. When I’m around him, I always feel like I’ve got to do a bit better than I normally would.”
“(The first time we met) I was in the Yardbirds, and we were playing a thing called the Beatles Christmas Show at the Hammersmith Odeon, in London. The Yardbirds were on the bottom of the bill, but all of the acts in between the Yardbirds and the Beatles were sort of music-hall, English rock & roll groups. And the Yardbirds were an R&B band, or even a blues band. And so there was a bit of, like, What’s this all about? He was checking me out, and I was checking him out to see if he was a real guitar player.”
He continued:
“And I realized that he was. But we come from different sides of the tracks. I grew up loving black music, and he grew up with the Chet Atkins-Carl Perkins side of things – blues versus rockabilly. That rockabilly style always attracted me, but I never wanted to take it up. And I think it’s the same for him. The blues scene attracts him, but it evades him somehow. He’s much more comfortable with the finger-picking style of guitar,” Eric Clapton said.
Eric Clapton was the only guitarist who was not a member of The Beatles to play in a track released by the band. He played the guitar solo in “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, which was a George Harrison song. They worked with each other extensively in the following decades and even toured together.
