Other Early Instruments

A Topic Post

George Harrison

Well, our George was a guitar guy right from the very beginning. Towards the end of 1955, at the age of 12, George spent six weeks in the hospital with inflamed kidneys. During that time, he heard that an ex-schoolmate named Raymond Hughes was selling his Egmond Toledo acoustic guitar. As encouraging parents, and perhaps feeling bad for their boy’s illness, Harry and Louise Harrison came up with the £3/10/ (that’s about £115 or $150 today) it would take to buy the guitar, and George came home from the hospital and had his first instrument. He soon broke it, but his brother, Peter, was able to put it back together, so all was good and it was the one he had from late 1955 until mid-1957. We’ll be talking a lot about his many, many subsequent guitars in future posts. 

Stuart Sutcliffe

Stu, of course, didn’t really want to be a musician. John, Paul, and George talked him into buying a bass guitar and joining the band after he sold a painting to Sir John Moores during an exhibition. He actually did have some musical experience. He had taken piano lessons starting at age 9. He had also played the bugle and his father had taught him some chords on a Spanish acoustic guitar, which he still owned when he met John. But he didn’t have any interest in seriously pursuing becoming a musician. The bass guitar that he bought with his art money was a Hofner President 500/5, sometimes referred to as the 333 model, which denoted it’s dark, “brunette” finish. It was a giant, almost four feet long, and Stu was only about 5 feet 7 inches, so he barely looked like he could handle it. This was the only bass he played with The Beatles. It is currently owned by The Hard Rock Café and is on display in London.

Pete Best

As a young teen, Pete had received an acoustic guitar from his mother Mona Best as a gift, but he had never learned how to play it. He had always been more interested in drumming. His first opportunity came when someone whose name is lost to history left a snare drum and brushes at The Casbah and Pete began playing Sunday night Casbah shows with The Blackjacks, utilizing that snare drum and a pair of bongos. Mona soon (very likely at Christmas 1959) bought Pete a Premier Outfit 54 kit, a standard package with a bass drum, snare, and two toms. It also came with one cymbal. This was the set that he took to Hamburg, and once there he added a high-hat cymbal and a crash cymbal, both Zildjians. With the exception of little upgrades here and there and the cymbals, this kit was unchanged for Pete’s entire time as a Beatle.

Ringo Starr

Like Pete, Ringo really only wanted to be a drummer. In a 1998 interview with Andy Babiuk, Ringo said “My grandparents played mandolin and guitar and they gave me their instruments and I just broke them. I had a harmonica, I dumped it. We had a piano, I walked on it. I just was not into any other instrument.”¹ At about the age of 15, Ringo bought himself a huge bass drum from a second-hand shop and practiced with that. It wasn’t until the next Christmas, in 1956, that Ringo’s step-father Harry Graves bought him a kit that was being let go by a dance band. Ringo has also said that by the time he was 18, he had collected various drums, but when he played with The Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, he was a standing drummer, basically just playing a snare drum and a floor tom. After he started playing with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, he bought himself another full kit, this time an Ajax Edgeware Set. By the time he joined The Beatles, he was playing a Premier Continental 56. He was clearly very serious about his drum collecting.

Paul McCartney – More Than a Trumpet

The McCartney family had an upright piano in their living room that Paul’s father, Jim, played at family get-togethers. So Paul had an early introduction to playing piano, but Jim wanted him to learn properly and sent him to take lessons. But at the age of 11, Paul didn’t have much interest in doing music homework, preferring to just play what he wanted, so the lessons didn’t last very long. He also enjoyed playing his cousin Bett’s banjulele (I had never heard of it before either…). In mid-1957, Paul started learning chords on his friend Ian James’ Rex guitar, and in July of that year he went to Hessy’s and traded his trumpet for a Zenith 17, the acoustic guitar that he would play until June of 1960, when he bought the Rosetti Solid 7 that he took to Hamburg.

John Lennon

John’s first two instruments were both harmonicas. Aunt Mimi started taking on college students as boarders at Mendips in 1947. One of the first was an English Literature student named Harold Phillips (that’s not the same Harold Philips who was better known as Lord Woodbine, whom we will be talking about again soon). He had a harmonica and John was enthralled. Phillips told him that if he could learn a song in one day that he could have the instrument. John learned two, and so he became a musician at the age of 7. He kept that harmonica until the summer of 1954, when he took it with him on a summer trip to see his relatives in Scotland. The bus driver was impressed with John’s playing of “The Happy Wanderer,” and told him that a passenger had left what turned out to be a very high quality harmonica on the bus months earlier, and that John could have it.

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Next week the subject will be how George and Paul met. Looking forward to that!

-            Adamson

Photo: c. 1928 Alvin Keech "Banjulele" type A, not Paul’s. Photo by Lardyfatboy, Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Type_A_Keech_Banjulele.jpg

Quote:

1) Beatles Gear, by Andy Babiuk (Backbeat, Milwaukee WI, 2015) pp. 110-112.