ANDREW FERGUSON: Where the Rubber Soul Meets the Road.
Hey you! Beatles fans! I want a show of hands. How many of you believe that the following story—it comes from Philip Norman’s new biography, George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle—has the faintest scintilla of a possibility of being somewhere close to a simulacrum of a story that might, conceivably, be within a hundred bazillion miles of an event that actually happened?
The year is 1971 or ’72, it’s not quite clear. The Beatles have well and truly broken up. George Harrison’s marriage to his first wife Pattie is dying from indifference, and Eric Clapton, perhaps Harrison’s closest friend, has loudly declared his undying love for her.
So here’s what Harrison does, goes the story: He sets out two guitars and amplifiers in the cavernous foyer of his Gothic mansion outside London and invites Clapton to visit, ostensibly for a gentlemanly chin wag. Instead, the unsuspecting suitor is challenged to a duel by the cuckolded Beatle—a “rock ‘n’ roll version of the ‘pistols at dawn’ a wronged Victorian husband would have demanded—in this case, guitars after dusk.” According to Norman.
On through the night the two guitar gods raged! “Clearly a duel for Pattie,” Norman calls it. Fiery licks rent the midnight air! Harrison, knowing Clapton’s superior skill, plied his rival with brandy and kept himself to only tea, or so the story goes. At last, the night far spent, the two men laid down arms, exhausted. And yet, Norman goes on, “no winner was declared and George never mentioned the episode afterward.”
Yeah, I don’t believe it either.
I bet that even Norman suspects the reason George (and Clapton) never mentioned the episode: It didn’t happen. It’s much too melodramatic, reeks too much of after-the-fact wish fulfillment, carries the air of an imagination malformed by 1940s and ’50s moviegoing—as indeed it probably was. The genealogy of the story, which Norman doesn’t bother to trace for his readers, leads back to the great and greatly bibulous actor John Hurt, a drinking buddy of Harrison’s who described the duel to Pattie Harrison but insisted he was the only witness.
Harrison talked up the brilliance of Clapton’s solo phrasing during the Get Back/Let It Be sessions (as highlighted in Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary). He let Clapton contribute much of the lead guitar work on his first solo album, All Things Must Pass. Clapton’s band Derek and the Dominoes were the house band for that album. Clapton and his then-current solo band backed up Harrison on his only tour of Japan in 1991. So yeah, guitar duels over Pattie very likely never happened.
Even this popular meme in guitar forums is false, alas, considering when Clapton gave Harrison one of his 1950s-era Gibson Les Pauls:
