He was the quiet Beatle only in that he was standing alongside two louder-than-life characters and in front of a guy playing drums. He held many strong opinions--on Beatlemania, on global want, on his right to privacy, on his God--and gave firm voice to most of them. But George Harrison was certainly the most reluctant Beatle, wanting out almost as soon as he was in. He often said that his luckiest break was joining the band and his second luckiest was leaving it. And he said once, "Being a Beatle was a nightmare, a horror story. I don't even like to think about it." He never really looked comfortable in his tight suit and pudding-basin haircut, not even in the fun-fest A Hard Day's Night, and in this he was perhaps the most honest Beatle, the one least convincing when wearing the mask. The standard line is that George Harrison was an enigma, but perhaps he was transparent: a terrific guitarist, a fine songwriter, a wonderer, a seeker and, overriding all, a celebrity who hated and feared celebrity.

Harrison died at a friend's home in Los Angeles last week at age 58, losing his last battle with cancer. In 1997 he had a cancerous lump removed from his neck; earlier this year he was operated on for a cancer found on his lung and subsequently received treatment for a tumor on his brain, including a controversial form of radiation therapy at the Staten Island University Hospital in New York City. "George is very different from many people in that he didn't have fear of death," said Gil Lederman, one of his doctors there. "He felt that life and death were part of the same process." Harrison's passing leaves only Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as surviving members of the Fab Four--John Lennon was murdered in New York City in 1980.

Harrison's wife Olivia and son Dhani, 23, were at his bedside when he died, and as word spread about his death, Harrison was mourned and eulogized by the crowds who gathered outside the Abbey Road studios in London and in Strawberry Fields, the area of Manhattan's Central Park across from where Lennon was shot, and by his former bandmates. "He was a beautiful man. He was like my baby brother to me," said Sir Paul, who lost his wife Linda to breast cancer in 1998. Starr, long Harrison's best friend in the band, said, "We will miss George for his sense of love, his sense of music and his sense of laughter."

That hosannas from the beknighted would be sung for George Harrison, born the son of a Liverpool bus driver during the darkest days of World War II, is in keeping with the kind of miracles the Beatles made for themselves. The most famous of the Beatles' fated hookups involves McCartney wandering by a summer festival at St. Peter's Parish Church in Liverpool's Woolton district on a hot day in 1957, and being transfixed by a skiffle band called the Quarry Men. Paul happened to have brought his guitar and impressed the band's leader, a cocky lad named Lennon, with raucous renderings of Eddie Cochran and Little Richard songs. That's the big cosmic moment, but in official Beatles lore there's an even earlier bit of predestiny. It is 1955, and George Harrison, just 12, is a miserable student putting in an hour's commute on his dad's bus, traveling from the family home in Speke to the Liverpool Institute. He is engaged in conversation by a boy a year ahead of him in school, the son of a cotton salesman from Allerton. Paul McCartney is just as crazy about guitars and American rockabilly stars as is Harrison, and soon he is joining young George in the evenings to practice their distinctive versions of Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O and Besame Mucho.

Without rehashing the many permutations of the evolving Quarry Men of the late '50s--the Moondogs, the Silver Beatles, the endless series of exploding drummers--we arrive in the Reeperbahn, the famous cabaret district in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 1960s with a band whose front line is Lennon-McCartney-Harrison because Lennon, in his wisdom, had decided that he would put at risk his dominance to build the strongest group. The way to think of those early Beatles is as one of the grittiest, nastiest, best punk bands ever, getting tighter by the night during sets that might last eight hours. "We were frothing at the mouth," Harrison remembered in The Beatles Anthology, a scrapbook of photos and reminiscences published last year, "because we had all these hours to play and the club owners were giving us Preludins, which were slimming tablets. I don't think they were amphetamine, but they were uppers. So we used to be up there foaming, stomping away." On many occasions he said that the best Beatles shows were in the clubs of Hamburg.