Harrison was the baby of the band, and if the inner dynamic of the Beatles had been different, his age might have cost him his place in history. During the group's first five-month gig in Germany, authorities discovered that Harrison, at 17, was too young to be working in the Reeperbahn nightclubs. They had him deported. Guitarists can be replaced, but by then McCartney and Lennon were protective of their little brother--the Beatles were as much a fiercely insular family as they were a ferocious rock band--and a few weeks later the boys were playing together again in England. Sounding better than ever, and much better than other Liverpool pop bands, the Beatles became local legends through their shows at the Cavern Club. They got a record contract, replaced their drummer with the talented Starr and were on their way.

For Harrison, much more quickly than for the others, the magic of the moment flickered and died. "At first we all thought we wanted the fame and that," he said in 1988. "After a bit we realized that fame wasn't really what we were after at all, just the fruits of it. After the initial excitement and thrill had worn off, I, for one, became depressed. Is this all we have to look forward to in life? Being chased around by a crowd of hooting lunatics from one crappy hotel room to the next?"

During the Beatles' grand conquest of America in 1964, when their initial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show drew an astonishing 73 million viewers and made them an overnight phenomenon, Harrison spent his days holed up in the Plaza Hotel with a high fever while the fab other three paraded around town, wowing the world's press with their vitality and wit. Then it was on to Washington for a concert at the Coliseum before more than 7,000 screaming fans. "It was bloody awful," Harrison told biographer Geoffrey Giuliano. "Some journalist had apparently dug up an old quote of John's that I was fond of jelly babies and had written about it in his column. That night we were absolutely pelted ... Imagine waves of rock-hard little bullets raining down on you from the sky. Every now and then one would hit a string on my guitar and plonk off a bad note as I was trying to play. From then on, everywhere we went it was exactly the same."

Harrison's guitar idols had included not only rocker Carl Perkins but also Andres Segovia, and he had worked hard to master an intricate, precise technique (his later experiments with 12-string guitars, not to mention his sitar playing, would be vastly influential in rock music). Now concertgoers couldn't even hear him, and, worse, they didn't care. Harrison, who turned 21 just after that first brief American tour, wondered to the others on the flight home, "How f______ stupid it all is. All that big hassle to make it, only to end up as performing fleas."

It wasn't long before the other Beatles shared that opinion, and the band's last public concert was at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on Aug. 29, 1966. (The city had wanted to give the group a ticker-tape parade, but the boys nixed the idea. They were terrified by the crush of Beatlemaniacs and thinking not only of John F. Kennedy's assassination but also of death threats the Beatles had received in the wake of Lennon's recent "We're more popular than Jesus" comment.) With the end of live performance, the band, and Harrison in particular, moved on to what he considered more serious endeavors. His marriage to Patti Boyd in early '66 had altered his perspective, as had what he called "the dental experience," which, he said, "made us see life in a different light."

The dental experience happened in 1964. Hamburg club managers had introduced the Beatles to uppers, and Bob Dylan had turned them on to marijuana. Now, at a dinner party at George's dentist's house in London, the host slipped sugar cubes laced with lsd into the after-dinner coffee of George and Patti, John and his wife Cynthia. Within months, all the Beatles were experimenting with acid, and eventually Paul was into cocaine, John into heroin and George a fan of hashish (for which he would be busted in March 1969). The music they continued to make in the studio changed. It got denser, trippier. The single Strawberry Fields was followed by the seminal album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the Beatles led their generation into a psychedelic world. As Harrison began to emerge as a songwriter, his exquisitely arranged compositions--Within You, Without You; Love You Too; Blue Jay Way--were informed not only by drug use but, in their melody and message, also by his increasing interest in Eastern religion, culture and music.

He came by this interest, which would become the driving force in his life, when the script of the second Beatles film, Help!, called for chase scenes involving cartoonish Hindu villains, and Indian sitar players were brought in to provide some zippy chase music. George started noodling on a sitar--if indeed one can noodle on a sitar--and asking questions. This led to exotic instrumentation on the Lennon ballad Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) and later to an apprenticeship with master sitarist Ravi Shankar, who gave Harrison lessons on the instrument and in life itself. "He was a friend, a disciple and son to me," said Shankar, who visited Harrison for the last time on Wednesday. "George was a brave and beautiful soul, full of love, childlike humor and a deep spirituality. We spent the day before with him, and even then he looked so peaceful, surrounded by love."