Billboard magazine publishes an interview by Editor in Chief TimothyWhitewith George to promote Anthology 2. Excerpts from it:Q: Your 12-string electric Rickenbacker guitar became especiallymemorable in terms of the Beatles' sound during the period documented on"AnthologyVolume 2." It was the spark or centerpiece of a lot of the arrangements.When did you get that Rickenbacker 360-12 semi-acoustic guitar?George: That was the time we were in New York for "The Ed SullivanShow," which was February 1964. When I came over on the plane, I had theflu; I was in bed at the Plaza Hotel, and I missed the press call for all thephotos they did against the New York skyline. I'm not in those. And I missedthe first Ed Sullivan rehearsal. So it was sometime during that rest period ofmine that a man from Rickenbacker [president F. R. Hall] brought theseguitar 'round for me. What happened was they had seen some pictures ofJohn playing one, a Rickenbacker 325, and they came and brought somenew ones. John had bought his, which was not a 12-string but a short-necked six-string, in [the Musik Rotthoff shop] when we were in Hamburgin 1961. We'd seen a photo of a bloke who was in the George ShearingQuintet, and he was the only one we'd ever seen with that Rickenbacker, sowhen John went in and saw that guitar, he just had to have it and bought itinstantly. I bought myself a Gibson amplifier that day; we got it on what weused to call in Liverpool as the "knocker," which means one pound down,and the rest when they catch you [laughter], and the man comes knocking onthe club door saying, "May I have my money, please!" As for myRickenbacker 12-string, I started playing it for the first recording sessionswe did after we returned from those three Ed Sullivan shows we did in '64.So I believe it was for [the album] "A Hard Day's Night" and other stuff.Q: Similarly, the guitar sounds you recently added to John's entrancing"Real Love" have become the core of that finished record, focusing thelistener emotionally.George: I know what you mean. He's got those augmented chords anddiminished chords on there - which was always featured in the old songsfrom the '20s, '30s, and '40s - and a lot of us had similar musicalbackgrounds, because we grew up in the same period, and we heard thesame type of melodic music that was played on radio in England. But it'strue, there are a lot of those chord changes; in particular, an augmentedchord, and that's probably what makes "Real Love" sound more like one ofmine than one of John's.

Q: How was that song demo worked with?George: Well, more or less, the same as we did on the first song, "Free As ABird." Except when we did "Free As A Bird," the original tape was just a bitbetter quality. This one had a lot of clicks on it and a background hum; itseemed to me as if it had come originally off of one of those portable four-track "porto-studio" things that became available in the '70s, since it wasjust on a cassette. But it had a number of things on it: There was atambourine, the vocal was double-tracked, and so on. They could never findthe original tape; the tape that we had from Yoko seemed a pretty far downthe line copy. But when we first got the cassettes from Yoko back in '93, Iactually preferred "Real Love" as a song; I thought the melody was moreobvious. The problem was that it was this bad copy, and it had thistambourine that was out of time and real loud. That was the only reason wepassed on it originally.Q: You passed on it?!George: Yeah, and the first thing that happened when we decided we weregoing to do something with the "Real Love" tape was that [producer] JeffLynne got a computer-programmer expert, and they put it on this programlike they used for cleaning up [the soundtracks of] the old Disney movies, aspecial program that had been developed that can clean out backgroundnoises. He spent a few days with this computer bloke, took away all theclicks and hums, and then that was the cassette we had to work with. Soeverything that's on "Real Love" is new, except for John's voice and thelittle intro section that it comes back to, where there's a pedal harmoniumand some old wobbly piano that sounds like it's from the distant past. Thatwas John's original piano and things, but we actually double-tracked it, justto give it a bit more weight. Having done "Free As A Bird," we knew we justcouldn't put the cassette on a 24-track and overdub on that, because thetempo never holds up. So again, we did the same thing we'd learned from"Free As A Bird": we put down a drum at an average speed, because it picksup and slows down a bit here and there. We laid the track down and then"flew" John's voice; once we'd built the track up with drums, bass, guitars,and pianos, we just dropped John's voice into the appropriate places. Thatway, it enabled us to restructure the song slightly, which we'd also done with"Free As A Bird," and we put in different things, like my solos.Q: Thinking of voices - in this case, singing voices - listening to the three-part vocals by you, John, and Paul on the early take on "Anthology 2" of"Yes It Is," I was wonder if it was easy for you three to get that harmonyconfiguration.

George: No, no. That was very difficult, I remember. We had to figure outthe parts. Like John's part, of course, that was his melody. And the harmonythat Paul sang was the closest one to it. The third part that I was doing hadto avoid the other two. Sometimes I'm up, and sometimes I'm down, andsometimes it moves in an unfathomable way, because it's basically justtrying to avoid hitting the same notes the others were on. It was a verytricky one to learn, and not a logical one; it's not one I could naturally comeup with. But when it was all put together, it sounded really good, so that wasjust an example of working out something. We spent a lot of time workingon arrangements, both vocal and guitar parts. Like on "And Your Bird CanSing," you'd think there's a double-harmony guitar part, but we didn't haveenough tracks to be double-tracking, so it was always two of us who'd playtogether, Paul and I or John and I, and we'd sit there and work it out andthen play it live onto one track.Q: In those vocal harmony meshes, you were good at retaining the normalqualities of your voices.George: Yes! They were just natural voices without any effects orexaggeration.Q: The previously unreleased version of "Within You Without You" is aninstrumental with just the Indian instruments and the string overdub, yet ithas a wonderful flow. Were the instruments originally handled separately?George: That song was done in three segments and edited together. We didthe intro and the start and the verses that lead up to the instrumental section.So the instrumental section was done separately, and it was very long forthose days. Because of the tambouras [four-stringed Indian droneinstruments], it was cross-faded together, and then the second section, whichwas the instrumental, went into 5/4 timing. Then the last section, when itcomes back out of that with the tabla and goes into the last verse, wasspliced together later. Everybody knows - if they've ever heard it, anyway -the one with the vocals on it. But it's interesting to hear it with just thebackground instruments. It stuck out a bit, really, on "Sgt. Pepper," becauseit had no relationship to anything else on that album other than "GettingBetter," which had a couple of tambouras that were forced on top of it.Q: You've told me over the years about the genuine toil that went into theBeatles' body of work. Do you think the overall excellence of the Beatles,aside from any God-given inspiration, had something to do with applyingthe professional effort that others often didn't?George: Hmm. I do think so. The only thing we were trying to do was makegood records, particularly when we had our first little success, and they

allowed us more studio time. It just seemed like we were in there all of ourlives, really, at that period. We worked hard; we weren't working 9 to 5. Weused to have to battle sometimes with the engineers and sometimes withGeorge Martin, to make them stay beyond 6 or 7 in the evening. Theyprobably used to start at 10 a.m. and finish at 5; then we came into theirlives, and we'd start at 1 or 2 in the afternoon and work right through 'til 1 or2 in the morning.