Cover Story: Buried Treasure: The Story of the Beatles' Lost Tapes

On Friday, January 10th, 1969, George Harrison quit the Beatles. He did it over lunch at Twickenham Film Studios in London where he, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were rehearsing for a new album and filming the action for a television special. The project was McCartney's brainstorm, a back-to-roots campaign — a return to touring and live, honest rock & roll — that he hoped would reignite the brotherly fire of the Beatles' Liverpool days, of their electrifying shows at the Cavern Club. McCartney even had a title for his baby: Get Back.

Instead, McCartney created a recipe for disaster. When Harrison walked out, he wasn't leaving the biggest band in the world. He was getting out of a living hell.

The Beatles were a mess in 1968 and early 1969, working together in a shaky truce. They had not played on a stage since 1966. Personal differences blew up into open squabbling during the recording of 1968's The Beatles, thirty songs that were really four solo albums under one roof — "Me and a backing group, Paul and a backing group," Lennon said. "I just did it like a job."

McCartney countered Lennon's fuck-it attitude — compounded by Lennon's addiction to heroin at the time — by assuming almost dictatorial control of the group. He pushed the idea of touring, of recording live without overdubs. He wanted to record the Get Back songs in concert — the suggested venue was a Roman amphitheater in Tunisia. McCartney was ready to go to any extreme to keep the Beatles a band. At the same time, he and Lennon treated Harrison like a junior partner, virtually ignoring him as a songwriter, playing his new tunes with little serious interest.

That day at Twickenham, after the Beatles ran through a few sloppy takes of McCartney's "Get Back," with its rah-rah chorus — "Get back to where you once belonged" — Harrison snapped. "I'm leaving the group," he declared. "When?" Lennon shot back. "Now," Harrison said. He suggested that the others advertise for a replacement, then he split. "I didn't care if it was the Beatles," he said in a later interview. "I was getting out." Lennon was not impressed: "If he doesn't come back by Tuesday," he snorted after Harrison left, "we get [Eric] Clapton."