Dark Carnival

The skinny boy with the thick dark hair sat in the back row of a full classroom, head down, intense brown eyes fixed on his notebook. As his teacher lectured, the boy scribbled with his pencil, as if taking down every word. But George Harrisonwasn’t lis­tening. The 13-year-old son of a bus driv­er drifted into visions of his future, filling his notebooks with obsessive drawings of guitars — the instrument he’d been long­ing to play since he’d heard Elvis Pres­ley’s hits, the sonic embodiment of all the fun and joy missing from dreary postwar Liverpool. Soon enough, he was filling his notebooks with lyrics and chord charts, and maybe an occasional sketch of a motorcycle.