McCartney Times

A friend of John’s Lennon‘s from the Liverpool College of Art, Stu Sutcliffe was the original bassist in the Beatles. In July 1961, upon the conclusion of their second residency in Hamburg, Germany, Sutcliffe quit the group to concentrate on his art career.“Paul [McCartney] and I got to know Stuart Sutcliffe through going into the art college,” remembered George Harrison in the Beatles Anthology documentary. “Stuart was a thin, arty guy with glasses and a little Van Gogh beard; a good painter. John really liked Stuart as an artist.”With money that he had earned from selling one of his paintings, Sutcliffe, at Lennon’s urging, bought a bass guitar and joined the band towards the end of 1959. But there was one main problem.“He wasn’t really a very good musician. In fact, he wasn’t a musician at all until we talked him into buying a bass,” said Harrison. “We taught him to play 12-bars, like ‘Thirty Days’ by Chuck Berry. That was the first thing he ever learnt. He picked up a few things and he practiced a bit until he could get through a couple of other tunes as well. It was a bit ropey, but it didn’t matter at that time because he looked so cool. We never had many gigs in Liverpool before we went to Hamburg, anyway.”

Source: 55 Years Ago: Stuart Sutcliffe Leaves the Beatles