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By Douglas Baldwin The Beatles would have been a very different band-and the world a different place-if Stu Sutcliffe hadn't left the lineup in 1961. Up until that point, Paul McCartney had shared lead guitar chores with George Harrison; Sutcliffe's departure forced McCartney into the bass slot. This led to two major developments: Paul became both an exceptional bassist and the Beatles'secret (more or less) sixstring weapon. His background in skiffle, a British phenomenon similar to the folk revival of the '50s in the United States, had already fostered some admirable acoustic guitar chops, which would serve him well as Beatlemania swept the world.

tr' McCartney's first recorded

guitar performance was on "l'll Follow the Sun," from the Beatles' fourth album, Beatles For Sale. Typical of Macca's fresh harmonic approach, this song features iust a handful of chordsplayed with a broad, open strum-that flirts with several key centers [Fig. 1]. Fans'first view of Mccartney the acoustic guitarist was a solo performance of "Yesterday" on The Ed Sullivan Show of September 12, 1965. He used an Epiphone Texan, tuned down a whole step and played with a simple thumb-and-brush strum, as in Fig.2. Three years later, on retreat with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in lndia, folk-pop troubadour Donovan introduced Mccartney to the pleasures of Martin guitars, open tunings, and fingerpicking IFig.3]. Songs written at this time appeared on The Beatles(a.k.a. "The White Album"). Purchased in December of 1964, Paul's Epiphone Texan Ff-79 was an American-made, slope-shouldered dreadnought. ln 2005. Epiphone produc€d a signature run ol 1,964 Texans in Japan. with another 290 built at Gibson's Montana facility. True to Sir Paul's original, they're

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