So much has been written about the band named The Beatles that to tackle anything new probably smacks of redundancy. But I was a contemporary of theirs, in London, and I share a tenuous personal link. Especially to George Harrison, and this month marks eighty years since his birth.

The Beatles meant something a little different in Britain than they did here, and I find Americans have difficulty fully comprehending why. We Brits had, despite the official historians’ view, effectively lost World War II. By the mid-sixties we had only partially rebuilt after the Blitz twenty years earlier, the country was drab and pockmarked, and there was a noticeable dearth of optimism. The older generation tottered, hollow-eyed, through a country decimated of its men and devoid of anything to look forward to. Schools still had walls in front of their entrances to stop bomb blasts hurtling down the corridors, and many sported bullet holes from strafing. While Germany was resurrecting itself, we kids played in bombsites and pillboxes, though the shellcases and bits of aircraft had long since been collected. In some places you could still see a complete living room — pictures, wallpaper, fireplace and all — exposed like a doll’s house to the light of day when an exploding bomb erased the outer wall.

My parents made a valiant effort to bring up a family in the postwar world of the fifties, but petrol rationing remained, and prefabricated houses – supposed to be temporary — sat like discarded shipping crates everywhere. The U.K. still owed the U.S.A. just about everything it earned, and with the state of its industries it wasn’t making much of a dent in the debt. The good coal was sold off to other countries, and we used cheaper, toxic brown coal to heat our homes. I always find the opening to the animated Yellow Submarine film moving, with its montage of dismal and colorless rooftops. That was life until the early sixties, not a period of prosperity as in the States, but a country shattered by Mr. Hitler’s attempt to subjugate it.

Then along came a band called The Beatles. I thought it a daft name, but there was something about their energy, their choices of song, their harmonies. Since LPs were so expensive Brits tended to buy singles, but despite this, plenty managed to muster the price of their first album. I played it incessantly on my sister’s nasty little portable record player, in mono, and I was enraptured. That’s where I learned harmony, but more, that’s where I gained an excitement about the possibilities of the future.

I expect it sounds like hyperbole now, but abruptly there bloomed in their music the glimpse of some kind of new and better world, something to celebrate. Soon, you couldn’t walk down a city street without hearing a band rehearsing. My friends and I were no different – we cobbled a group together despite having had no training, and being unable to afford proper instruments. I wrote three songs a day. We must have driven my poor neighbors batty with our Wednesday night rehearsals, though one set was obligingly hearing impaired. The rest soon were.

We weren’t the Beatles, of course. None of us would be. We lasted four years – longer than most – but relationships eventually pulled us away, and we had to get real jobs. But the Liverpool lads were always our soundtrack. As we moved into the adult world we grew up alongside four young men who had the talent, and luck, and timing, to captain our entire generation. As they came of age, so did we.

From copying American R&B and soul records bought from sailors portside, they progressed to writing their own pastiches, and then their own music independent of anyone else’s stylistic restraints. Once they returned from their brutal skill-honing in Hamburg they quickly dominated the music scene in the U.K. What made the band’s output unique was their relentless search for something new, their reluctance to stay stuck in one style. Nowadays we know all of their songs intimately, sometimes to the point of overkill, but at the moment of their release they were always stunningly new, shockingly original. They never repeated themselves.

By the time of their Ed Sullivan appearance Britain had changed. It was still poor, and the empire was long gone (most would say justifiably so), but it was a brighter, more positive place. “Positive” is a term rarely applied to the British, a culture steeped in complaining and the distrust of success, but the Beatles, and a myriad of other homegrown bands and singers, were helping to turn things around.

In 1968 the Beatles were sometimes in the London headquarters for meetings. I was nineteen and a junior designer for EMI at the time, seldom getting to design album covers, but I ran into the Fab Four twice. The first was when they were recreating the looking-over-the-balcony photo from their first album, Please Please Me, and which would be used for the cover of The Beatles 1967/1970. The balcony was the second floor of the EMI lobby, and word quickly flashed around the building that they were in the house. I stood next to the photographer, looking up at the lads with their daringly long hair.

The second time, I was heading out for lunch in midwinter and slipped in the slush just as a stretched white Mercedes limo pulled in. John, Paul, George, and Ringo opened its doors, and Ringo helped me to my feet with a grin. That constituted my own personalized Meet the Beatles. I was mortified.

Shortly thereafter they went their separate ways as solo acts, with varying levels of success. But their effect as a band has endured. True, nothing could ever again be quite like the first hearing of “Good Day Sunshine” on a bleak English street in January, or being stunned by the tape loops of “Tomorrow Never Knows” while mainstream radio stations still doggedly played Pat Boone and Frank Sinatra. Soon they were overdone and eclipsed by newer fashions in music, as is always the way. Life moves on, as it should. All things must pass.

I appreciated them all — Paul’s vocal range and sweet singable melodies, John’s edge and cutting wit, Ringo’s chummy pitchiness — but I related most to George’s search for meaning. I was certainly desperate for some at the time. Some of the Indian music was an ill-fitting graft onto late sixties Britain, but we embraced it nevertheless, and with it a whole new culture. It suddenly became hip to be a sitar player. Ragas flew off the record shelves, and when I bought one and listened to it my older sister barged in and demanded, “What the hell is that?” I didn’t really know. But I respected George’s attempt to make more of his life than just strutting about as a self-indulgent star.

Certainly he was far from perfect. When his second wife Olivia was asked in an interview about his fidelity as a husband, she replied, “Well, he was a man.” But I didn’t expect perfection from him. He had never set himself up as a saint, just a seeker. Even now, with him gone these 22 years, I still find myself wondering what he would make of this and that.

I was recently wounded by someone I thought a friend, and the first thing I did was put on Concert for George, the filmed tribute assembled by his friends at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2002, one year after his death. Soon I was singing along again, as all the best musicians of the era played his songs. A remarkably tight performance, too, considering the enormous number of musicians involved. What can beat a rendition of “Wah-Wah” with four famous drummers and a percussionist? There is Dhani, his son, so touchingly like his father in looks, playing a dreadnought guitar that looks as if he made it himself, looking a tad out of his depth but thoroughly moved. There is Eric Clapton, who stole George’s first wife Patti and introduced her to heroin, leading the show. There’s Paul McCartney appearing somewhat taciturn, or perhaps trying hard not to appear the star of the evening. There’s Billy Preston, the only player worthy of the name “the fifth Beatle” (though many have tried to claim the title), soaring beyond his own personal tragedies to add a gospel keyboard dimension to the mix. Everyone brought to the performance something the Beatles tried to foster, and what a world at war yet again desperately needs – love. Love for George, and his having been here for a while.

I can’t watch that concert without feeling inspired. No matter what my own petty concerns might be, I’m not ashamed to say Mr. Harrison’s strivings to make the world a better place through his music resonate within me like the sympathetic strings of a sitar. It’s not that the baby boom generation was better than anything that followed – each generation has its creative peaks – but I will be forever grateful that my youth coincided with that of the Beatles.

Thanks, George. I hope you found what you were looking for.

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David Andrew Westwood is a North Carolina-based writer. His latest novel is The Sea Denied a Sailor

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