In the Beatles’ mid-’90s Anthology era, George Harrison’s guitars were built by a man named Bernie Hamburger – and one of his creations features in the video for the band’s final single, Now and Then. But what do we know about these guitars?
Beatles fans know George Harrison’s guitars as well as they know his solos from All My Loving, Nowhere Man and Something. There’s the Gretsch Country Gentleman, the Rickenbacker 360/12, the Epiphone Casino (with Bigsby), the psychedelic Strat nicknamed “Rocky,” the ’68 rosewood Telecaster. They’re as much a part of the band’s visual history as velvet-collared suits and Sgt. Pepper mustaches.
But in November 2023, when Now and Then added a new epilogue to the Fab Four’s catalog, an unfamiliar guitar came with it. As seen in Peter Jackson’s short film about the making of the track, there’s Harrison in the studio, playing a double-cutaway electric, cherry red with white trim.
“When it showed up in the video, I jumped higher than Michael Jordan,” says Bernie Hamburger, who built the guitar for Harrison in the mid’90s – a Hamburguitar Model S. Hamburger also made the handsome emerald green Tele-shaped Model T that appears in the Beatles’ Anthology-era Real Love music video.
To his delight, Hamburger discovered that these were Harrison’s go-to guitars during his later years. “After George passed away in 2001, his guitar technician, Alan Rogan, told me that George owned many, many instruments, and all of them were in storage – with the exception of the ones I made for him,” he says. “Those were always within reach, plugged into an amp, ready to play. So I guess he liked my stuff.”
Hamburger says even though he’d “met a lot of rock stars, meeting a Beatle was a little different.” But Harrison was “friendly and approachable and treated me like we knew each other forever.
“Next thing I know, I’m sitting there in a hotel room with both of them, and they’re trading licks back and forth, doing [Perkins’] Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby and Your True Love. It’s my hero – and my hero’s hero – playing my guitars. Are you kidding me?! I thought, ‘This can’t be happening.’ It was so surreal.
“Then George said, ‘Bernie, this is a really nice guitar. By the way, can you make mandolins as well?’ I’d never made a mandolin in my life. But I told George, ‘Absolutely.’ So he hired me.”
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