George Harrison was my favorite Beatle when I was the age when you have favorite Beatles. For a shy kid lurking on the edge of teenagerdom, the skinny, quiet Harrison was the perfect moptop to adopt. The two big guys were too obvious; John was too brash and Paul was too pretty. There was Ringo, but for some obscure reason the fact that he was the drummer worked against him. Besides, he was cute in a way that in sixth grade was strictly for the girls, and he had what looked disturbingly like a 5 o’clock shadow.

George, by contrast, seemed aloof and innocent and mysterious — and young. He wasn’t entirely boyish — there was some hint of mastery about him, some vaguely unnerving sense of sexual knowledge in his lean face — but he definitely came off like the junior partner in the band. On the cover of “Meet the Beatles,” the first record I ever bought, he looks like he’s about 16 years old — which wasn’t that far from the truth. He was the kid who was accepted into the club: the perfect wish-fulfillment icon.

And he played lead guitar. At the time, I barely knew what that meant, but I figured it must mean he was a better instrumentalist than his gaudier big brothers. While Paul and John were busy being geniuses and stars, I imagined George in the background, hunched over the neck of his guitar like a writer hunched over his typewriter, quietly and painstakingly adding the notes that would make the songs John and Paul wrote even better.

But George didn’t stay my favorite Beatle for very long. Partly this was because he was so much less incandescent than John and Paul that idolizing him felt almost perverse, self-consciously eccentric: It was like choosing to memorize Rosencrantz’s speeches instead of Hamlet’s. All the great songs, all the great vocals, were by John and Paul. “Don’t Bother Me,” the first Harrison composition to appear on a Beatles album, was a nice song, and his voice had a slightly nasal, sensitive thinness that was endearing, but it wasn’t memorable enough to thrust him into the limelight. His guitar playing and backing vocals sounded good, but you didn’t really notice them. If you were going to have a favorite Beatle, and you weren’t making your choice on the basis of sexiness or deliberate obscurantism, it had to be John or Paul. George just kind of fit in.

The real reason George didn’t stay my favorite Beatle is that as I listened over the years, it became clear that the Beatles couldn’t be taken apart. They were indivisible. It was the Beatles, not John or Paul or George or Ringo, that my generation grew up with; it was the Beatles that, for a host of sometimes inexplicable reasons, created a soundtrack that so many of us lived by. I couldn’t have a favorite Beatle any more than I could have a favorite parent or a favorite child.

And it is as a member of the Beatles — nothing more, nothing less — that we will remember George Harrison. “He fit in” does not appear to be much of an epitaph — until you remember that what he was fitting into was the greatest rock group of all time.

Say “lead guitar” and you don’t think of somebody fitting in — you think of somebody soaring off, opening their id like a firehose and blasting away everything in the vicinity. This is the mainstream guitar-god rock legacy, from Mike Bloomfield to Jimi Hendrix to Eric Clapton to Van Halen to Allan Holdsworth. This wasn’t Harrison’s style. Blinding speed was never his specialty, though he could lay down nasty licks with the best of them. And in his entire career with the Beatles he probably never took longer than a 30-second solo. But what Harrison brought to the Beatles was exactly what the Beatles needed.

Harrison remains a seriously underrated guitarist, but even to call him a “guitarist” feels wrong. He played the songs, and the guitar was what he happened to use. As a soloist, he had a beautifully clean melodic style, one almost completely devoid of the blues-riff clichis that almost every rock guitarist falls back on. He was a master of sophisticated chord voicings and gorgeous intros, like the roaring, cascading opening guitar line in “And Your Bird Can Sing.” He was disconcertingly versatile: from the tricky pick-and-fingering country-twang Chet Atkins style of some of his early work, to the sitar and tamboura experiments on “Norwegian Wood” and “Within You Without You,” to the gut-shaking straight rock in “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Clubs Band (Reprise).”

But his signature style (which the above solos share in — Harrison had an identifiable voice from the beginning) is unclassifiable: It’s the orchestral approach found on songs from “Fixing a Hole” to “Tomorrow Never Knows,” an osmosis-like style in which the phrasings soak up the musical context like a sponge. Many of Harrison’s solos sound like they were worked out in advance. This can sometimes take away from their sense of spontaneity, but it gives them great depth and subtlety. He played guitar like a composer, unhurried, willing to use silence, making every note count: He himself retreats until he becomes almost invisible, and what is left are musical passages that are so perfectly crafted that it is impossible to imagine them any other way.

Harrison was also an exceptionally gifted and varied songwriter, whose light was somewhat obscured by the supernovas he kept company with. His Indian-mystic efforts never quite sent me into whatever empyrean they were intended to, but the soft poignancy of “Here Comes the Sun,” the muscular empathy of “If I Needed Someone,” with its great chiming 12-string chords, and the satisfyingly nasty rant “Taxman” bear witness to a talent that at its best stands comparison with Lennon and McCartney. I don’t know whether he had in him more than the two or three songs he was allotted per album or not (most of his post-Beatles work seems to indicate he didn’t), and I don’t really care. “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” and “Beatles ’65″ and all the rest are his legacy, along with that of his mates, and they will do.

Above all, Harrison epitomized taste — a commodity we don’t readily associate with rock ‘n’ roll. He knew how to listen. He was a consummate team player, both as a calming influence on the stormy Lennon-McCartney sea and as a creative collaborator. And when dozens of his peers who ran off those pyrotechnic solos are long forgotten, George Harrison will still be there, deeply ingrained in songs that in their honesty, their strangeness, their enduring loveliness, will form his permanent epitaph.

For those of us who grew up when the Beatles were the very face of invincible youth, George Harrison’s death, like that of John Lennon so many tragically long years before him, is inevitably a memento mori. The shock and pain of Harrison’s passing is not as great as Lennon’s, of course: Lennon was cut down at 40, and his murder ended the dream — the illusion — that the era of the Beatles could somehow go on forever. Dying of cancer at 58 is different. Yet something of the same pain, a pain mixed with an old wonderment, is stirred by George’s death — because in some corner of our hearts, he will always be George, that shy, fearless boy whose unlined face looked out at us so many years ago. So when we’re thinking about it all we will ask each other: Do you remember the opening chords of “Getting Better”? Do you remember that bit when he comes wailing in at the end of “Got to Get You Into My Life”? And when the tears come, as they will for many of us, they will be tears not just of sadness but of joy, of a profound gratitude.

In a strangely poetic bit of coincidence, the world lost two songwriting legends Monday, men whose tunes defined modern pop and whose collaborations have become classics.

In his lengthy partnership with composer Mike Stoller, lyricist Jerry Leiber helped invent the burgeoning rock ‘n’ roll sound, penning the bluesy hits “Kansas City” and “Hound Dog.” The duo went on to write exuberant smashes like “Jailhouse Rock,” “Yakety Yak” and “Love Potion #9,” among others, amassing a catalog of hits that’s still one of the recording industry’s most successful. Yet Leiber’s sound was far from brash. You can hear his style all over the achingly lovely “Stand By Me,” which he and Stoller co-wrote with Ben E. King; in the melancholy and determined collaboration “On Broadway”; and in the great Peggy Lee anthem to disillusionment, “Is That All There Is?” He and Stoller were also prolific producers, the masterminds behind the sweeping sounds of hits as diverse as the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby” and Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You.”

Friends and family said goodbye to Amy Winehouse Tuesday with prayers, tears, laughter and song at a funeral ceremony in London.

The singer’s father, mother and brother and close friends, along with band members and celebrities — including producer Mark Ronson and media personality Kelly Osbourne, her hair piled beehive-high in an echo of the singer’s trademark style — were among several hundred mourners attending the service at Edgwarebury Cemetery in north London.

Photographers and a few fans lined the lane outside.

Sherwood Schwartz, writer-creator of two of the best-remembered TV series of the 1960s and 1970s, “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Bunch,” has died at age 94.

Great niece Robin Randall said Schwartz died at 4 a.m. Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he was being treated for an intestinal infection and underwent several surgeries. His wife, Mildred, and children had been at his side.

Sherwood Schwartz and his brother, Al, started as a writing team in TV’s famed 1950s “golden age,” said Douglas Schwartz, the late Al Schwartz’s son.

A family friend says former first lady Betty Ford has died at age 93.

Marty Allen says Ford, whose battles with cancer and substance abuse inspired millions to seek treatment, died Friday. Allen did not say how Betty Ford died. He says he expects the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library to release additional information.

Her husband, Gerald, died in December 2006.

The couple married in 1948, the same year he was elected to Congress. She was thrust into the spotlight in 1974 when he became president after the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer weeks later and won acclaim for her openness and courage.

Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in the 1976. Mrs. Ford later was treated for drug and alcohol addiction and then helped found the Betty Ford Center to help others.

Celebrated American painter Cy Twombly, whose large-scale paintings featuring scribbles, graffiti and unusual materials fetched millions at auction, has died. He was 83.

Gagosian Gallery spokeswoman Virginia Coleman said Twombly, who had cancer for a number of years, died Tuesday. Eric Mezil, director of the Lambert Collection in Avignon, France, where a Twombly show opened in June, said he died in Rome.

Twombly is known for his abstract works combining painting and drawing techniques, repetitive lines and the use of graffiti, letters and words.

In 2010, he painted a ceiling of the Louvre museum, the first artist given the honor since Georges Braque in the 1950s.