AWC is celebrating the quiet guys today…or the relatively quiet, anyway. Zeppo Marx and George Harrison (born 42 years apart on this date) didn’t exactly lead lives of anonymity, but as members of famous quartets, both of them worked in the shadows of more flamboyant and famous team members.

Zeppo was the stage name for Herbert M. Marx, the youngest of the five Marx Brothers, born in New York 114 years ago on February 25, 1901. As part of his brothers’ famous comedy team, Zeppo was the straight man when the Marx Brothers made the leap from the vaudeville stage to the big screen. He appeared in the Marx Brothers’ first five films, playing the romantic lead or the regular guy while his brothers Chico, Harpo, and Groucho clowned around. (The fifth Marx brother, Gummo, was even more anonymous…he never appeared in a movie after the brother act went Hollywood.) One unattributed quote referred to “the plight of poor Zeppo Marx,” claiming that “While Groucho, Harpo and Chico are hogging the show, as the phrase has it, their brother hides in an insignificant role, peeping out now and then to listen to plaudits in which he has no share.”

Zeppo finally left the group to the funnymen, but he might have had the last laugh. His talents as a mechanic (he was the one who kept the family car running) led him into an engineering career where, among other things, he owned a company that produced military parts during World War II and invented a watch that tracked the pulse rate of cardiac patients. He also started a successful theatrical agency and became very wealthy from his post-Marx Brothers ventures before his death in 1979.

George Harrison (born in Liverpool 72 years ago on February 25, 1943) was known as “the quiet Beatle.” While John Lennon and Paul McCartney famously wrote most of the band’s songs and fought over its direction, and while Ringo Starr received a drummer’s unique brand of fame, George kept it mellow, writing a few major songs and playing lead guitar. His contributions to the band were nonetheless distinct. Indian culture seeped into the Beatle repertoire, thanks to his interest in Hinduism. (He introduced the band to the eerie sound of the sitar, and for better or worse, the Hare Krishna movement.)

After the Beatles broke up, Harrison set out on a successful solo career, raised money for starving Bangladeshi refugees in a major 1971 benefit concert, and formed the most awesome superband ever in 1988, bringing Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison on board for a few jam sessions that turned into the Traveling Wilburys, because that’s what you get to do when you were in the Beatles. He was only 58 when lung cancer took him in 2001, leaving a lot of guitars to gently weep. His memorial tree is being replaced in Los Angeles today, on his birthday. It turns out the quiet Beatle’s memorial was quietly killed...by beetles.

Photo collage assembled by AWC