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| Photo by Chris Cuffaro |
George Harrison Reconsidered
By Timothy White
Musician Magazine
November 1987
He came as soon as he heard. It's 10:37am on Tuesday, August 25, 1987, in Burbank, California. And although he's been missing for five years, nobody minds, because today he swore he'd deliver. George Harrison arrives alone at the headquarters of Warner Bros. Records carrying the master reference disc of his new album, direct from Bernie Grundman mastering, where he spent the last 24 hours facing the music and deciding it was finally time to share it.
No one at the company has listened to the finished version of Cloud Nine, and no one was invited to until this moment. He strides through the morning haze, his pale fingers gripping the plain white cardboard sleeve that holds the end product, dressed in a raven tweed jacket, white silk shirt, charcoal slacks, black bucks, and red and gray argyle socks. He takes the tiled front steps with a tread as heavy as his attire. Lenny Waronker, bashful and boyish, president of Warner Brothers, meets him at the threshold of his office with a warm smile and a wary electricity in his gaze, two literally trembling hands present the perspiration pocketed dust jacket. "George Harrison" was inscribed across it, and careless script from a felt marker. Waronker cups the prize as its lower corners held it against the front of his short leather driving jacket, as if it were a citation.
"George!" calls a voice over Waronker's shoulder, and from an adjoining office suite appears Mo Ostin, chairman of the board of the Warner Records Group. Balding, beaming in his white sports clothes and bronze skin, telegraphing an easy zeal for the unfolding ceremony. Ostin beckons the two principals and a guest inside. Two chairs are angled before Waronker's desk-side turntable for the private listing session. Mo reclines on a couch behind them, and the instant before the stylist finds the pressing, there is no sound in the room, but that of George Harrison, 44, sipping sharply from a cup of tea.
Lenny leans forward, his eyes now closed, and Mo contemplates the ceiling. The first track, "Cloud Nine," descends upon the paneled room with absolute authority, an unmistakable, reverberant vocal sufficing its space with biting, angular grace. The arrangement is rich but focused, pretty but austere, and when it surprises at the bridge with an exquisite upward spiral of harmonies, the composer makes his opening comment. "I put," he states above the surging music, "some Beach Boys at the bridge." Mo manages a horizontal nod. Lenny places his palms over his sealed eyelids. "That's What It Takes" bursts forth, attacking the ears as if from a wind-swept dashboard radio. "Fish on the Sand" is next heighten the sense of breeze tossed forward, dispatch. The singer is biting the words, snapping them off with an aggressive drive.
"Just For Today", a ballad of bottomless sadness, takes hold. Then "This is Love" builds a case for a new promise. The vocals full of yearning, quickly, a fresh aureole landscape approaches. With "When We Was Fab", the tantalizing familiar filigrees acting as magnets for their arrangements. Sly twist as the song fades, Waronker looks up from his cradled hand. "That was," he says, "a killer sequence of tracks!" "I can't wait," Ostin giggles, "to catch the second side."
And "Devil's Radio" is worth anticipation. The fervent rocker is an unearthly delight. Harrison permits himself the merest smile of impish satisfaction, which widens as whoops erupt from his audience. "I had to rescue the song, redo it, to give it a better chance," he volunteers, his dense Liverpool dictation slicing through the speaker's throb as the Earth rolls "Someplace Else" begins. "This was wasted on a soundtrack to an unsuccessful Madonna- Sean Penn film I produced.
The tough tart "Wreck of the Hesperus" is the third track on the second side. Its witty vocal parries a neat counterpoint to the stabbing guitar. The lush "Breath Away from Heaven" provides an atmospheric slice of intrigue. Then, as the finale "Got my Mind Set on You" kicks in with a primitive rock and roll wallop. George Harrison reveals his glee with the with the with the rye ode to checkbook romance. "This will teach the yuppies!" he crowed.
"This album will teach 'em, teach a lot of people something!" Mo Ostin rejoins, on his feet and radiant with relief. "We'll give them 'Got My Mind Set on You ' as the first single." "And then for the second single," Added a jubilant Warnoker, "We can choose from 'That's What it Takes,' 'This is Love', or 'When We Was Fab'. The 'Fab' track is like a movie. It's so vivid, and it's a graceful and riveting acknowledgement of the past. This whole album's got the good rock roots and new excitement radio has been needing."
Harrison's jaw drops. "You say that I passed the final examination? Well, hooray for that much." A hearty round of backslapping and guffaws erupts as the former Beatle is reminded of an innocent time in his Liverpool origins, when, in 1959, 16-year-old George burned his report card (he failed every subject but art) and quit school. By that time, George, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney had already played together at the Casbah Coffee Club, a cellar Cafe owned by future drummer Pete Best's mum Mona.
You likely know the rest. The Beatles fired Pete Best in August 1962 and hired Rory Storm and the Hurricanes' drummer Ringo Starr. Whereupon irate Pete Best fans entered the Cavern Club and blackened George's eye in a fracas. That September, The Beatles cut their first single, "Love Me Do", at EMI's number 2 in St John's Wood. Producer George Martin asked the lads, "Anything you're not happy about with us?" "Yes", George, clipped "I don't like your tie."
Several 100 million records later, on November 1, 1968, the first outside LP project by a Beatle. George Harrison's Wonderwall Music was issued on Apple Records. In 1969, shortly after the Beatles got a number one US hit with Harrison's "Something" from Abbey Road, tensions in the group grew grievous. In early 1970, The Beatles disbanded. After releasing the experimental Electronic Sounds on the Zapple subsidiary, making a massive individual impression with the three records set All Things Must Pass, and thereafter plots a new path for himself.
Cloud Nine, produced with Electric Light Orchestra's Mastro Jeff Lynne, is George Harrison's 13th solo album, if you count the Concert for Bangladesh and a capital greatest-hits collection. It's the fifth of his Warner Bros. albums in the States, and his only LP since the unjustly ignored, Gone Troppo, a genial 1982 gem. Moreover, in Lenny Waronker's estimation, "Cloud Nine is the finest album George has made since All Things Must Pass, and probably his best ever." Harrison's core band for the record consists of George on guitar and sitar, Jeff Lynne on bass and guitar, Ringo, Jim Keltner, and Ray Cooper on drums and percussion. Elton John and Gary Wright on keyboards, and Jim Horn on horns. Also featured is Eric Clapton, still George's best friend after fabled misadventures, principally luring away wife Pattie Harrison in the mid 70s. "But I also pulled a chick on him once," George had noted. Indeed, Harrison was such a forgiving soul that he let Ringo and Paul perform "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" at Eric and Pattie's wedding reception.
"You come a long way from Liverpool Technical Institute", I observe after Harrison, and I bid goodbye to the Warners' brass and press on to our appointed lunch interview. "Well, yes and no," George assures with a mischievous blink of his brown eyes, "because the Gretsch guitar I got several months after splitting from Liverpool Tech is the very same one I'm holding on the cover of Cloud Nine."
Musician: How did you hook up with Jeff Lynne?
Harrison: I've been trying to imagine for a few years somebody who could co-produce my albums. I'm sure there are plenty of talented people out there, but I haven't worked with many people on the production line. In the old days, we just had George Martin working with us, and after that, well, I worked a little while with Phil Spector. That became more trouble than it was worth, and I ended up doing most of the work myself.
Musician: People sometimes forget Spector was involved in All Things Must Pass and the Concert for Bangladesh.
Harrison: Well, on All Things Must Pass, Phil came in, and we did half the backing tracks. Then, because of the condition he was in, he had to leave, and I completed the rest of the backing without him, and did maybe 50% of the overdub, all the background vocals, and all the guitar parts. Then he came back when I was mixing it. All of this was over a four, five month period, but he still had to keep going to the hospital, seeing a doctor. He was going through a bad time with drinking, and it made him ill.
Musician: What was his role in recording Bangladesh?
Harrison: Phil was at the concert, dancing in the front when it was being recorded. There was a guy, Gary Kellgren, who did the key work in the live recording. Then, when Phil came to the remix again, Phil was in and out of the hospital. Phil worked on the second solo album, Living in the Material World. But by that, I mean he was around again. He kept falling over and breaking his ankles, wrists. The guy who was his helper was having a heart attack. Phil was never there. I literally used to have to go and break into the hotel to get him. I'd go along the roof at the Inn on the Park in London and climb in his window, yelling," Come on, we're supposed to be making a record!" And he'd say, "Oh, okay." And then he used to have 18 cherry brandies before he could get himself down to the studio. I got so tired of that because I needed someone to help. I was ending up with more work than if I'd just been doing it on my own.
Musician: Wasn't "Try Some Buy Some" from Living in the Material World supposed to be on a Ronnie Spector album?
Harrison: That's right. It didn't come out because Phil couldn't last in the studio for more than a few hours. We did about four very rough backing tracks, a couple of songs Phil had written. One of them was very good in his pop vein. He liked my "Try Some, Buy Some," so we orchestrated it and knocked off a B-side for a Ronnie's single on Apple, in '71, the B-side was a killer, "Tandoori Chicken." It's a 12-bar thing done on the spot with Mal, our roadie, and Joe the chauffeur. "I told Mal, my old pal, to go down with Joe, and they should go and get some tandoori chicken and a great big bottle of wine." (Laughter). We did it in one take with a lot of improvised sketch singing in the middle. It's hysterical. We also did a song, which I later used on Extra Texture, called "You." It was high for me singing it because I wrote it with Ronnie Spector's key and put my vocals on the instrumental track we completed.
I love those Ronettes records, and those Phil Spector records. I still do, and I love Phil. He's brilliant. There's nobody who's come close to some of his productions for excitement. Tina Turner's "River Deep Mountain High" was probably one of the only cinemascope-sized records ever. But Phil didn't have enough energy with me to sustain an album for Ronnie. Still, he had a sense of humor. And if you're reading Phil, I still think you're one of the greatest. He is, you know. He should be out there doing stuff right now, but not with me.
After that, I just worked on my own, though in 1978 I did one album, George Harrison, with Russ Titelman, who was a great help. At that time, I felt I didn't really know what was going on out there in music. And I felt Russ, who was in music day by day, would give me a bit of direction. I didn't do an album until Somewhere in England in 1980/ 81 and then Gone Troppo the next year. The problem is that when you write, perform, and produce, there's just a chance of getting lost.
So recently, I thought, "Who would I possibly work with?" I don't really know many people who would understand me and my past and have respect for that who I also have great respect for. Then I hit on Jeff Lynne, thinking he'd be good if we got on. Well, I never met him, but I was talking to Dave Edmonds, and he said he knew and had just worked with Jeff. Well, I mentioned, "If you talk to him, tell him I'd like to meet him." Dave called me back and said Jeff was going to be down in London, and I said to ask him if he wanted to come over to the house. So I met him like that, and we had a nice dinner and a couple of bottles of wine, and I got his phone number. We hung out a bit.
It's been two years now since I met him, and the more we got to know each other, it just evolved into this thing. Jeff was fantastic, the perfect choice. I couldn't have worked with a better person.
Musician: You and Jeff cooked up "When We Was Fab" as an homage to your formative years.
Harrison: I got this idea for a few chords, and I started the tune while Jeff and I were messing around in Australia last November at the Australian Grand Prix. I began the song on a little guitar someone loaned me, and I got three or four chords into it when the string broke. We had to go to dinner, but luckily, there was a piano at the person's house where we went. So with people frying stuff in the background, we got on the piano and pursued three chords. They turned into the verse part of "When We Was Fab". First thing I constructed was a tempo announcement with Ringo going "one two, da da dumb. Da da dumb." Next, we laid the guitar, piano, and drum framework, and I wasn't too sure what it was going to turn into, but the idea was that it would evoke a fab song. It was always intended to be lots of fun.
Musician: Maybe it's the California setting, but the first bygone Beatles track it made me think of was one you wrote for Magical Mystery Tour based on your temporary 1967 LA address between Beverly Hills and Laurel Canyon
Harrison: "Blue Jay Way! It's in there. And also this funny chord, an E and an F at the same time, like when I had on the old Beatles record, "I Want to Tell You", it also has that chord and John's " She's So Heavy." Anyway, every so often we took the tape of "Fab" out and overdubbed more, and it developed and took shape to where we wrote words. This was an odd experience for me. I've normally finished all the songs I've done, with the exception of maybe a few words here and there, before I ever recorded them. But Jeff doesn't do that at all. He's making them up as he goes along. That, to me, is a bit like, "Oh no, that's too mystical." I want to know where we're heading. But in another way, it's good, because you don't have to finalize your idea until the last minute. We put wacky lyrics in the last line of each chorus, like, "Back when income tax was all we had." Another one says, "But it's all over now Baby Blue," it's tongue in cheek. It shows how Jeff could assist my muse to do it live. We need the Electric Light Orchestra for all those cellos.
Musician: The Beatles were a huge influence on ELO. But a nice thing about Cloud Nine is that it doesn't sound like Jeff Lynne, but rather like George Harrison, saying, "I'm back."
Harrison: That's the great thing about Jeff. He wanted to help me make my record, but there's so much in there. Jeff contributed to "Fab". It was a 50/50 contribution, but "This is Love" was a song where I said, "Why don't you write me a tune?" So he came down with lots of bits and pieces on cassettes, and almost let me choose. We wrote the words together. In fact, he had so many permutations of how that song is that he can still write another three songs out of the bits left.
I think he's one of the best pop songwriters around. He's a craftsman. He's got endless patience. I tend to feel "okay, that'll do" and go on, and Jeff will still be thinking about how to tidy what's just been done.
Musician: Are you a Jeff Lynne? Are you a saver of tracks and ideas?
Harrison: Not consciously, but I think all experiences go in here (Taps his head) and our nervous systems compute them. If something's good, you tend to remember it (smiles), and if something's bad, too. I don't think you can get away from your past. If you want to put it like that.
Musician: Tell me the story behind "Got My Mind Set on You."
Harrison: That's something that I've just had in the back of my head for 25 years. It's a very obscure song, and I had it off an old album by this guy, James Ray in the very early 60s. Our manager, Brian Epstein, had his two NEMS (North End Music Stores) shops at Charlotte and White Chapel Street in Liverpool, and he made it his policy to have at least one copy of every record that came out in England. We used to go through all the records in the two shops, and that's why the Beatles records in those very early days were made up of both all the obvious things we liked, like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, but also things which were obscure. Most of them were American records, but a lot were not even known there. We did a James Ray song, "If You Got to Make a Fool of Somebody," in our show for years. When we started making records, we did a lot of covers, but we never covered that one, although we might have done it live in some BBC record recordings. All these North of England bands started doing a lot of the tunes we used to do, and actually had hits with some of the tracks. The Swinging Blue Jeans took Chan Romeo's "Hippy, Hippy Shake" from what we used to do.
So I came here to America in 1963 before the Beatles came here, and I bought the James Ray album that had, "If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody." The album itself was really terrible, but the best songs were written by this guy who discovered James Ray, a former mailman named Rudy Clark. Clark wrote, "It's Been a Drag," and "I Got My Mind Set on You Part One, Part Two," although it didn't have any breaks in between. If you listen to the song now, it's very different from how I've done it. I've changed it and changed the chords because I preferred it the way I heard it in my head. Clark and Ray's version of it was coming out of the old jazz swing era. It had these horrible screechy women's voices singing those backup parts.
I did that song because Jim Keltner got his drum pattern going one day that was a cross between swing and rock. Gary Wright turned around and said, "Hey, doesn't that remind you of that song, 'Got My Mind Set on You'"? (Laughter) I was so surprised that anybody else had ever heard that tune.
Musician: You've covered some rare chestnuts on your own. On Gone Troppo, you cut "I Really Love You," a bouncy R&B number that was a hit for the Stereos in 1961.
Harrison: Yes, and if you remember that song, then I'll tell you that the Beatles wrote a song that I think was actually a nick a bit of a pinch off that one, it was a song that John wrote, and I sang on the very first Beatles album called "Do You Want to Know a Secret." If you check that against the song you're referring to on Troppo, that's round two of where "Secret" came from. (Laughter) It's a fun track.
Musician: What was it like working with John on Imagine in 1971? You contributed a slide guitar, or dobro, on "Crippled Inside," "How Do You Sleep? "I don't Want to be a Soldier Mama", "Gimmie Some Truth" and "Oh, My Love."
Harrison: It was nerve-wracking, as usual. Previously, I'd worked on "Instant Karma." At that time, very strange, intense feelings were going on. Sometimes people don't talk to each other, thinking they're not going to be the one to phone you up and risk rejection. With John, I knew Klaus Vormann, the bass player, so I could at least ask what was going on over at his little eight-track studio in this house in Tittenhurst Park, and how Klaus was doing. John said, "Oh, you know, you should come over." So I just put me guitar and amplifier in the car. I turned up, and he was openly pleased I came. I enjoyed "How do You Sleep?" I like being on that side of it with Paul (chuckles), rather than on the receiving end.
Moreover, I was earnestly trying to be a slide guitar player at that time, but I always blacked out at solos, especially live ones. I seemed to have no control over what was happening, and my mind would go blank. That was one of them where I had a few good notes, and it just happened to sound like a solo. We did all that work in one day.
Musician: Just as "How Do You Sleep" And "Crippled Inside" were John Snipes at McCartney, your song "WahWah" on All Things Must Pass was aimed at Paul during Let It Be
Harrison. (Nods) I'd left the band at that period. Everybody's seen that film, Let It Be, now. And what was supposed to be us rehearsing new material. They were going to film us recording it live. But the rehearsal became the movie after we got over all the rows, we had us recording it live. Just ended up in Apple studio and on the roof. I just got so fed up with the bad vibes and the arguments with Paul were being put on film. I didn't care if it was the Beatles. I was getting out, getting home, in that pissed-off mood. I wrote that song, "WahWah"was saying, "You've given me a bloody headache."
Further on, the song worked while Live at the Bangladesh concert, considering there was no rehearsal, that whole show was a stroke of luck. I rehearsed some with Ringo, the horn players, and the guys from Badfinger. But it was all happening so fast. It's amazing we managed to get anything on tape.
Musician: "Not Guilty" on George Harrison, was written during the sessions for the Beatles' White Album, was a barb at your old band mates.
Harrison: It was me getting pissed off at Lennon and McCartney for the grief I was catching during the making of The White Album. I said I wasn't guilty of getting in the way of their careers. I said I wasn't guilty of leading them astray by going to Rishikesh to see the Maharishi. I was sticking up for myself, and the song came off strong enough to be saved and utilized.
Musician: You've drawn some strong statements from "Deep Blue" was very affecting, and since it was on the flip side of the Bangladesh single, it became a jukebox favorite in bars in the States.
Harrison: I'm glad you noticed that one. You're sure they weren't just punching up the wrong side of the record? I got the impression people never heard a lot of these songs. When I was making " All Things Must Pass " in 1970, not only did I have Phil Spector going to the hospital and all this trouble, but I was also organizing the Trident Studio schedule in London with Derek and the Dominoes, who many forget got their start on that record. But also, my mother got really ill. I was going all the way up and down England into Liverpool, trying to see her in the hospital. Bad time. She got a tumor on the brain, but the doctor was an idiot and was saying there's nothing wrong with her. She's having some psychological trouble. When I went up to see her, she didn't even know who I was. (Voice stiffened with anger) I had to punch the doctor out, because in England, the family doctor has to be the one to get the specialist. So we got the guy who to look at her, and she ended up in the neurological hospital. The specialist said she could "end up being a vegetable, but if it was my wife or my mother, I'd do the operation," which was a horrendous thing, where they had to drill a hole in her skull. She recovered a little bit for about seven months, and during that period, my father, who'd taken care of her, had suddenly exploded with ulcers, and he was in the same hospital, so I was pretending to both of them that the other one was okay, then running back and forth to do this record. I wrote that song. I made it up at home one exhausted morning with those major and minor chords. It's filled with that frustration and gloom of going to these hospitals, and the feeling of disease as the world's meaning truly is what permeated the atmosphere. Not being able to do anything for suffering family or loved ones is an awful experience.
Musician: Let's talk about "Devil's Radio", a raging track.
Harrison: That was a tune I hit on accidentally. I passed a little church in England near where my boy, Dhani, who's now nine, goes to school. There was a poster on the side of the church saying, "Gossip, the devil's radio. Don't be a broadcaster." I just thought it was a dead ringer for a rock tune at that point. I'd just been to see The Eythermics a couple of times and forgotten about that kind of straightforward rock and roll song that they'd go for so effectively, somewhere down the line, I got into all these thick chord songs and forgot until I was watching the Eythermics how great that straightforward from-the-gate force and rock rhythm is. I thought, "God, I can do this." So the song was the result of seeing that poster and then the Eythermics. The only thing missing is that it should be Bob Dylan singing it. (laughter)
That song starts out like a voice from on high. "I heard it in the night, words the thoughtless speak like vulture swooping down below on the devil's radio. I heard through the day airwaves getting filled with gossip broadcast to and fro on the devil's radio."
Musician: There's a line that seems to refer to your reclusive profile of late. "You wonder why I don't hang out much."
Harrison: Yeah, it's something about (haunted house voice) "It's white and black, like industrial waste pollution of the highest degree. You wonder why I don't hang out much. I wonder why you can't see. It's in the films and songs and in your magazines. It's everywhere that you may go, the devil's radio." Boo! (laughter)
But really, gossip is a terrible thing. We all do it, and all our minds are polluted by it. You know what I mean? Somebody said, the next time you gossip, gossip about yourself, and see how you like it. It just creates a muck of negativity and false information, and it puts a bad atmosphere out. Like the church poster said, "Don't be a broadcaster." I like to remind myself of this, because I'm just as bad as everyone else.
Musician: Recently, in Rolling Stone, they had a rock trivia quiz in which John Lennon's Two Virgins was said to be the first Beatles solo album, but that's wrong. You stuck your neck out four weeks before the November 29, 1968, release of Two Virgins with Wonderwall Music
Harrison: (grinning) And it's not trivia, it's history! I remember doing it in London at the end of 1967, and then going to Bombay and recording part of it in the studio there. There was this guy who directed the movie Wonderwall called Joe Massot. I don't know where I met him, but he said he wanted me to do the music for his movie, which didn't come out until 1969, and I said, "I don't know. I haven't got a guess on how to write music for a movie," and he said, "Oh, we got no budget for the music anyway. So whatever you give me, I'll have it." I was real nervous with the idea, because he wanted music running throughout the whole film, but he kept on with me. What I'd do was go to the film studio with a stopwatch. It was really high-tech stuff, and I'd just be what they call "spotting the scene" to see where the music was going to go. Doing click, click with the watch, I go back into my studio and make 35 seconds, say of something, mix it, and line it up with the scene. It gave me a great opportunity. I was getting in so into Indian music then that I decided to use the assignment partially as an excuse for a musical anthology to help spread it. I used all these instruments that, at the time, weren't as familiar to Western people as they are now, like the shanai, sitar, bansuri, tabla, and teranga. I also use Tambora drones and had Eric Clapton playing blues guitar backward over them, along with loads of horrible Mellotron stuff also
Musician: I got a kick that there was a snatch of "Crying" from Wonderwall Music spliced in 13 years later, at the close of Somewhere in England's "Save the World."
Harrison: You spotted that? Three points for you! The whole "Save the World " song blows up in the middle, where we all get nuked with babies crying. That latter song is very serious, but at the same time, it's hysterical. The lyrics got a lot of funny things about dog-food salesmen and make your own H-bomb in the kitchen with your mom at the end. I just wanted to let the whole song go out with something sad, to touch that nerve and maybe make you think, "oh shit."
I thought of the instrument used on Wonderwall Music called the thar shahe, which means "string shahe." It's like a one-string fiddle, a bowed instrument with the panthetic strings resting over a stretched skin, so it had that hollow, echoey resonance, a wailing, crying sound.
Musician: Electronic Sound, released on the Zapple label in May 1969, was your second solo album. How'd you go from touting these esoteric, acoustic Indian instruments to creating that dense mass of synthesizer gizmo effects?
Harrison: All I did was get that very first Moog synthesizer with that big patch unit and the keyboards that you could never tune, and I put a microphone into a tape machine. I recorded whatever came out. The word avant-garde, as my friend Alvin Lee likes to say, really means avant- got a clue. So whatever came out when I fiddled with the knobs went on tape. But some amazing sounds did happen.
Musician: Only two albums appeared on Zapple, Electronic Sounds and John Lennon's Life With Lions, Unfinished Music Number Two, the third scheduled release, Listen to Richard Bratgan was never issued.
Harrison: See, we conceived of an offshoot of Apple Records that would be artie music that wouldn't normally gain an outlet, a series where people could talk or read their work, as with the Bratgan thing. The intention was to get Lenny, Bruce, and all these kinds of people. But as with so many other things at Apple, it seized up before it really got going. Both of the albums that did come out are a load of rubbish, yet they're interesting from a collector's point of view. The theory was we wanted to let serendipity take hold.
Musician: You told Mitch Glaser in Crawdaddy in 1977 about the entirely happenstantial origins of Cream's "Badge" in 1968. Eric Clapton mistook your scribbled note about the song's bridge for the title "Badge", and the lyric "I told you about the swans, they live in the park" was just a drunken mumble from Ringo.
Harrison: Uh huh. Nobody asked me about "Badge" before. That whole song was quite silly. Ringo was sitting around drinking out of his brain, saying anything. The part about "our kid now he's married to Mabel." Well, "our kid" is a common Liverpool expression that usually means your younger brother. We were amusing ourselves, and my Lo Angelo Mysterio credit must have been thought up by Eric. I just saw it on the back of the album when it came. In those days of course, if you played on anybody else's album or even one track, EMI used to get funny about it, thinking, "Oh, the fabulous Beatles publishing catalog", and try claiming royalties on it. So if we did that, we always had to make up names. Ravi Shankar used to put on Harri Georgeson or Ja Raj Harrison. John preferred George Harrisong.
Musician: What were the influences on your slide guitar playing over the years? It's an incredible, distinctive signature.
Harrison: I'm not sure about the influences. First time I ever played slide was in 1969. I suppose I stuck one of those things on my finger somewhere before that. But in 1969, Eric Clapton got his manager to bring Delaney and Bonnie over to England, and Eric was in the band. I went to see the first show in December. It was such a good rocking crew, I figured it would be nice to be in it. They said, "Okay, we're coming to your house in the morning." And they pulled up the bus outside my house and said, "Come on." I just grabbed my guitar and an amp and went on the road with them. They had a song out called "Comin Home", which Dave Mason had actually played slide on. Delaney gave me this slide bottleneck and said, "You do the Dave Mason part." I never attempted anything before that, and I think my slide guitar playing originated from that. I started writing some slide songs on that tour, one of which later came out on 33 1/3, called "Women, Don't You Cry for Me." Then I started playing that way at home, and I suppose I was always trying to pretend to be a blues player in my style.
Another thing that influenced me was during the 60s, I played the sitar and got heavy into Indian music. That may account for some qualities that you can't quite put your finger on. It's in there somewhere, and comes out. For two or three years, I was only playing the sitar, then I decided I better get back to playing the guitar and writing pop tunes. In the late 60s, I found I couldn't really play these solos or get a good sound because I hadn't touched the guitar other than the Beatles sessions for records. I started playing slide, thinking, "Maybe this is how I could come up with something that's half decent." I got into doing corresponding guitar harmonies to the bedrock side parts, double tracking them like on " My Sweet Lord " and other portions of the All Things Must Pass album.
Musician: Is there a certain guitar you use for slide playing?
Harrison: I used to use anything. I didn't understand how to do it properly. Eventually, I found the best way. Ry Cooder, who's my favorite guitar player in that vein, has his bridge cranked up high with heavy gauge strings. That's what you really need, otherwise you get all that rattling on the front rise. Got good touch and a good ear for melody. It's one thing to be able to play slide efficiently, but if you can't get a tune out of it, too, it's not very likable. I set up this straight, an early 60s model that was originally pale blue for slide play when we did "Nowhere Man", and in the late 60s, I painted it psychedelic. It was the one I used for the '67 satellite thing, for "All You Need is Love," and also on "I Am the Walrus" on Magical Mystery Tour. But I'd never had the technique that Ry Cooder had with finger style picking. I've tried to get this without a flat pick using your right hand so that you can dampen down all the notes. But if you were to isolate my slide tracks on some of the old records, there's all this racket going on behind, whereas I'm sure if you were to do the same thing with Cooder, you could hear just what he's playing. It's really clean.
I've got two slides, and the main one I used is actually a piece of the old Vox AC-30 amplifier's stands. I asked the roadie we used to have in the Beatles, Mal Evans, if he could get me one. And he just got a hacksaw out and sawed through a piece of the amp stand. I use that a lot. I had some glass slides all made. Also, I find the glass slide tends to be a warmer sound, whereas the metal one is more slippy and is brighter. But I couldn't tell you which one I used where (chuckles), because I don't make notes on it.
Musician: Do you have any hobbies besides Film Producing and being a Grand Prix buff ? Somewhere in England, you were shown on the cover in front of a Mark Boyle painting? Do you collect art?
Harrison: That painting was wonderful. He's done a cast of the pavement and the gutter and the piece of the road. It's quite an amazing process, like a sculpting of the street. I like certain artists, but by the time I got to like them, they were too expensive to collect, like Dali or Magritte. Paul's got a bunch of Magrittes. He bought them for like $50 each. Then the guy died in 1967, and now they're worth millions.
Musician: Whatever happened to the four songs "Lay his Head", "Tears of the World", "Set Singing" and "Flying Hour" that Warners dropped from Somewhere in England?
Harrison: Funny, you should ask that, with us discussing art. I'm doing another book for Genesis publications, who did my 1980 book. I Me Mine, for some reason, I don't remember why I Me Mine, later came out in a cheap version, but it was only really made as a limited edition, because how it was made was almost more important than what's inside. But there's this new book I've been working on with an artist, Keith West, for about two years now. He's illustrating the lyrics to my songs. It could only be done in a limited edition, because if you printed it cheap, you'd lose the value of it. We're making it in two volumes.
To answer your question, we decided to put a free record inside the books. Some songs have gotten left out over the years. I finished the record for the first book just before I came here, and it's those four songs you just mentioned, and a live version of "For You Blue." It all comes in a big leather box with a little drawer for the record. It's called Songs by George Harrison, and it should be out by Christmas, but there are only 2000 copies being made, and it does cost £200. It's expensive, yes, but in a world of crass, disposable junk, it's meant to be a lovely thing.
Musician: That anticipates my next question, now that the surviving Beatles are suing Nike for the Revolution sneaker ad, what's your view of the commercial abuse controversies regarding the Beatles' recorded legacy?
Harrison: Well, from our point of view, if it's allowed to happen, every Beatles song ever recorded is going to be advertising women's underwear and sausages. We've got to put a stop to it in order to set a precedent. Otherwise, it's going to be a free-for-all. It's just one of those things, like the play Beatlemania, we have to do certain things in order to try to safeguard the past. The other thing is, even while Nike might have paid Capitol Records for the rights, Capitol Records certainly doesn't give us the money. It's one thing if you're dead, but we're still around. They don't have any respect for the fact that we wrote and recorded these songs, and it was our lives, the way I feel. I don't care who thinks they own the copyrights of the songs or who thinks they own the masters of the records. It was our lives, we said it, and they should have a little respect for that
Musician: Dark Horse, the album and single, made for a powerful but pessimistic image of desperate competition with your former band mates and with yourself.
Harrison: That album had some good material, but the pressure I got under that year was ridiculous. I went through so many things. Produced two albums, Shankar Family and Friends and the Place I Love, by Splinter and I produced the Indian Music Festival, which had taken me years to get together with 15 or 16 classical Indian musicians, all playing ensemble like an orchestra, which they never do in India. You'd see solo players or two performers with the tabla player. In 1974, I went to India, got them all together, and they came to Europe. Ravi wrote all the material. It rocked. Then came my own album. And this tour I had lined up. And I also met my wife, Arias [sic], around then. I wrote the song "Dark Horse" in the studio with Ringo and Keltner, and never got to finish it. I took this half-finished album with me to tour rehearsals in Los Angeles, and got my voice blown out by singing all day. I decided, since I had to teach the band the songs anyway for the tour, to mic up the soundstage when the studios at A&M record it live. If you listen now, it's sort of okay. It was all done in a rush, with rehearsals by day and mixing at night. For the artwork on the inner sleeve, I was so behind that, moments before we went on the road, I got a blank dust cover, wrote out all the credits by hand, put a few thumbprints on it, and gave it to the record company for the printers. The cover shot was my high school class photo from Liverpool Institute, with lots of gray students who looked the same in this big gray building in the background. I positioned the blow-up photos that I'd be in the middle, put an album cover over the length of it, and cropped it off. I moved the headmaster, who never liked me anyway, from where he was in the photo. And I put him in the middle with a bull's eye Capitol logo on his chest. I got the art guy to paint the Himalayas in the background with a few yogis in the sky, and put exotic T-shirts on everybody.
Musician: Is that Peter Sellers you're with on the inside shot?
Harrison: Sure, that's us strolling around Friar Park. I was quite close to Peter. Long before I met him, I was a fan of the Goon Show, and then I used to see him at parties. I got to spend a lot of time with him in the 60s when I was with Ravi Shankar, because Peter liked Ravi a lot. Once, Peter Sellers, Ravi, and I all went to Disneyland in 1971. Can you imagine all of us going on the Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion rides together? Peter was a devoted hippie, a free soul. He came on tour with me in 1974 and flew on the plane with us. When Peter was up, he was the funniest person you could ever imagine, so many voices and characters, but that was his problem. When he wasn't up, he didn't know who he was supposed to be. He was a considerable influence on my getting into the film world. Peter used to come to my Henley home with all these 16-millimeter films, and used to sit around and have dinner and watch his favorite picture, which has been mine ever since Peter showed it to me. It was Mel Brooks, The Producers. He kept saying, "You've got to see this movie." Eventually, we put it on, and I've never taken it off. The bubble caption in the photo of Peter and me on the Dark Horse jacket is from The Producers, from Max Bailey to his partner, Bloom, "But Leo, we say, let's say we promenade through the park. "
Musician: People always say you're so serious and broody, but I'd say you have a real sense of humor.
Harrison: Me too. I've always had a sense of humor, and I think it's absolutely necessary. I think what happened is I was tagged as somber because I did some spiritual things during a sizable phase of my career and sang a lot of songs about God, or the Lord, or whatever you want to call him. You can't be singing that material laughingly, but if you're not smiling, people draw a conclusion of seriousness. I don't think anybody's all serious or all comical. I've seen comedians who are deadly serious when they're off stage. Frankly, I always thought it would be very funny when people thought I was very serious. Maybe it's also because the last time I did interviews back in the 70s was all that heavy hangover from the hippie 60s, when everybody was into this discipline, that doctrine, and that other, I've got a very serious side of me. But even with that, I always see the joke too. That's why I like Monty Python
Musician: Which brings up the Life of Brian and other film projects. It's a great body of work, from Time Bandits on through Mona Lisa and Withnail and I, you've done with your partner, Denis O'Brien, for Handmade Films.
Harrison: It's my hobby. It's taken time, but we've gained a little respect from the film people. We try to be nice to people. It's not always easy, and most of the things we've done were films nobody else wanted to do. They were rejects. The only film that was not enjoyable making was the only one on which we've ever been involved with anybody from Hollywood, Shanghai Surprise. We were a day away from scrapping that when, suddenly, Sean Penn and Madonna got involved. But that was such a pain in the ass. We've got good relationships with other people we've worked with, however, like Michael Caine, Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins.
Withnail and I, the first film Bruce Robinson directed, was a chance to support a project everybody else turned down. It's the same right now with a movie we're shooting about a band of gypsies in Czechoslovakia, that Bob Hoskins has written, directed, and is acting in himself. It's called Ragged Rant Ronnie. I'd like to think we help people achieve some of their ambitions. At the same time, when we took on the Life of Brian, I was so into Monty Python, I didn't care what anybody thought. In those days, we had to put up all the money. Didn't get any advances from studios, nothing.
Musician: When you produced Life of Brian, many people questioned why the man behind "My Sweet Lord" would produce a supposedly sacrilegious, Biblical farce.
Harrison: Aha, actually, all it made fun of was the people's stupidity in the story. Christ came out of it looking good. Myself and all the Monty Pythons have great respect for Christ. It's only the ignorant people who didn't care to check it out, who thought that it was knocking Christ, actually it was upholding him, and knocking all the idiotic stuff that goes on around religion, like the fact that many folks often misread things and will follow anybody. Brian saying, "Don't follow me. You're all individuals." Is like Christ saying, "You'll all do greater work than I will." He wasn't trying to say, "I'm the groove man, and you should follow me." He was out there trying to, as Lord Buckley would have said, "Knock the crows off the squares", trying to hip everybody to the fact that they have a Christ within them.
Musician: You're a fan of hipster comedian Lord Buckley, which is where your 1977 hit "Cracker Box Palace" came from.
Harrison: I was down at the music publishing convention in France in 1975. I was stuck at some boring dinner when I saw Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. I went over to him, and he was with this fella, George Greif, who was himself a manager. We got talking, and I said to Greif, "I don't know if this is a compliment or an insult, but you remind me of Lord Buckley." He said "I managed him for 18 years!" I couldn't believe it, so we spent a few hours talking, and he said that Buckley lived in this little shack he called Cracker Box Palace. I wrote that down on my cigarette packet, and again, like "Devil's Radio", it was a good phrase for a song. Near the end of the single, there is a line in it in direct relation to Lord Buckley. "I met a Mr. Grief, and he said, I welcome you to Cracker Box Palace. Was not expecting you. Let's wrap and tap at Cracker Box Palace. Know that the Lord is well and inside of you." I made the raw input into a story about getting born and living in the world. But again, everybody thought I was talking about the other Lord.
Musician: You mentioned knowing Albert Grossman. I always wondered how the Band came to invite you up to Woodstock in November 1968 you wrote, "I'd Have You Any Time" with Dylan during that visit.
Harrison: I wrote "All Things Must Pass" there as well. To this day, you can play Stage Fright and Big Pink. And although the technologies change, those records come off as beautifully conceived and uniquely sophisticated. They had great tunes played in a great spirit and with humor and versatility. I knew those guys during that period, and I think it was Robbie Robertson who invited me down. He said, "You can stay at Albert's. He's got the big house. " I hung out with them and Bob. It was strange because at that time, Bob and Grossman were going through this fight, this crisis, about managing him. I would spend the day with Bob and the night with Grossman and hear both sides of the battle. Artistically, I respected the band enormously. All the different guys in the group sang, and Robbie Robertson used to say he was lucky because he could write songs for a voice like Dylan's. What a wise and generous attitude. The hard thing is to write a song for yourself, knowing you've got to sing it. Sometimes I've had a hard time singing my own stuff.
Musician: You once remarked that you were trying to write a Robbie Robertson kind of song with "All Things This Past."
Harrison: "The Weight" was the one I admired. It had a religious and a country feel to it, and I wanted that. You absorb, then you interpret, and it comes out nothing like the thing you're imagining, but it gives you a starting point. We used to take that approach with The Beatles, saying, "Who are we going to be today? Let's pretend to be Fleetwood Mac." There's a song on Abbey Road, "Sun King," that tried that at the time Albatross was out with all the reverb on guitars. So we said, "Let's be Fleetwood Mac doing Albatross," just to get it going. It never really sounded like Fleetwood Mac, just like "All Things" never sounded like The Band, but they were the point of origin.
Musician: What was it like writing with Dylan? He was still a hermit from his motorcycle accident in July 1966. Was he shy?
Harrison: We were both shy. He'd been out of commission socially since his accident. I was nervous in his house, and he was nervous as well. We fidgeted about for two days and only relaxed when he started playing some guitars. The song "I'd Have You Anytime" was an accident. I was just saying, "Hey, man, how do you write all these words?" which people probably said to him all the time. He kept thinking he would come pouring out with all these lyrics. He wrote the middle, "All I have is yours. All you see is mine. I'm glad to hold you in my arms. I'd have you any time." It was simplicity itself. (smiles) Meantime, he was saying, "How do you get all those chords?" I showed him some weird ones and happened to hit those two major sevens, one after another; they turned into that melody. Understand, I sang that opening lyric off the top of my head, tried to communicate with him, let me in here. I know I've been here.
Musician: The man who built your Henley Castle, Sir Francis Crisp, was both a prominent lawyer in the 1800s and an architect. I've heard that inscriptions and artwork he added to the interior inspired such songs as "The Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let it Roll)" and the answers at the end of "Ding Dong."
Harrison: It's a Victorian house, and when I bought it, it was about to be demolished, so I got it in its roughest state. Over the years, I've fixed it up, and it's a fabulous place, a treasure of Victorian artifacts. Even though a lot of things originally made for the house have been sold before I bought it, there are inscriptions all over the place, some in Latin, some in Old English, many of them poetry of obscure authorship. "Ding Dong", which I wrote in five minutes, came from some Tennyson carvings over either side of the fireplace with little bells. "Ring out the old ring in the new. Ring out the false ring in the true." Outside in the building, where the gardener sheds have carved over one window is "Yesterday today was tomorrow." The adjacent window has "Tomorrow today will be yesterday." Those parts became the middle eight of "Ding Dong." The quote above the entrata says, "Scan, not a friend with a microscopic glass. You know his fault now let his foibles pass." Opposite it reads, "Life is one long enigma, true, my friend, read on, read on, the answers at the end." Extra Texture is where that was used, which was a grubby album in a way. The production left a lot to be desired, as did my performance. I was in a real down place. Some songs I like, but in retrospect, I wasn't very happy about it. Gray, cloudy lies, describes clouds of gloom that used to come down on me, a difficulty I had. I found, over the years that I'm more able to keep them away, and I'm quite a happy person now.
Musician: The flip of "Ding Dong" displays the cloudy side of you, "I Don't Care Anymore" never appeared anywhere else.
Harrison: I had to come up with a B-side, and I did. Did it in one take. The story was in the attitude. I don't give a shit.
Musician: Yet you often seem to care a great deal about the care and feelings of many of your songs, to where you've done sequels to several. Extra Textures's "This Guitar Can't Keep from Crying", and "Here Comes the Moon" on George Harrison, are drastic examples.
Harrison: Concerning my guitar songs, if you're a guitar player, guitars have a genuine fascination, and it's nice to have songs about them. I recently saw a guitar program on TV in England, and it got into how it's phallic and sexual. Maybe that's so, I don't know, in my case, but ever since I was a kid, I loved guitars and songs about them, like BB King's "Lucille." But the sequels, in this case, had to do in large part, with me not enjoying "Guitar Gently Weeps." I love what Eric did on guitar for the original. The versions I did live are better in some respects. See, in the Beatles' days, I never liked my singing. I couldn't sing very good. I was always very paranoid, very nervous, and that inhibited my singing. "This Guitar Can't Keep From Crying" came out because the press and critics tried to nail me on that. The '74 tour got nasty. I had no voice on the road, and I was shagged out, knackered. I had a choice of canceling the tour and forgetting it, or going out and singing hoarse. I always think people will give others more credit than they do, so I assume they'd know I'm in bad voice, but still feel the music's plentiful and good.
I wrote that song about being stuck on a limb and being down, but not out. For "Here Comes the Moon." I think I was on LSD or mushrooms at the time, and was out sunning in Maui. The sun was setting over the ocean, and it gets pretty stunning, even when you're not on mushrooms. I was blissed out, and then I turned around and saw a big full moon rising. I laughed and thought it was about time someone, and it may as well be me, gave the moon its due.
Musician: Did "This Song", the song about the My Sweet Lord/ He's so Fine suit, provide you with any catharsis?
Harrison: It did get it all off my chest. It was a laugh and a release. Saying "This song has got nothing bright about it." After Bright Tunes publishing sued me, was amusing, at least to me. Also cracked the song could be "You", meaning the Ronnie Spector song. And then had Eric Idol of Monty Python dub in two arguing voices saying, "Sounds like 'Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch'. Nah. Sounds more like 'Rescue Me'". I see now where everybody's doing videos with courts and judges, like I did for that single, not to mention Madonna helping herself to "Living in the Material World" for "Material Girl", I was ahead of my time. (Chuckle)
Musician: Living in the Material World, the album, after all, was a smash hit in America. It was number one for five weeks in the summer of 1973 with the "Give Me Love" single on top simultaneously, and it sold over 3 million copies.
Harrison: Yes, but they, Capitol / EMI, still never gave me royalties, did they? No.
( Note, according to Capitol / EMI spokeswoman, all recording royalties due him since 1973 have been paid to date.)
Musician: Cloud Nine rescues two worthy songs "Someplace Else " and "Breath Away from Heaven" which they wrote for that Madonna /Sean Penn movie Shanghai Surprise.
Harrison: I never did a soundtrack album because the film got slagged off so bad. We had such a rotten time with them while making it. I didn't want to lose the songs, especially "Breath Away from Heaven", which has nice words, although I hadn't included the lyrics to any songs on this album. Always did before, but I thought that the practice is getting passe. Maybe I'm looking for a few new leaves to turn over.
Musician: Could they include a return to touring?
Harrison: It's possible. Ringo can't wait to go out. And Eric Clapton keeps telling me he's gonna be in the band. Eric's such a sweet cat. I caught one of his own shows in the Los Angeles Forum just before Easter of this year. I stood at the side of the stage holding up my cigarette lighter for the encore. (Laughter) Really, I love him that much through the thick and the thin. Eric and I have always persevered and protected our friendship. One of the only things that Eric ever held against me is that I met Bob Marley while I was out here on the west coast in the late 70s, and Eric's always wished he'd been the one. He's never forgiven me for not taking him along to meet Bob Marley. (Sighs)
It's hard to see the greats go, and I'm a big fan of so many kinds of rock and popular music, like from Bob Marley to Cole Porter to Smokey Robinson to Hoagy Carmichael. I mean, I wrote "Pure Smokey" on 33 1/3 as my little tribute to his brilliant songwriting. His effortless butterfly of a voice The Beatles did Smokey's "You Really Got a Hold on Me,". and there was a song John did that was very much influenced by Smokey: "This Boy." If you listen to the middle eight of "This Boy", it was John trying to do Smokey. It suddenly occurred to me that there's even a line in "When We Was Fab", saying, "and you really got a hold on me."
As for Hoagy Carmichael. I've been nuts for him since I was a kid. I cut his "Hong Kong Blues" on Somewhere in England, and there's still a few more of his, I wouldn't mind doing like "Old Rocking Chair." Maybe one day, not just yet, but one day when I get a bit older, me and Eric can sing, "Old Rocking Chair Has Got Me." There seems to be a running thread here about music and its powerful hold, and it's that way too. We who love music, we love the people who make it. We love the sound of it, and we love what it does to us, how it makes us feel and how it helps us love.
When I was writing "Cloud Nine", I had these ideas in mind. I'd read once in some spiritual context that a bad part of you is your human limitations, and a good part of you is God. I think people who truly can live a life in music are telling the world, "You can have my love. You can have my smiles. Forget the bad parts. You don't need them. Just take the music, the goodness, because it's the very best, and it's the part I give most willingly."
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