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Re:Day 60 and dear George Harrison. 3 Years, 10 Months ago
Amusingly You Tube says the copyright to the melody of my track is claimed as - My Sweet Lord! Life is full of giggles. Worth checking out the original.
Re:Day 60 and dear George Harrison. 3 Years, 10 Months ago
George was my favourite Beatle too.. he was a deeper thinker and I liked his spiritual side.
He had a gorgeous little cottage called Friar Park situated outside of London
Here’s a video about it...
George, I heard, was always a little tight with his spending and got his brother
and some other family members to look after the gardens and cleaning..
Jk I didn’t realise you made that record back in ‘75
I read that after he lost the case he was quite distraught about writing songs in case he would have to go through the whole thing again..
He eventually got over it and made tons of new records and built a massive personal fortune.
And like you jk with Revvolution Movies, George (with Dennis O’Brien) got into the British movie business
with their company called Hand Made Films.
Re:Day 60 and dear George Harrison. 3 Years, 10 Months ago
T Rex’s “Hot Love” is reminiscent of the children’s tune “A Frog went Walking on a Summer’s Day”.
It's strange how the concept of multiple independent discovery is recognised within the fields of physics and maths but not music. Aren’t they all interconnected?
Re:Day 60 and dear George Harrison. 3 Years, 10 Months ago
Little Sausage wrote: George was my favourite Beatle too.. he was a deeper thinker and I liked his spiritual side.
He had a gorgeous little cottage called Friar Park
"Little cottage"???
George was a complicated man. He used to cruise around the streets near the Apple offices and pick up young fans. He was very promiscuous and would have been destroyed in the era of false (and real) allegations. I also always found his resentment of Lennon and McCartney a bit immature. Yes, he accumulated enough of a backlog of decent songs for All Things Must Pass, but what of his output after that? Not that many songs that rivalled L&M. And his gripes about McCartney mainly came down to the fact that McCartney, as a multi-instrumentalist (who played the guitar solos on some of George's own songs, including Taxman), had a much more complete sense of how to finish his own songs than George did (remember the guitar - clang clang - 'answers' George proposed adding to Paul's Hey Jude? McCartney was absolutely right to say no to that, but George sulked about it for years. George could be really 'normal' and modest and engaging, but he could also be bitter and hypocritical, depending on his moods. Olivia was a very forgiving woman.
Re:Day 60 and dear George Harrison. 3 Years, 10 Months ago
Who would have thought that grassing up your mate to the would lose that friendship!.
The similarity between "He's so fine" and "My Sweet Lord" is very clear, but I really can't hear much similarity betweeen "Wild World" and "Its a Sin".
Re:Day 60 and dear George Harrison. 3 Years, 10 Months ago
I love both of them dearly but George's eagerness to depict himself as the 'authentic' one to McCartney's 'inauthentic' one always stuck in the craw.
For example, George would always pretend Paul was desperate for hits at any price whereas he merely listened to his muse. Well, when John was murdered, Paul waited until a suitable tribute, 'Here Today,' came to him, whereas George simply reclaimed a jarringly jaunty-sounding song he'd already written for Ringo, hastily re-wrote the lyrics (quite badly) and called it 'All Those Years Ago'! Pretty tasteless, I felt.
Same went for touring. George went to the US and had a disastrous time, not least because he soon realised he simply didn't have the strength as a vocalist to command a long solo show. McCartney, meanwhile, went from one success to the next, so George again depicted Paul as the shameless publicity seeker while himself as the contented hermit. Completely untrue. George knew he didn't have the ability to go on further tours and make them work, but instead of just admitting that - no shame in that at all - it again became one of his 'I'm above all that nonsense' poses.
He even tried to dress up his sacking from his label, after 'Gone Troppo', as his own decison to withdraw from a sordid recording industry, even though the real reason was he had been deemed, even after - for a second time - grudgingly replacing a third of his original album with 'more commercial' songs, not sufficiently marketable.
Of all the Beatles, George needed the Anthology most because he'd been fleeced of millions by his old movie partner, but even then he acted like some sulky schoolkid. If you look at the studio footage and the chat outside at George's home, Paul is desperately trying to please George, who clearly knows it, and yet George makes it as hard as possible. There's one point where Paul says, 'Hey George, do you remember that time...' and he recounts a story, but George, who is sitting on the grass right next to him, ignores him and starts strumming away on his ukelele, leaving a visibly hurt Paul to just say, 'Obviously not'. So unneccessary, and very sad. You can maybe understand that back in the early 70s, but by the 80s, by that time, really?
George was great in many ways but he was always myth-making whilst acting as the truest Beatle.
Re:Day 60 and dear George Harrison. 3 Years, 10 Months ago
I'd rate McCartney alongside Brian Wilson for sheer musicality. Both of them could not just dream up a song but 'hear' inside their heads what instruments they wanted and how they should be played. That's an amazing ability. But in the studio Brian could tell the Wrecking Crew how to play his music - no great conflict there. Whereas McCartney would get resentment from George and John for telling them what he wanted. When you hear 'The Fool on the Hill' or 'Lady Madonna' or 'Hey Jude' then it would take a huge leap into the dark to question his judgement, while of course understanding the others' frustration. But all of that notorious 'I'll play what you want me to play or I won't play at all' stuff, ultimately I think that reflects worse on George than Paul. It was just George's good/bad luck to work alongside someone with that range of musicality. (And the irony was that George ended up letting Jeff Lynne completely stamp HIS ELO sound all over Cloud Nine, and he didn't complain at all!)
Re:Day 60 and dear George Harrison. 3 Years, 10 Months ago
Green Man wrote:
I'm not a Beatles fan but I do enjoy listening to all of George solo material.
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Name ten solo songs, post All Things Must Past, that you truly - truly - think rate as classics. I love 33 and 1/3 and the George Harrison LP, those two albums are fantastic IMHO, but I'd still hesitate before nominating that many tracks. The Jeff Lynn effort came, as usual, with his thump-thump-thump production that makes my ears bleed.
Re:Day 60 and dear George Harrison. 3 Years, 10 Months ago
I think being in a band and songwriting with a group is really hard... even more so when you’re rich and famous. Everyone wants to do their own thing and believes that can do it without the others.
As another example:
Mickie Most said to Mike Chapman that although Chapman was a good songwriter, there was a certain element that Nicky Chinn bought into the writing partnership that made the creative force better.
The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts.
I think Chapman resented Chinn’s wealth as Chinn had came from a wealthy London family and already had the trappings of a luxurious Mayfair flat and a night life usually spent at the Tramp club.
I think songwriting with others is really hard, of course now it’s the way most pop is made..
With Burt Bacharach & Hal David the roles were very defined, Bacharach did the music and David the lyrics.
Of course now most songwriters don’t collaborate with just one person, usually the flit around from song hub to song hub. That’s how the Los Angeles pop business works, if you’re lucky you’ll have Max Martin
adding his gold dust to the song.
Re:Day 60 and dear George Harrison. 3 Years, 10 Months ago
Didn't GH write 'Here Come The Sun' one day when he was staying at Eric Clapton's house in Ewhurst; I believe Clapton's house is located somewhere down Moon Hall Road, probably with a south westerly facing aspect. We have a massive sky down here in the Surrey Hills; beautiful for gathering the sun by day, and fantastic for star (and moon) gazing by night. 'Here Comes The Sun' and 'Something' are definitely my two favorite Harrison songs.
Now that's a much nicer story than hearing about some copyright dispute.
I wonder if JK got his planetary inspiration from the time he spent living in Ewhurst too...