Tag: george harrison

Categories
music

Morning Harrison

Jim James of My Morn­ing Jack­et has record­ed some pared-down, reverbed-up cov­ers of George Har­ri­son songs under the name Yim Yames. I've includ­ed one here: "Long, Long, Long" from the White Album, and I appre­ci­ate the qui­et, def­er­en­tial treat­ment that Jim James gives his songs. Good stuff, "Yim."Here's a good sto­ry in the engineer's notes from the orig­i­nal record­ing of "Long, Long, Long" on Mon­day, Octo­ber 6, 1968:

There's a sound near the end of the song [best heard on the right chan­nel] which is a bot­tle of Blue Nun wine rat­tling away on the top of a Leslie speak­er cab­i­net. It just hap­pened. Paul hit a cer­tain organ note and the bot­tle start­ed vibrat­ing. We thought it was so good that we set the mikes up and did it again. The Bea­t­les always took advan­tage of accidents.

From the indis­pens­able Bea­t­les Record­ing Ses­sions by Mark Lewisohn.

Categories
aside

Et tu, John and George?

Jour­nal­ist Mikal Gilmore dis­cuss­es the research of his Rolling Stone cov­er arti­cle, "Why the Bea­t­les Broke Up."

What I found most trou­bling, most trag­ic, in all of this was two things: Both Lennon and Har­ri­son (Lennon, clear­ly, in par­tic­u­lar) did their best to sab­o­tage the Bea­t­les from mid-1968 onward, and when it all came irrev­o­ca­bly apart, I believe that both men regret­ted what they had wrought. I don't think that John Lennon and George Har­ri­son (but Lennon, again, in par­tic­u­lar) tru­ly meant the Bea­t­les to end, even though they might not have known it in the moment. I think they meant to shift the bal­ance of pow­er, I think they meant for the Bea­t­les to become, in a sense, a more casu­al form of col­lab­o­ra­tion, and I think they clear­ly intend­ed to rein in Paul McCart­ney. But they over­played their hand and — there's no way around it — they treat­ed McCart­ney shame­ful­ly dur­ing 1969, and unfor­giv­ably in the ear­ly months of 1970.