Originally published in Uncut Take 276 [May 2020 issue], we present the untold storied behind George’s solo albums…
George Harrison was only hitting his stride when The Beatles ended. The start of his solo endeavours in 1968 coincided with his rise to greater prominence within the band, and in the immediate post-Fab era he continued to blossom. All Things Must Pass, “My Sweet Lord”, The Concert For Bangladesh and “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)” elevated him to solo superstar status in the early ’70s. Thereafter, his career was tidal, powerful waves of creativity subject to the waxing and waning of his enthusiasms in the face of competing interests: spirituality, gardening, fast cars, films.
Harrison was in many ways a reluctant solo artist, often happiest in collaboration, yet his vision was stubbornly individual and his music branded with his forceful personality. Whether channelled through rock, pop, soul, country or Indian music, his wire-cutter vocals, signature slide-guitar motifs and mix of spiritual yearning, no-nonsense truth-telling and earthy humour was utterly distinctive. Here, Harrison’s closest collaborators reveal the intimate stories behind the music, a tale encompassing death rides in E yellow Porsches, lascivious jazzers, Dylan worship and an unforgettable recording session on the day John Lennon died. Through it all. “George was always himself,” says his former bandleader Tom Scott. “He was consistent in the space he occupied. “His simplicity was beautiful.”
WONDERWALL MUSIC (APPLE, 1968)
Harrison’s soundtrack to Joe Massot’s film about a mad professor and a Biba girl called Penny Lane is released three weeks before the ‘White Album’. With cameos from Eric Clapton and Peter Tork, it’s the first Fab Four solo record, the first album on Apple and a world music crossover before its time.
JOHN BARHAM (MUSICIAN/ARRANGER): Wonderwall… was primarily an extension of his love of Indian music. George became a pupil of Ravi Shankar and he impressed me as being a very respectful and disciplined student. He seemed at ease with the sitar. There were already obvious influences on Beatles songs like “Within You Without You” and “Blue Jay Way”.
DAVE MASON: George was nearly adopter! He had done those wonderful Indian tracks on Revolver and St Pepper, and was learning with Ravi Shankar. He gave me the sitar he’d first learned on. I used it on “Paper Sun”, Traffic’s first single.
BARHAM: Joe Massot offered him complete freedom in creating a music score for the film, and he took advantage. But it was obvious that George was still intensely involved in his creative work with The Beatles. When we were doing Wonderwall, The Beatles were using the same studio; they had it block-booked. There were times when George’s sessions finished and the other three Beatles would come in for an evening session. When this happened, George would become re-energised and go into a world apart with the other three that nobody else seemingly could enter. At one session I found a flugelhorn lying around the studio. It turned out to be Paul McCartney’s.
ROY DYKE (DRUMS), THE REMO FOUR: We recorded backing tracks at Abbey Road to accompany certain points in the film. George had timed it all with a stopwatch: “We need one minute and 35 seconds with a country & western feel.” Or, “We need a rock thing for exactly two minutes.” Nothing was really written. We’d talk over ideas he wanted, play something, and he’d say, “That’s good, keep that. I like the piano there.” It was very experimental. There were different tracks with different atmospheres, and a few different sessions. The Indian musicians were recorded in Bombay. At another session he used Eric Clapton, who did a great riff on “Skiing”. I heard he borrowed a five-string banjo from Paul McCartney for Peter Tork to use!
BARHAM: Big Jim Sullivan, who was recording with Tom Jones at Abbey Road, happened to drop in and played bass on “On The Bed”. [It was] a free atmosphere, the sessions were very creative and very enjoyable. I was very impressed how well George had mastered Indian classical techniques. He had dropped in on one of Ravi Shankar’s recording sessions for the BBC/Jonathan Miller production of Alice In Wonderland at the Shepherd’s Bush BBC Centre, which I worked on. At the session we were recording a scene where Ravi soloed and I played an Indian jhala texture on piano.
George was fascinated by the combination of sitar and piano, and subsequently at his house in Esher he asked me to play one of my own compositions based on jhala texture. He looked and listened very closely. Later at one of the Wonderwall sessions he very abruptly sat down at the piano and with great intensity started playing his own jhala over a chord sequence. We had many discussions about Indian philosophy and spirituality. I’m convinced that George was one of the very few people I’ve met who was on a spiritual journey.
ALL THINGS MUST PASS (APPLE, 1970)
Triumphant triple album produced by Phil Spector in the wake of the Beatles break-up. Includes “Isn’t It A Pity”, “What Is Life”, “Beware Of Darkness” I and global hit “My Sweet Lord”, the latter subjected to years of litigation over similarities to The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine”.
KLAUS VOORMANN (BASS): George was very excited at this period; the songs were so great. Some of them they’d already tried with The Beatles, but they fell through. All the contract stuff was ongoing, but between George, John and Ringo there was no problem. They had gone separate ways, they didn’t like the same things, but they were still really professional about working together.
ANDY WHITE (DRUMS): I’d first met George at John’s studio when he was making Imagine. Everybody had dinner together every night and we talked about his musical ideas. He said, “I want you to come and play on the album.’
DAVE MASON (GUITAR): I was playing guitar with Delaney & Bonnie and we did a show at Croydon. Eric came down, and George was with him. We invited him up to play. He wasn’t sure what to do, so I showed him this little repetitive slide-guitar part that I’d put on “Coming Home”. We got it down in the dressing room. Years later, George said that one of the reasons he got into that signature slide-guitar sound is that I had showed him this lick. So I got an open invite to come and play on All Things Must Pass. I mostly played acoustic rhythm guitar. It was a little bit chaotic – throw it all in the pot and see what comes out.
WHITE: It was pretty organised, actually! He was very together. He had a bunch of songs prepared and he knew what he wanted to do each day. George would tell us how it went, the feel and the tempo. He was very serious about his music; quiet, controlled, level-headed. I knew it was going to be a big statement, a Beatle making a solo album – there was a feeling of that in the studio.
VOORMANN: There were no headaches, no confusion. George had prepared the songs and he had enough experience, though he learned a lot from Phil Spector.
WHITE: Spector didn’t come out of the control room much. George was out in the studio, he’d go back, and him and Phil would talk a lot about how they were doing it and who was playing on what. Ringo came in the day we were doing “My Sweet Lord. I said, “George, Ringo’s here – why doesn’t he play the drum part?” He said, “No, I want you to play the drums. Ringo can play tambourine.” It didn’t make me feel that comfortable! It was very casual like that. I never thought for a million years that “My Sweet Lord” sounded anything like “He’s So Fine” when we were in the studio.
Maybe I should have been there to testify and say, “Look, I played on this, and there was never one word mentioned about this in the studio.” It certainly wasn’t conscious. I felt it was pretty unfair.
VOORMANN: George took his time in the studio. He had the EMI people on his back; they thought it was too expensive, they didn’t realise that this was going to be such a big hit. George was really pissed off about that, actually.
MASON: He was emerging from an incredible writing team, but he suddenly came up with all this beautiful stuff. He just got overshadowed for a while, but it was always there. George as much as anybody had a very powerful effect in the early ‘7os. Partly it was about his internal spirituality, which was pretty powerful, and also because on Beatles records he had been relegated to two tunes. Having a record that was all his made a huge difference.
THE CONCERT FOR BANGLADESH (APPLE, 1972)
Another triple, this time capturing two concerts held on August 1, 1971 in aid of the refugees of the Bangladesh Liberation War. Organised by and starring Harrison, it features sets by Bob Dylan and Ravi Shankar and a starry band including Ringo Starr, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Badfinger, Jim Keltner and guest star Eric Clapton.
JONATHAN TAPLIN CONCERT CO-PRODUCER: Ravi had come to him and said there was this extraordinary emergency. People were starving, the whole formation of what was then East Pakistan was incredibly disorganised. George wanted to help, and the best way to help was to raise money through a concert.
JIM KELTNER [DRUMS]: He asked me, Leon and Klaus Voormann to play on the single “Bangla Desh”. I had no idea that there was going to be a concert! He told me that Ringo would do it if I would do it.
TAPLIN: The whole thing was incredibly spur of the moment. When we looked into getting Madison Square Garden there was literally one day when there wasn’t something already booked, so we chose that day: August 1.
The core band was established very quickly. It was a tribute to George that he could call people like that and whatever they were doing, they dropped it. Dylan said he would do it but kept hesitating to give the final commitment – but that’s the way Bob works. We reserved a rehearsal hall above Carnegie Hall for a week before the concert, and everyone gathered at the Park Lane Hotel, literally around the corner. Everyone showed up – except, notoriously, Eric. That became the point of panic.
KLAUS VOORMANN [BASS]: We were a little worried about what was going to happen if Eric wasn’t there. Jesse Ed Davis from Taj Mahal’s band came to help out. I showed him all the songs and we practised together, because he came after the rehearsals were done.
TAPLIN: We told Eric that Jesse would play guitar, and then he miraculously recovered and got on the plane! He was in terrible shape.
KELTNER: Eric had gotten careless, let’s say, and he really wasn’t feeling well at all. When he got to New York there was scurrying around trying to help get him back in shape. George was great. He was so unfrazzled. Someone who wasn’t a frontman and didn’t want to be one, he takes this burden on his shoulders and does it because he wants to help a friend. It was typical of George to draw people together and make something happen.
VOORMANN: He was really good friends with Bob, but he knew Bob was scared to be up there again. Even after the rehearsals, George didn’t know if he was going to do it or not.
TAPLIN: Bob didn’t turn up to rehearsals – but he did turn up to the soundcheck the night before, and then we knew he was going to do it. The band was so good; it was very easy for them to adapt.
KELTNER: With Ringo and I playing two drum kits, nothing was worked out. The only thing I decided was that I would definitely not play the hi-hat. For me, Ringo’s magic started with his hi-hat feel, that sloshing side-to-side style. We played the backbeat together, and it was extraordinary to me that I didn’t really have to watch him, because our hearts beat almost in the same tempo. I’d listened to him so much, my time feel was so close to his. When you hear that Bangladesh record, you don’t hear two drumkits, yet I can hear both our sounds.
TAPLIN: There was a party back at the hotel. A lot of people were there. The Band had come down from Woodstock. After that, the album took a while. There were issues with Spector and George was a perfectionist. Because he was a Beatle, no outside forces could push him into doing anything any faster than he wanted to do it. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. It showed other people how you could use your celebrity to do good things.
LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD (APPLE, 1973)
The intimate follow-up to All Things Must Pass, recorded at Apple and Harrison’s studio at Friar Park, his neo-Gothic home in Henley-on-Thames. In thrall to Eastern spirituality, the songs movingly lay bare his conflicts, doctrines and, on “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth”), longings, though some critics hear only hectoring hypocrisy.
KLAUS VOORMANN (BASS): On All Things Must Pass, he had all those songs on the shelf. This was a new bunch, and he wanted to let people know how he felt about those religious aspects of life and put it on a record. For him, it was a deep urge.
JIM KELTNER (DRUMS): He always spoke about the conflict in his life. It was apparent when vou knew him; vou could see it. I don’t want to talk about his personal life, but he had a lot of contradictions, he had many sides. George had the beautiful ability to put it into his songs.
JOHN BARHAM (ARRANGER): He was seriously stressed. I think it was most likely the daunting task of attempting to match the extraordinary artistic and commercial success of the last album. They are not among my happiest memories of working with George. I felt that his stress was negatively affecting the working atmosphere in the studio. It sometimes made him short-tempered and irritable.
VOORMANN: I had a great time! We recorded some of it at Friar Park – there was a great atmosphere in that place. On “Be Here Now” he wanted me to play upright bass, and we found out that the toilet in the bathroom, when I put the bass there, that gave us the best sound. So was playing bass in the bathroom, and then former Beatles roadie Mal Evans came in, sat on the toilet and flushed in the middle of the song!
JIM KELTNER: We did the tracking at Apple. The songs were just cool, simple little songs, but when we got to “Give Me Love”, I thought to myself, ‘This is hard work, this one!’ The drums are kind of subdued, but I was playing a very busy little syncopated part, trying to play with the guitar – and George was so easy to play with. When we finally got the take, I remember listening and thinking, ‘I wouldn’t have got away with that with anybody else.’ Any other producer would probably have said, “OK, that’s cool, now let’s have a proper backbeat and nail it down.”
By the time we got back to LA we were already hearing it on the radio. One day we got into the car. It was me and my wife Cynthia, George and Pattie, and Richard Perry and Joni Mitchell. We went to the Playboy Mansion and that night in the car they were playing “Give Me Love” on the radio. It blew my mind. He always said it was a little prayer. I still well up to this day when I hear it.
VOORMANN: I never read any of the reviews. I can imagine journalists hungering for something to have a go about, and that’s a good angle, all that religious stuff. But it’s a beautiful LP. There were some great songs on there.
DARK HORSE (APPLE, 1974)
Cataloguing a period of mischief, excess and the end of Harrison’s marriage to Pattie Boyd, who left him for Eric Clapton. Recorded at Friar Park and the lot of A&M Studios in Los Angeles, the diary-like songs capture the disjointed, messy spirit of his life during this time.
ROBBEN FORD (GUITAR): I was on tour with Joni Mitchell for the Court And Spark album, and her backing band was LA Express. In April 1974 we played London, at the New Victoria Theatre, and George came. It was quite a surprise! He was very nice, and he invited us all out to Henley on-Thames the next day. Joni eventually split, but the whole of LA Express were there. Very late that night we went up to his studio and cut “Hari’s On Tour (Express” and “Simply Shady”, the first two songs on the record. We didn’t do a lot to perfect those songs. Iwas even a little surprised that they were on the record!
TOM SCOTT (SAXOPHONE): He was looking to see if LA Express could be his band on his upcoming tour. I didn’t know that until later. It didn’t work out. Joni and our drummer, John Guerin, were in a relationship and they had a kind of an elitist attitude, which did not go over very well with George. Then our bass player, Max Bennett, proceeded to get wasted on vodka and make eyes at Pattie, in their house! I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘You idiot. Really?’
ANDY NEWMARK (DRUMS): I met George in the spring of 1974, over at Ronnie Wood’s house in Richmond, The Wick. I was there with Willie Weeks recording for Ronnie’s first solo album. George came over with a song for Ronnie, “Far East Man”, which we recorded with George at Ronnie’s house for his album.
George asked Willie and I after the session if we would come out to his house for a month or two later to record tracks for what later became Dark Horse. Friar Park was like Disneyland, with all this incredible ornamental woodwork.
Massive rooms, the size of football fields. He had a beautiful recording studio up on the top floor overlooking the gardens and lakes. We stayed for a week, and did maybe five or six songs with Billy Preston, me and Willie. He was very open; he let everyone try to figure out their own parts in a very relaxed manner. He was the opposite of dictatorial. Nothing about George reeked of stardom or fare. His marriage was ending, everyone knew that, but it was all friendly and polite and civilised – very English! Pattie and George were at the dinner table and it was all very civil. They were very adult about the way they handled it. They officially split up after we recorded. By September they had separated.
SCOTT: He had started his own label, Dark Horse Records, through A&M. Olivia was the secretary in the American office in Los Angeles. He would call her, and he hung up one day and said, “You know, there’s something about her. I’m attracted to her.” I said, “You don’t even know her!” But of course we know how that turned out…
KLAUS VOORMANN (BASS): George would go from good to bad. With Living In The Material World you had the feeling that now he is very religious, he’s meditating and getting up at five in the morning. Then suddenly he goes out and starts doing a lot of coke!
JIM KELTNER (DRUMS): Everybody was crazy in 1974. Everybody. Lawyers, doctors… not just musicians. Everybody was using too many drugs and drinking too much. You didn’t tell George not to do something. He was going to do what he was going to do.
NEWMARK: We finished the album at A&M Studios in Los Angeles while we were rehearsing for the tour, with all the wires going from the sound stage into a recording studio in the main building. It felt a bit rushed. Dark Horse was a little drop-off; the golden touch got a little tarnished.
GEORGE HARRISON (DARK HORSE, 1974)
An underrated gem from Harrison’s bubble-perm years. A mellow, soft-focus affair, it includes minor hit “Blow Away” and a song held over from the later days of The Beatles, “Not Guilty”.
RUSS TITELMAN (PRODUCER): He had the demos and he invited me over to his house in Benedict Canvon to listen. “Blow Away” was on there and “Faster”, “Not Guilty” and “Love Comes To Everyone”.
He had just the guitar part to “Your Love Is Forever” – no vocal, no lyric. When I heard it, I was floored. I called him and said, “Look, you have to finish this song, please write a lyric.” He did. He was going to Hawaii and he was going to come back through Los Angeles.
I said, “Why don’t you write a song about Olivia?” He came back with “Dark Sweet Lady” and we booked a session and recorded that song at Amigo in North Hollywood. It was the only thing we recorded in America. Then we made plans for me to come to England. He picked me up at the airport in his yellow Porsche, and he high-tailed it back to Friar Park, through little country lanes. He scared the pants off me. White knuckles. Then I finally thought to myself, ‘This is a Beatle, I’m not going to die!’
JIM KELTNER: He was a dangerously fast driver. He and Clapton both. It would be scary at times. On the back roads, he loved going through little villages and telling you what the buildings were and when they were built.
TITELMAN: I stayed at Friar Park at the beginning. I had my little room and my Nikon – I pretty much photographed the whole house. After a while, we were working really late hours, so I went down to Henley and stayed at the Red Lion hotel with the band. Olivia was pregnant with Dhani. The first two weeks we worked every day, and then we took a break for a week or so, during which time I got married in Henley – George and Olivia were the witnesses! Then we went back and brought in people. Steve Winwood did all sorts of things on the record. Eric came with Pattie. He was hitting it pretty hard.
We were sitting in the kitchen drinking tea, Eric was having a cognac, but it was perfectly fine. No tension. Eric Idle would come with his wife. Jackie Stewart dropped in. George was very good at arranging his records. He played that down, but he had all his parts laid out. His guitar parts were constructions. Very workmanlike, kind of methodical. I would wait for the moments where he would say, “OK, I’ll do a solo now,” and all of a sudden there would be this beautiful slide sound.
TOM SCOTT (SAXOPHONE): He was almost too critical of his own shortcomings. But he put that slide on his finger and within two note you know who it is. He didn’t play a blizzard of notes, he wasn’t a technical wizard, but what matters is how you communicate on vour instrument.
TITELMAN: We did some mixes and he wasn’t really happy with them. I think “Not Guilty” and “Your Love Is Forever” are the two that survived, then he remixed it after we left. He had a specific idea about how he wanted it to sound. I think it’s one of his better albums. We played it for Eric Idle and Ringo, and I remember them applauding after certain songs. They were very supportive, very close. George didn’t talk much about The Beatles. In fact, he never talked about it, except one day I was in the studio singing the harmonies on “Getting Better”. He walked by me and said quietly, “I sang that part!”
SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND (DARK HORSE, 1981)
Started the year before John Lennon’s murder, it is finished shortly afterwards and contains a poignant tribute, “All Those Years Ago”. After it was initially rejected by Warner Bros, Harrison removes four tracks and adds four others before the album is deemed fit for release.
RAY COOPER (CO-PRODUCER/ PERCUSSION): George understood space. We would sit in the gardens at Friar Park and talk about what we were going to do next, or we would talk about other incidental things us, organically. He knew the value of that. He knew how to bring things together. He knew how to listen and how to collaborate. He needed other musicians to play with and someone who could bring about some energy in the recording room.
DAVE MATTACKS (DRUMS): Ray called on the morning of the session and said, “I’m not sure whether it’s going to happen.” I asked why. “Have you not heard? John Lennon has been shot.” There was a two-or three-hour gap when nothing happened, then Ray called back and the conversation was something along the lines of, “I’ve spoken to George, and he thinks that trying to make music would be more therapeutic than him sitting around and being besieged by press and God knows what else” So the session went ahead.
COOPER: George has just finished the vocals on ‘All Those Years Ago’, of all things, and I was on my way back home to London in the early hours of the morning. On the radio it was announced that John had been murdered. I turned the car around on the M4 and came straight back. George was devastated. He and John had a very special relationship. He loved him, and he had just written a song about him.
MATTACKS: Ray picked me up at the railway station, and we got to Friar Park and the gates outside were mobbed with press. It got a little bit more serene when we got to the house. I just said, “Im incredibly sorry about the news. Me and half the world are lost for words.” After a while, the session got under way. I was overdubbing a track called “Blood From A Clone”. I was trying to do something a little off-centre, because that was what the lyrics of the song implied, it was an anti-drum-machine song. I remember thinking, ‘Try and programme this!’ Initially George wasn’t 100 per cent sure, but Ray convinced him. It wasn’t heated, it was just a discussion between the three of us, and he came around to it.
After we’d recorded. in the evening we sat around eating. The conversation got around, very gently, to the crazy fan factor. We talked for a bit about Beatlemania and all that, and then George said the phrase that really stuck with me. He said, “All I really wanted to do was to be in a band.” It was very telling, and very poignant. In other words, “All these side issues got in the way, and look where it got us. This is the end result.”
COOPER: George had incredible ears. The mixes on the album were very much his. George Martin used to pop in; sometimes he was on his way home and her come in for a cup of tea – while I was producing! He was very supportive. I would just sit back and make the tea and listen to their stories.
CLOUD NINE (DARK HORSE, 1987)
Following a creative dry spell, Harrison hooks up with Jeff Lynne as producer and co-writer. The collaboration is a success, resulting in the hits “When We Was Fab”, “This Is Love” and an American No 1- a cover of James Ray’s 1963 song “Got My Mind Set On You”.
JEFF LYNNE: I went to dinner one night with Dave Edmunds, in Marlow. At the end, as we walked down the street to our cars, he shouted back to me, “By the way, I forgot to mention, George Harrison asked me to ask you if you wanted to work on his next album.” I said, “What do you mean, by the way!?” He took me around to George’s the next day.
I got to the giant portcullis at the front and Olivia said, “George is down by the lake, I’ll take you there.” He took me into the tunnels and said, “Don’t put your hands outside of the boat, just grip with your bum.” I thought, ‘I like this guy!’ We got talking about what we liked, we had a nice day hanging out, then he said, “Do you want to do go on holiday?”
OK then! We went to his house in Hawaii, then on to Australia. We landed at the Grand Prix in Adelaide. in the middle of the track in the helicopter, and went around all the pits and had a coffee with all the drivers. twas quite an experience. We went back tC this guy’s house at night; he had a shooting gallery with a grand piano in there, and that’s where we wrote “When We was Fab”. It was so much tun to do. We wrote it on one piano, George at the low end me at the high end. It came out really well. was so thrilled with all the little puns and innuendos.
KLAUS VOORMANN: George said, “I have a song and it’s reminiscing about the old days. Can you do a cover?” I took the same picture from the Revolver cover, the old George, and put a new George on the bottom.
LYNNE: Cloud Nine took about six months altogether. I’d go down at the weekend and go home the next weekend. Give him a break from me! The basis of some of the songs is just me and George playing. We had a click track and we’d play along, but we had great musicians to do all the overdubs: Jim Horn on sax, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Keltner on drums. Jim was really important.
JIM KELTNER (DRUMS): We would play all day and at night George and Jeff would get silly. They were on a roll one night and it was like Monty Python, and out of that came the Traveling Wilburys. I had brought my SP12, my little drum machine sampler. Jeff saw me with the machine and said, “You know the problem with drum machines is they don’t swing.” I started playing a sample I had brought from a record I had just done in Los Angeles with Andy Taylor and Steve Jones. I was playing this groove. In the back of the room, Gary Wright on keys starts playing the chord progression to “Got My Mind Set On You”, then George started singing, Jeff chimed in, and pretty soon we were playing the song. We all flipped out! I laid down my drum track from my SP12, and they all proceeded to overdub on it.
LYNNE: Jim used to call himself the Stenographer Of Rhythm – he would type it all into his machine. It’s kind of a wacky drum sound, but at the time it was different. We put it on a few tracks where we hadn’t put the drums on first. The album was a fantastic success, and George was thrilled. I had a message on my answerphone one day: “Hey Jeff, we’ve just gone No 1 in America!” You could tell he was really chuffed.
BRAINWASHED (DARK HORSE, 2002)
Harrison’s death from cancer on November 29, 2001 comes less than two years after an intruder attacks him at home in Friar Park. The rough tracks for his last album, recorded between 1988 and 2001, are completed and mixed by left lynne and Dhani Harrison, and released in November 2002.
JEFF LYNNE (CO-PRODUCER/INSTRUMENTS): Dhani asked me could I mix with him at my studio. Working on Brainwashed was a very sad thing, because he was a great pal and now he was gone. It was difficult to make decisions when nobody was there to say, “I hate that, you bastard!” Some of it had been done quite a while before he died. Some songs were just his voice and simple little guitar parts, some lead, or some lovely slide guitar parts. Others sounded like they were finished.
JIM KELTNER (DRUMS): The drums were done really quickly after George had done the basic tracks. He had laid down the guitars and the rough vocals with Dhani. That’s what I played to. It was fun. Then we heard that he’d had an intruder. He and Olivia came to town and asked us to come to their hotel, quite late.
They sat together in front of us and they wanted to tell us everything. It was like they needed to; it was cathartic. George’s arms were fresh with the scars, purple – they were just healing. You could see where the knife had plunged down and out, all in a line. It was remarkably ugly and frightening, the story even more so. It turns out the alarm system hadn’t been activated in a long time. George didn’t want to live like that. The wound through his lung – the good lung, the other one was still healing from cancer – basically did the job. That was it.
KLAUS VOORMANN: He called me when he was in Switzerland, near the end, and I visited him. He was already in pretty bad shape, but he got up and was fun and was joking. He had no hair on his head, just a little bunch on the back that he couldn’t get to, and he gave me a razor and said, “Hey Klaus, can you get that for me?” So I cut the last hairs on his head. He was laughing and soothing us, making us feel good. He said, “It’s only our shell, it doesn’t matter if I live for 30 more years or one. It’s OK, don’t be sad.”
KELTNER: We last saw him at Mo [Ostin’s] beach house. He said, “You’ll never know what you’ve meant to me, Jim,” and gave me a big hug. I said, “Oh, you’ll be around longer than me, man!” When we drove off, my wife said, “You know he was saying goodbye to us, don’t you?”
LYNNE: His life was in those final songs, the things he got up to each day, like riding down the River Thames. Lots of very personal stuff. Some of them are really good. We gradually just filled them in. It was just about mixing them and making them sound like George would like them. You just had to go with your gut feeling. I felt so bad for Dhani having to do that, after his dad had just passed on, but he really wanted to do it. He’s a good lad, Dhani. It was joyful when it sounded great – “Well done, George, nice one!” – but such ashame he wasn’t there to hear it with us.
