John Lennon

296. George Harrison – My Sweet Lord (1971)

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The Intro

John Lennon and Paul McCartney were the greatest pop songwriting partnership of all time, together or separately writing 17 number 1 singles for The Beatles. But George Harrison has always been my favourite member of the Fab Four. Sardonic, mystical and more level-headed than the others, ‘the Quiet One’ blossomed at the end of his time in The Beatles. He had matured into a great songwriter, and I’ve always liked an underdog. Something was the first dance on my wedding day, and my youngest daughter was born to Here Comes the Sun. I even have the latter tattooed on my right arm.

Despite his new-found confidence and prolificness, it must still have come as a shock to the other three members of The Beatles that it would be Harrison who would score the first solo number 1 and biggest seller of 1971 with My Sweet Lord.

Before

Born 25 February 1943 in Wavertree, Liverpool, Harrison was the youngest of four children. His father Harold was a ship’s steward and his mother, Louise, a music-loving shop assistant. Fascinatingly, when Louise was pregnant with George, she would listen to a show called Radio India every Sunday, hoping that the sounds of the sitar and tabla would make her baby peaceful.

As a child, Harrison liked artists including George Formby and Cab Calloway, until in 1956 he had an epiphany while on his bike. He heard Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel blaring from a house, and was hooked. At first his dad was apprehensive, but relented and bought him an acoustic guitar. He formed a skiffle group called The Rebels, and one day on the bus to school, he befriended an older boy called Paul McCartney.

Two years later, Harrison was accepted into McCartney’s group The Quarrymen following initial skepticism from founder John Lennon. By the time the group had become The Beatles and settled on the legendary line-up, Harrison was their lead guitarist.

In their early recording years, Harrison would usually get a song or two to sing on each album, either a Lennon-McCartney original like Do You Want to Know a Secret? (from first LP Please Please Me) or a classic rock’n’roll track such as Roll Over Beethoven from the follow-up With the Beatles. It was on this album that he made his songwriting debut, with the typically sulky, downbeat but interesting Don’t Bother Me.

His influence would start to really be felt on the band when recording 1965’s Rubber Soul. By this point he was a fan of folk rock from the US, but had also become interested in Indian music through the filming of that year’s film Help!. His track If I Needed Someone, a Byrds soundalike, was one of that album’s highlights (he later said this was his favourite Beatles album).

Harrison became ever more fascinated with Indian culture and music, and Love You To on Revolver and Within You, Without You on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band helped turn their fans on to both – and many other bands too. And me – it may sound hard to believe, but it was The Beatles’ Indian-influenced songs that really got me into the Fab Four. I can remember the exact moment, in fact – I tranced out to Harrison’s Blue Jay Way at a friend’s house (completely without the aid of drink or drugs, I should add) and became obsessed. His first ever B-side, 1968’s The Inner Light, also marked the end of his overtly Indian material within the band.

The Beatles began splintering while recording their self-titled double album that year, and Harrison quit at one point, but two of his four tracks that made the final cut, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Long, Long, Long, were among the album’s best.

His songwriting went from strength to strength from here on in. Something was his first A-side, and famously Frank Sinatra called it the finest love song of the past 50 years. After Abbey Road had been released, they had discussed continuing, and Lennon suggested Harrison should be allowed an equal share of songs on their next album – something McCartney disagreed with.

Harrison had already released two solo albums before The Beatles split – the 1968 film soundtrack Wonderwall Music and the experimental Electronic Music the following year. He was stockpiling songs all the time, recording a beautiful demo of All Things Must Pass during Beatles’ sessions. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when he decided his first post-Beatles album, produced with Phil Spector and named after said track, would be triple-length.

Among those songs was his first solo single, My Sweet Lord. First written in December 1969, it was influenced by his production duties on Radha Krishna Temple’s Hare Krishna Mantra. Harrison was a guest, along with friends Eric Clapton and Billy Preston on Delaney & Bonnie’s European tour. He ducked out of a press conference and began vamping on an acoustic guitar, alternating between singing ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Hare Krishna’. Whether he was aware he was doing it to the tune of He’s So Fine, a 1963 hit for The Chiffons, we’ll never know, but he was also deliberately influenced by the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ rendition of Oh Happy Day.

At the time of writing My Sweet Lord, Harrison wasn’t intending on going solo, so he offered it to Preston, whose second album, Encouraging Words, he was producing. With the Edwin Hawkins Singers providing some great backing vocals, Preston’s version is more overtly gospel, with the backing chant being mostly ‘Hallelujah’.

Letting someone else record it was one thing, but Harrison was nervous about doing it himself later in 1970. He wanted to sing about needing a direct relationship with God, and for others to be able to do so too, whatever their religion, and so he reintroduced the Hare Krishna mantra to the song, as well as the third verse of the Guru Stotram an ancient hymn in praise of Hindu spiritual teachers:

‘Gurur Brahmā, gurur Viṣṇur 
gurur devo Maheśvaraḥ 
gurus sākṣāt, paraṃ Brahma 
tasmai śrī gurave namaḥ.’

This translates as:

‘I offer homage to my guru, who is as great as the creator Brahma, the maintainer Vishnu, the destroyer Shiva, and who is the very energy of God.’

Opening with a low-key strum (in general, this is a pretty lo-fi recording by Spector’s usual standards) that’s much more ‘Harrison’, his version comes to life with some nice slide guitar work that’s also unmistakably him, before he begins singing. Harrison is earnest, pleading almost, for God, in whichever form, to come into his life. As cleverly noted elsewhere, it’s almost like Harrison is on his way for a first date, nervous but keen to find romance. I prefer the choice to build the song up, keeping the backing vocals until later – it helps create the ‘epic’ atmosphere such a song deserves. Critics of My Sweet Lord complain that the backing vocals smother it, but I can’t agree with that. They make it such a joyful song of love and devotion, and I’m speaking as an atheist.

My Sweet Lord had an all-star role call of collaborators. Among those making an appearance at Abbey Road Studios were Preston on piano, Clapton on acoustic guitar, his Derek and the Dominoes colleagues Bobby Whitlock on harmonium and Jim Gordon on drums and percussion, Ringo Starr on the same, Pete Ham, Tom Evans and Joey Molland from Badfinger on acoustic guitars, their drummer Mike Gibbins on tambourine, Klaus Voorman from Plastic Ono Band on bass, future Dream Weaver hitmaker Gary Wright on electric piano and Ravi Shankar collaborator John Barham providing the beautiful string arrangement. It is unknown, however, who played on the selected takes. I could always make out Harrison’s voice among the backing singers – what I didn’t know until now is that it’s purely him, multi-tracked and credited to ‘the George O’Hara-Smith Singers’.

Harrison announced in October 1970 that there would be no single before the release of All Things Must Pass, but Spector and bosses at Apple disagreed and thought My Sweet Lord had real potential. Harrison backed down, and the single was released in November in the US, then in January 1971 in the UK. It only took a fortnight to climb to number 1.

After

My Sweet Lord went on to sell millions, and All Things Must Pass was a huge-selling album. While Lennon and McCartney were busy sending each other coded insults via respective albums Imagine and Ram, Harrison, for a time looked like he would be the most successful solo Beatle of all. It didn’t work out that way, but he wouldn’t have wanted it to anyway. It may not be his greatest song, but it’s certainly up there, and if anyone deserved some time in the limelight, it’s the Dark Horse.

The Outro

In 2002, Harrison’s debut single was re-released posthumously and went to number 1 once more. A very fitting tribute. I’ll look at the rest of Harrison’s life and career, and the controversy regarding this song, when we get to that point.

The Info

Written by

George Harrison

Producers

George Harrison & Phil Spector

Weeks at number 1

5 (30 January-5 March) *BEST-SELLING SINGLE OF THE YEAR*

Trivia

Births

30 January: Actor Darren Boyd
31 January: Northern Irish TV presenter Patrick Kielty
2 February: Singer Michelle Gayle
3 February: Playwright Sarah Kane
13 February: Singer Sonia
16 February: Actress Amanda Holden/Actor Steven Houghton
23 February: TV presenter Melinda Messenger
24 February: TV presenter Nicky Hambleton-Jones
1 March: Classical composer Thomas Adès
3 March: Satirist Charlie Brooker

Meanwhile…

3 February: Gritty British crime thriller Get Carter, starring Michael Caine, premiered in Los Angeles.

4 February: Car manufacturer Rolls-Royce went bankrupt.

11 February: The UK, along with the USA, the USSR and others, signed the Seabed Treaty, which outlawed nuclear weapons on the ocean floor.

15 February: Decimal Day! People all across the UK and Republic of Ireland were left confused when currency went decimal, despite public information films like this explaining beforehand.

24 February: Home Secretary Reginald Maudling announced the Immigration Bill, which would strip Commonwealth immigrants of their right to remain in the UK. The bill was of course supported by Enoch Powell, but the controversial former shadow cabinet minister continued to demand a massive voluntary repatriation scheme for the immigrants.

1 March: An estimated 120,000 to 250,000 “kill the bill” protesters went on strike against the 1971 Industrial Relations Act in London.

154. Elvis Presley with The Jordanaires – (You’re the) Devil in Disguise (1963)

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Elvis’s chart fortunes had been falling in the US for a while, but now the same thing was happening in the UK. In 1960 and 1961 he’d scored four number 1s per year alone, but following his 1962 Christmas number 1, Return to Sender, he’d been unusually absent from the pole position. This may have been in part due to a rare lack of released singles, granted, but he was clearly not the force he had been. Some of his top songwriters had left his camp due to money issues, which was also having a knock-on effect.

(You’re the) Devil in Disguise had been written by one of his most prolific remaining teams, Bill Giant, Bernie Baum and Florence Kaye, who were behind many of the songs in his musicals. It was due to appear on a new album, but RCA chose to issue the material as singles and bonus tracks instead. The usual backing band were in place, as were The Jordanaires, plus Millie Kirkham joining them on backing vocals. Jordanaire bass singer Ray Walker was the man behind the deep ‘oh yes you are’ as the song fades out.

As patchy as Elvis’s songs had become, there’s a lot to like about this one. The switch between sweet and soulful and uptempo rock’n’roll may be an obvious trick, but it works, and of course Elvis has the vocal skills to pull both directions off. The clean, classy production also makes a nice change from the earthy Merseybeat number 1s of late, which is ironic considering how I’ve been longing for Elvis to make way for exactly that. (You’re the) Devil in Disguise is a fine song, and like Return to Sender, one of his better early 60s tunes.

However, Elvis’s 14th UK number 1 spent a mere week at the top – the shortest stint he’d ever had. Not only that, it was his last number 1 for nearly two years, and his 15th, Crying in the Chapel, was an old recording, meaning his next ‘new’ number 1 wouldn’t happen until 1970.

In a true ‘changing of the guard’ moment, when (You’re the) Devil in Disguise featured on Juke Box Jury, John Lennon was one of the guest reviewers. He voted it a ‘miss’ and compared Elvis to Bing Crosby. One of Lennon’s heroes was now nothing more than a corny old has-been to him.

Written by: Bill Giant, Bernie Baum & Florence Kaye

Producer: Steve Sholes

Weeks at number 1: 1 (1-7 August)

Births:

Reform Judaism rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner – 1 August 
Singer Tasmin Archer – 3 August
Disc jockey Gary King – 4 August

57. Lonnie Donegan & His Skiffle Group – Cumberland Gap (1957)

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lonnie-donegan-photo-1.jpg

The Intro

It’s only now that I finally get just why skiffle was so influential. There had been no number 1 like Cumberland Gap before. At 40 seconds in when Lonnie Donegan moves the song up a gear and it enters a breakneck speed, going so fast that he becomes breathless, you see why a genre that was fashionable for such a brief time inspired a generation of great musicians. It has been argued that Cumberland Gap was the first punk number 1, and it’s a very strong argument. This is a million miles away from Here in my Heart.

Before

Donegan was born Anthony James Donegan in Bridgeton, Glasgow on 29 April 1931. The son of an Irish mother and a Scottish father, the Donegans moved to East Ham in 1933, but he was evacuated to Cheshire to escape the Blitz.

He bought his first guitar at 14, as World War Two came to an end. He took a keen interest in jazz, folk, country and blues. Trad jazz bandleader Chris Barber had heard he was good on the banjo and asked him for an audition. Donegan had never played a banjo, but bought one and passed the audition anyway.

In 1952 he formed his own band, the Tony Donegan Jazzband, and after opening for blues musician Lonnie Johnson, Donegan took his first name in tribute. By 1953, he was in Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen with Barber.

During the intervals of their shows, Donegan took to providing a ‘skiffle break’. The name derived from a New Orleans term for house parties that were organised to pay the rent. These interludes soon had the crowd more excited than the main sets. Donegan, with backing from a tea-chest bass and washboard from other band members, would play storming renditions of old blues songs by Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. It’s very likely that Cumberland Gap was among this material. It was only a matter of time before Donegan broke free and went solo.

Easily the oldest song to reach number 1 to date, Cumberland Gap‘s origins are shrouded in mystery. It’s an Appalachian folk tune that likely dates back to the latter half of the 19th century, but I’d put money on it being Woody Guthrie’s recording that Donegan was aware of. Originally concerning a mountain pass at the juncture of Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky used by migrants in the 18th century, Donegan has fun with the lyric, referring to the county in northwest England instead and claiming the Gap is ‘Fifteen miles from Middlesborough’.

Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSB-TMKkij0

Despite Rock Island Line coming first, and being understandably perhaps the most famous skiffle song ever, I think I prefer Cumberland Gap, maybe because of the fact I’ve been comparing it to number 1s that came before, which can only amplify how good it is, or perhaps due to the wordplay. There’s not a lot of difference between the two, which is why skiffle didn’t last long, but that doesn’t really matter. Both songs create an almighty racket on such basic instruments, don’t outstay their welcome, and show so much other material from the time as being out-of-date and too restrained. And it still sounds fresh, unlike Rock Around the Clock. You can see why Bill Haley soon started to look old-fashioned, and Donegan’s DIY ethic was bound to become more inspiring.

The Outro

Skiffle’s inspiring qualities were instant. By this point, John Lennon had formed The Quarrymen, and during Donegan’s next run at the top, Paul McCartney had joined the group.

The Info

Written by

Traditional

Producer

Alan A Freeman

Weeks at number 1

5 (12 April-16 May)

Trivia

Births

17 April: Author Nick Hornby
20 April: Cricketer Graeme Fowler
29 April: Actor Daniel Day-Lewis
3 May: Comedian Jo Brand
10 May: Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious

Meanwhile…

15 April: John Bodkin Adams shocked the nation by being found not guilty in court. It is still believed that Adams was a forerunner of Dr Harold Shipman, and may have killed over a hundred patients, but that political interference caused him to be set free.

20 April: Manchester United retained the First Division title in the Football League, but lost against Aston Villa in the FA Cup final on 4 May, narrowly missing out on becoming the first team to win the double that century.

24 April: The first broadcast of BBC astronomy series The Sky at Night, with the legendary Patrick Moore at the helm.

35. Alma Cogan with Vocal Group & Orchestra by Frank Cordell – Dreamboat (1955)

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The Intro

Alma Angela Cohen, better known as Alma Cogan, or ‘The Girl with the Giggle in Her voice’, scored her first and only number one with the poppy Dreamboat, written by Jack Hoffman.

Before

Born 19 May 1932 in Whitechapel, East London of Russian-Romanian Jewish descent, Cogan had been a star for a few years by this point. When she was 14, she had been recommended for a variety show by ‘Forces Sweetheart’ Vera Lynn. Two years later, formidable band leader Ted Heath told her to come back and try and work with him when she was older. He later said it was one of the biggest mistakes of his life.
She became a BBC radio regular, and earned her nickname after bursting into laughter while recording If I Had a Golden Umbrella in 1953. With her sweet timbre, she was compared to Doris Day, particularly on her first hit, Bell Bottom Blues, in 1954. She charted 18 times in the 50s, but Dreamboat was her biggest tune.

Review

Clocking in at under two minutes, Dreamboat is an average piece of 50s pop. It’s a bit too cutesy-wutesy and cheesy for its own good, but must have been fun at the time. The lyrics are confusing. It’s a nautical-themed love song (!), in which she seems to be singing about one person, and how devoted she is to him, how wonderful he is etc. But the first lines are:

‘You dreamboats, you lovable dreamboats
The kisses you gave me set my dreams afloat’
Make your mind up, Alma. The strangest lyric is:
‘I would sail the seven seas with you
Even if you told me to go and paddle my own canoe’

This creates the image of Alma Cogan paddling frantically behind her dreamboat. Or has she got several on the go? Anyway, by the time you’ve pondered all this, this harmless bit of fluff is over. And that was fine with pop fans of the day.

After

Cogan won the New Musical Express‘s Outstanding British Female Singer award four times between 1956 and 1960. Her star waned as the new decade dawned, but she branched out and remained popular due to her starring role as Nancy in the musical Oliver!, plus regular appearances on television and radio.
Her dwindling chart action didn’t prevent Cogan from throwing hip showbiz parties at her widowed mother’s flat in Kensington. Regularly seen attending were the likes of Princess Margaret, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Bruce Forsyth and Roger Moore.

She also become closely linked to The Beatles. The teenage John Lennon would playfully tease her, and according to Lennon’s ex-wife Cynthia, they had a romance after meeting on Ready Steady Go! in 1964, but it was kept out of the public eye. Allegedly, Paul McCartney first played the melody of Yesterday on her piano. So it seems a shame the Fab Four couldn’t work their magic and help Cogan’s music career.
In 1966, she collapsed several times while on tour, citing stomach problems.

The Outro

Tragically, Alma Cogan died of ovarian cancer on 24 October. She was only 34.

The Info

Written by

Jack Hoffman

Producer

Wally Ridley

Weeks at number 1

2 (15-28 July)

Trivia

Deaths

18 July: Footballer Billy McCandless

Meanwhile…

17 July, racing driver Stirling Moss, dubbed ‘the greatest driver never to win the World Championship’, became the first English winner of the British Grand Prix at Aintree.