Sir George Martin, Giles Martin and Dhani Harrison, listening to the multi-track master of “Here Comes The Sun,” reveal the audio channel with George Harrison’s “lost solo guitar.”

Kind of like X-raying a great painting and finding something significant underneath the surface. Sublime!
 

 
Thank you Ron Nachmann!

 
A George Harrison bonus post here on the tenth anniversary of his death.

Harrison’s 1976 hit “Crackerbox Palace” was written about his visit to the Los Angeles home of the great Beatnik comic, Lord Buckley, after a chance meeting with Buckley’s manager, George Grief, in France. Harrison was a big admirer of Buckley (as was Frank Zappa) and thought the name of his house would make a great song title. The song includes references to both George Greif (“I met a Mr. Greif”) and to his Lordship (“know that the Lord is well and inside of you”).

Python member Eric Idle directed a promo film for “Crackerbox Palace” shown on SNL that featured Neil Innes (in drag and in other weird costumes). You can spot Harrison’s future wife, Olivia Arias, in a flash as one of the women on the bed and director Idle can be seen as one of the people in the chair. What’s really wild about this clip is that you can see how George Harrison lived like, uh, royalty in his Friar Park mansion. The house and the grounds are really a sight. The final pull-out shot shows some insane landscaping.
 

George Harrison - Crackerbox Palace by ringodreammer

 
Beatle George Harrison died ten years ago on November 29, 2001.

Below, you can watch the entire historic Concert For Bangladesh performance featuring George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ravi Shankar, Leon Russell, Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, Badfinger, Jesse Ed Davis, Klaus Voorman and Mother of Invention Don Preston.

Harrison walks onstage at 22 minutes in—after a fiery opening set by Ravi Shankar—and the supergroup (led by bandleader Leon Russell) launch into his blistering anti-Macca number “Wah Wah,” one of the best songs on his sprawling All Things Must Pass album.

(You might not want to wait too long to watch this one, who knows how long this is going to last on YouTube…)
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:

‘Little Malcolm’: George Harrison’s lost film starring John Hurt and David Warner
George Harrison sings on Eric Idle’s ‘Rutland Weekend Television’
‘The Kid’: Paul McCartney talks about George Harrison
Raga: 1971 film featuring Ravi Shankar and George Harrison remastered

 
A “lost” film produced from “top to bottom” by George Harrison, has been rediscovered and released on DVD by the British Film Institute. Little Malcolm was made in 1973, and starred John Hurt, David Warner,  John McEnery, Raymond Platt and Rosalind Ayres. Based on the play Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs by David Halliwell, it was Harrison’s first film as producer, and one that was thought long lost, as director by Stuart Cooper explained in an interview with the Guardian:

“George never said this to me,” says Cooper, “but I definitely got the feeling that Little Malcolm may have been the first and last time George ever went to a play. But he was a big, big fan of it and also a big fan of [its star] Johnny Hurt, so he was in our corner already. Also, at the time, the other Beatles all had a film gig, John had done Imagine, Paul, I guess, directed Magical Mystery Tour, and Ringo was in Candy and The Magic Christian. So the only one without a film gig was George. He financed Malcolm through a company called Suba Films, which existed solely to receive profits from the animated Yellow Submarine. It was financed entirely by Yellow Submarine! It wasn’t a big budget, somewhere around a million, million and a half pounds – not expensive. He financed it top to bottom. He stepped up, wrote the cheque, and we made the movie.”

Little Malcolm is the story of Malcolm Scrawdyke (Hurt), a delusional Hitlerite revolutionary, who plots his revenge after his expulsion form college, by forming the Party of Dynamic Erection, with fellow slackers, Wick (McEnery), Irwin (Platt) and Nipple (Warner). Malcolm’s battle is against an unseen enemy, and the film is a mix of Young Adolf meets Baader-Meinhof via Billy Liar.

Halliwell wrote Little Malcolm in 1965, it was his first and most successful play. Directed by Mike Leigh, the role of Malcolm was originally played by Halliwell, who explained his thoughts behind the drama at the time:

“The Nazis made a big impression on people of my age, they almost destroyed Europe. But as well as being pretty threatening they were also seen as a laughing stock even during the war.”

The play’s director, Mike Leigh had a different view of Halliwell and the production, as he wrote for Halliwell’s obituary in 2006:

David Halliwell was a loner. He lived alone and, typically, it seems he died alone. Indeed, his eponymous loner, Little Malcolm Scrawdyke, was in many ways a self-portrait, although David always denied this. Having met at Rada and become close friends, he and I founded Dramagraph with Philip Martin in 1965, and I directed and designed our original production of Little Malcolm at Unity Theatre. David played Scrawdyke. He was impossible to direct, resisted cuts, and the production was famously overlong and unwieldy. But it was and remains a magnificent piece of writing, and it is truly tragic that this quite brilliant and original dramatist procrastinated for the remaining 40 years of his life.

Halliwell didn’t really procrastinate, he was a prolific writer, who, as Michael Billington also pointed out:

...pioneered the idea of lunchtime theatre and multi-viewpoint drama and left his mark on several close collaborators, including Mike Leigh.

Unfortunately, through his determination to do things his way, Halliwell never fully developed his ideas, and as Billington noted, “Halliwell suffered the fate of the pioneer whose ideas are refined and improved by later practitioners”.

Originally Little Malcolm ran for 6 hours, but after subbing by Leigh, it transferred to London’s West End, where John Hurt took over the title role - it was a career defining performance - one of many in Hurt’s case - and after a short run, moved to Dublin and New York. The play won Halliwell a Most Promising Newcomer Award, and also attracted Harrison’s interest, enough for the Beatle to bank roll the movie. But once made, the film was caught up in The Beatles’ acrimonious split, as Cooper explained:

“In the end, we got hung up by the Beatles’ breakup, when all of the Apple and Beatles assets went into the official receiver’s hands. So Little Malcolm just basically sat there for a couple of years. Whatever heat and buzz we generated was all lost. It didn’t diminish the movie but it stopped the momentum. George had to fight to get it back.

“Berlin was the first airing we managed, but it won best direction and the response was incredible. We got great reviews from Alexander Walker and Margaret Hinxman, but by then it really didn’t have any legs. It was a film that got lost, and I had to put it on a shelf and say to myself, well, there might be a day for that one day – and here we are now, after so many years.”

In 1974, Little Malcolm won the Silver Bear at Berlin Film festival. It was Cooper’s first, he won a second in 1975 with Overlord before directing Hurt, Warner and Donald Sutherland in the film version of Derek Marlowe‘s The Disappearance in 1977.

Harrison was certainly an innovator as Little Malcolm and his later movies Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and The Long Good Friday proved. Now, nearly forty years after its first screening, Harrison’s “lost” first film as producer is available at last.
 

 
Who needs Martin Scorsese’s documentary on George Harrison, when you can have this roughly cobbled together sequence of prime cuts of Pirate George causing mayhem on Eric idle’s Rutland Weekend Television Christmas Special.

So, here’s one somebody prepared earlier.
 

 
Previously On Dangerous Minds

Rutland Weekend Television: Eric Idle’s nearly forgotten comedy classic

 
With thanks to Neil McDonald
 

 
DM pal Michael Simmons wrote the new MOJO cover story on George Harrison and they’ve posted his great new interview with Paul McCartney on the MOJO blog. Even hardcore Beatlemaniacs might find something new here:

MOJO: Years ago, John [Lennon] was quoted as saying that George was ‘the kid’ when the Beatles began and that John treated George as such. How long did that last?

PAUL: It probably lasted a couple of years. Just because of his age, in a group of men who’ve grown up together, particularly round about their teenage years - age matters. In John’s case, who was three years older than George - that meant a lot. John was probably a bit embarrassed at having sort of ‘a young kid’ around, just ‘cos that happens in a bunch of guys. It lasted for a little while. It was particularly noticeable when George got deported from Hamburg [in November 1960] for being underage. Otherwise, when he first joined the group, he was a very fresh-faced looking kid. I remember introducing him to John and thinking, Wow, there’s a little bit of an age difference. It wasn’t so much for me ‘cos I was kind of in the middle. But as we grew up it ceased to make a difference. And those kind of differences iron themselves out.

MOJO: I’m curious about George’s process in the studio. Do you recall any stand-out moments where George brought something in or made a song click?

PAUL: Oh yeah, sure. There were quite a few. I would think immediately of my song “And I Love Her” which I brought in pretty much as a finished song. But George put on do-do-do-do [sings the signature riff] which is very much a part of the song. Y’know, the opening riff. That, to me, made a stunning difference to the song and whenever I play the song now, I remember the moment George came up with it. That song would not be the same without it.

I think a lot of his solos were very distinctive and made the records. He didn’t sound like any other guitarist. The very early days we were really kids and we didn’t think at all professionally. We were just kids being led through this amazing wonderland of the music business. We didn’t know how it went at all - a fact that I’m kind of glad of ‘cos I think it meant that we made it up. So we ended up making things up that people then would later emulate rather than us emulating stuff that we’d been told.

In the very early days, it was pretty exciting. I remember going to auditions at Decca and each of us did pretty well, y’know. We were in a pub afterwards having a drink and kind of debriefing and coming down off the excitement, but we were still pretty high off it all. And I remember sitting at the bar with George and it became kind of a fun thing for us for years later. I would say, [adopts awed voice] When you sang [Goffin & King’s] “Take Good Care Of My Baby,” it was amazin’ man!’ I’m not sure we said ‘man’ or even ‘amazing’ in those days, but… That was a special little moment and it just became a thing between me and him: [awed voice again] ‘When you sang Take Good Care Of My Baby’...’

Part 2 is here. Below, the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s upcoming documentary George Harrison: Living In The Material World, out next month.
 

 
Really looking forward to this one !
 

 
Thanks Alex Graham !

 
George Harrison’s exotic soundtrack to swinging 60s cinematic head trip Wonderwall was the first solo Beatle project (that is if you don’t count Paul McCartney’s soundtrack to The Family Way, which was credited to The George Martin Orchestra). Wonderwall Music is all over the musical map—delightfully so—with songs ranging from classical Indian ragas to jaunty nostalgic-sounding numbers to proto-metal guitar freakouts. It’s a minor classic, I wish more people knew about it. I’ve long been an enthusiastic evangelist for this album, sticking tracks on mixed CDs and tapes for quite some time.

With Ringo Starr (under the pseudonym “Richie Snare”) and Eric Clapton (here credited as “Eddie Clayton) and some session musicians, Harrison recorded the “English” portion of Wonderwall Music in December 1967. The Indian musicians were recorded the following month in Bombay. Peter Tork from The Monkees plays an uncredited banjo part on the record. It was released on November 1, 1968, just a few weeks before the White Album, and was the first release on Apple Records.

There are a lot of great tracks on Wonderwall Music, but the one I want to highlight first is “Ski-ing” a two-minute long sonic SCREAMER wherein Eric Clapton comes up with the blueprint for the Buttlhole Surfer’s guitar sound back when Paul Leary was just a little kid.
 

 
“Greasy Legs”:
 

 
“Party Seacombe” (amazing!):
 

 
Another minor masterpiece with “Red Alady, Too”:
 

 
“Glass Box”:
 

 
The trailer for Wonderwall, directed by Joe Massot and starring Jane Birkin, Jack Magowran and Iain Quarrier.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Wonderwall: The Ultimate Sixties Flick?

 
John, Paul, George and…Jimmie? It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, does it? But for ten days in 1964, Jimmie Nicol was one of The Fab Four, drafted in to replace Ringo Starr on The Beatles first world tour.

Starr had collapsed with tonsillitis, and rather than cancel the tour, producer George Martin decided to call in a temporary replacement - Jimmie Nicol, an experienced session musician, who had played with Georgie Fame and jazz musician, Johnny Dankworth, amongst others. Lennon and McCartney were fine with the idea, but Harrison was a bit shirty, and at one point threatened to walk off, telling Martin and Brian Epstein: “If Ringo’s not going, then neither am I - you can find two replacements.” It was soon resolved and within 24-hours of the initial ‘phonecall, Nicol was playing drums with the Fab Three in Copenhagen. He later recalled:

“That night I couldn’t sleep a wink. I was a fucking Beatle!”

The next leg of the tour was Australia and Hong Kong, and Nicol soon found himself at the heart of Beatlemania. Fans screamed his name, his photograph was sent around the globe, and he was interviewed as one of the band by the world’s press. Nicol later reflected:

“The day before I was a Beatle, girls weren’t interested in me at all. The day after, with the suit and the Beatle cut, riding in the back of the limo with John and Paul, they were dying to get a touch of me. It was very strange and quite scary.”

He also gave an inkling into The Beatles’ life on the road was like:

“I thought I could drink and lay women with the best of them until I caught up with these guys.”

Ten days into the tour, Ringo had recovered and quickly reclaimed his place. Nicol was paid off by Epstein at Melbourne airport, given a cheque for $1,000 and a gold Eterna-matic wrist watch inscribed: “From The Beatles and Brian Epstein to Jimmy - with appreciation and gratitude.” It was like a retirement present. Within a year Nicol was bankrupt, owing debts of over $70,000, and all but forgotten. So much for his 15 minutes of fame.

“Standing in for Ringo was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Until then I was quite happy earning thirty or forty pounds a week. After the headlines died, I began dying too.”

Nicol went on to play with Swedish guitar band, The Spotnicks, but by the late sixties he quit pop music and relocated to Mexico. It was later claimed he had died, but as the Daily Mail explained in 2005, this was false:

At 66, his square-jawed looks have given way to grey jowls, the smile oblieterated by missing teeth. Anything that might remain of his Beatle haircut is tied back in a scruffy ponytail. But he still has his principles. Despite the lucrative rewards of today’s Beatlemania industry, he staunchly refuses to cash in….

It has even been reported that he died in 1988. This week, however, after a difficult search, I confirmed reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. One morning he could be foind visiting a building society, eating breakfast in a modest cafe, then returning silently to his London home. At this flat you could see sheet music through one window but no sign of any drums. He didn’t answer the door when I rang. If he got my messages about the new book, he didn’t reply.

When I eventually made contact, the conversation was predictably brief: “I’m not interested in all that now,” he said. “I don’t want to know, man.”

Here is footage of The Beatles’ tour of Australia and Jimmie Nicol’s time as the fifth Beatle - the Beatle who never was..
 

 
Rare clips of The Beatles on tour, plus Jimmie Nicol interview, after the jump…
 

 
October 14 will see the long-overdue DVD release of the 1971 documentary Raga narrated by and featuring Ravi Shankar. Digitally remastered from a 35mm print, from the looks of the new trailer below it should be stunning. I’ve always loved and been intrigued by the Apple Records soundtrack LP so I’m looking forward to finally seeing this in pristine quality.
 

 
Via Arthur Magazine, thanks !
 
East Meets West Music

 
After Cream broke up, bassist extraordinaire Jack Bruce went on to release Songs for a Tailor, his 1969 solo record. Songs for a Tailor is a stunning collection of brass and bass-led jazz-rock fusion, a sound that traveled (quite) far from the heavy rock sound Bruce was known for in Cream. The songs were co-written with Pete Brown, the poet and lyricist with whom Bruce wrote many of Cream’s most memorable songs.

Below is a live performance of one of the album’s stand-out tracks, Never Tell Your Mother She’s Out of Tune, taken from the documentary Rope Ladder to the Moon. George Harrison actually played guitar on the recorded song, using the same pseudonym he used when he recorded Badge with Cream, “L’Angelo Misterioso.” The studio version can be heard here. (Isn’t Jack Bruce a ringer here for Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh?)
 

 
What follows below are a pair of newly uploaded Rock Music Exposed clips from YouTube channeler, Triplexity, and were apparently culled from the two-part ‘89 documentary, Hell’s Bells (which, to my knowledge, remains in VHS-only exile).

The intro, clip 1 of 36 (!) and found here, lays out the Hell’s Bells agenda, “to help people understand the big picture, peel back the veneer of pop culture, and gaze into the bedrock of truth that lies beneath.”

Since it also hopes to serve as, “a wake-up call, an alarm warning of the fire raging just down the hall,” you can bet your salvation its earnest-but-porny-looking narrator means a “Christian truth.”  I know, sounds like a snooze.  We’ve seen—and smirked—at this kind of crap on numerous occasions. 

But readers of Dangers Minds might find far more compelling the below clips, 12 and 13.  In them, Hell’s Bells puts under the Christian magnifying glass Kenneth Anger, Mick Jagger, Timothy Leary and The Beatles.

 
Have a very new year.
(thx Matt Devine !)

I’ve been listening to the music of Neil Innes a lot this week as I’ve been writing and as always, enjoying his work immensely. It’s a feast. Truly he is one of the best pop songwriters we have, a chameleon of musical styles from the earliest stages of his career. Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville, psychedelic rock, Beatles pastiches to reggae, there’s nothing he can’t do. As Innes gets older, his genre hopping songwriting gets even better, something that can’t be said of all—or even many—of his Sixties contemporaries. Sadly, although he is undeniably a musician’s musician, Innes will never be recognized as such. Why? Because he’s funny, too.

Since I was a wee lad I’ve been been a fanatical fan of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the wonderfull zany group of Dada art school rejects featuring Innes and “ginger geezer” front man Vivian Stanshall (more on Viv another time, of this I can assure you). I discovered them listening to the Dr. Demento radio show when he played their cover of Hunting Tigers Out in “Indiah” (I heard Noel Coward and The Mothers of Invention for the first time during that same show, three life-long obsessions launched that fateful evening). I ran right out and spent my allowance on The History of the Bonzos, a two LP set with a glossy booklet filled with insane photographs and a history of the group. I loved every single song on it. Still do.

The Bonzos were beloved of all the really heavy rock groups of the Sixties and they opened for The Who, Led Zeppeln and the Kinks. Eric Clapton was a huge fan. Paul McCartney produced their only hit, I’m The Urban Spaceman (under the name Apollo C. Vermouth) and they made a guest appearance in the Beatles’ TV special Magical Mystery Tour as the band in the strip joint playing Death Cab for Cutie (and yes, this is where the band got their name). If someone hasn’t heard their seminal albums Gorilla, The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse, Tadpoles or Keynsham (my favorite) they really don’t know as much about Sixties music as they think they do, it’s just that simple. It’s like never hearing Captain Beefheart or The Velvet Underground and thinking you’re clever, a glaring and unforgivable cultural blind spot, sez me.

I’ve gone out of my way for three decades now hunting down Bonzo Dog Band related bootlegs, especially video. There wasn’t a lot of it about until a few years ago when the DVD of Do Not Adjust Your Set was released. DNAYS was a hip Sixties tea-time kids show, beloved of children and parents (think Pee-wee’s Playhouse from an earlier era). It starred pre-Python Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin (Terry Gilliam did animations for the show). The Bonzos were the primarly musical performers and members of the group appeared as extras in the comedy sketches. DNAYS was thought lost for many years when the ones that were released on DVD were re-discovered. Now there is a terrific amount of “new” Bonzo material for fans like me to feast on much hat has been uploaded to YouTube.

After the breakup of the Bonzos, Neil Innes continued his association with his former DNAYS co-stars by appearing and writing material for the final 1974 series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the series after John Cleese left (only Innes and Douglas Adams were ever given writing credits outside of the six Pythons during the show’s history). Innes appears in Monty Python and the Holy Grail as the minstrel and singing his memorable Dylan parody, Protest Song (“I’ve suffered for my music and now it’s your turn…”) in Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl. Post-Python, Innes and Eric Idle created the wonderful Rutland Weekend Television series (think Brit version of SCTV) and Innes went on, solo, to The Innes Book of Records, a more musical oriented comedy series.

And of course there was The Rutles in All You Need is Cash, Idle and Innes’ adroit parody of the Beatles. Innes went on to a number of childrens shows in the 1980s and 90s such as Puddle Lane. He tours solo and with others and has reformed the Bonzo Dog Band for a reunion concert (with luminaries like Britwits Stephen Fry and Paul Merton filling in for the late Vivian Stanshall). A film has been made about Innes’ life and career (and featuring many of his famous friends) called The Seventh Python, which is now playing the film festivals circuit to great reviews.

Bonus Clip of George Harrison performing The Pirate Song on Rutland Weekend Television (hilarious)

Neil Innes Official Website

Neil Innes on Twitter

Wonderwall is an unusual and beautiful psychedelic Sixties period piece that sees a scientist (Jack MacGowran) becoming obsessed by a gorgeous model who lives next door to him.

Wonderwall is probably the ultimate “swinging London” film and what a pedigree it has. The film stars the lovely Jane Birkin and featured Anita Pallenberg and Dutch design collective The Fool (who art directed the film and were well-know for their work with the Beatles) in cameo roles. The soundtrack was by George Harrison and featured Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, some top classical Indian players in Bombay and an uncredited banjo performance by Monkee Peter Tork. There is one song called Ski-Ing that features one of the single most ferocious guitar riffs that Eric Clapton ever laid down and most of his biggest fans have never even heard it.

Made in 1968 by first time director Joe Massot (who would later direct the Led Zeppelin concert film The Song Remains the Same and work on the psychedelic western Zachariah with the Firesign Theatre), Wonderwall was released on DVD in an elaborate package by Rhino in 2004 that now goes for top dollar to collectors.

The stills and animated gifs here were nicked from the fantastic blog of Martin Klasch. Over and over again, I find myself using Google Images and landing on his site, which is a visual treasure trove. He’s got a great eye. Check it out.