#darkhorse45

[harrisonarchive]

George Harrison, Dark Horse Tour, 1974. Photo: John Gellman

"This happened in Philadelphia, so long ago: December the 16th, 1974. [...] I asked the bartender for a piece of paper to write a note. On the paper, I wrote: ‘George: Do a favour for me. Make some mention of the fact that today is Beethoven’s birthday. Do it for me. I am Eric Hall, formerly of Porchester Road, Norris Green, Liverpool 11.’ Then I walked all round the stadium to where one could see steps that led down into the darkness of backstage. Reaching the bottom of the steps, I beckoned to a giant security guard [...]. I proffered the folded little note and said politely, 'Would you see that George Harrison gets this, please?’ He took the note and ambled away from me... I thought, 'Well, that’s the last I’ll hear of that…’ [...] December 16th was a Monday that year. On the Wednesday, I was sitting in my office and the phone rang. It was Jim, a photographer friend. He said, 'Eric! Were you at the Spectrum last night?!’ I said, 'For George Harrison? No, I was there Monday night.’ Jim said, 'Wow, man! You wouldn’t believe what happened! 'George Harrison came out and halfway through the show and he said, "My friend, Eric Hall from Norris Green back in my hometown is here tonight. He tells me it’s Beethoven’s birthday today. Here’s something for Eric,” and then he played the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony! In the coolest rock style, dude!’ Jim yelled into the phone, 'I couldn’t believe my ears, ma-an!’ Whoa, neither could I. The amazing thing was that there was someone there that knew me. I would never have known of George’s generosity – or his pride in doing something for a Scouser so far from home! Some karma, huh? But then, you know, sometimes good karma is just being a Scouser. Eric Hall copyright 1998" - People's Stories: Liverpool Lives, 7 Jun 2011 (x)

[harrisonarchive]

George Harrison and Olivia Harrison waiting for the band to clear customs, Vancouver, Canada, ‪2 November 1974, as included in Living In The Material World. Photo: Henry Grossman.

"Those were crazy days. Let's be honest. Drugs were a problem." - Jim Keltner, Uncut, Aug 2008

"Olivia came into the picture at just the right time, a crazy, dark time. She is a strong person, and when he fell for her we all agreed that was a good thing. It wasn't good for him to be on his own, and without her things would have got worse." - ‪Jim Keltner‬, MOJO, Nov 2014

"'Well, I've been talking to her on the phone a lot,' he said, a little sheepishly. 'You know, we really have a connection. Sometimes we talk for hours. I just want to know if she’s as beautiful as she sounds.' […] [I]f he really wanted to meet Olivia, he could walk into her office and introduce himself. Which is exactly what he did. From all accounts, it was love at first sight." - Chris O'Dell, Miss O'Dell

"George couldn't stop talking about her [Olivia] after he met her." - Al Aronowitz, The Blacklisted Journalist, 2001

"His dark sweet lady was the love of his life, and I know how much he loved her." - Eric Idle, The Greedy Bastard Diary

Q: "Was it love at first sight?" Olivia Harrison: "Pretty much. We felt it in our hearts from before we met. Even on the phone, we seemed to have some understanding, like you do when you meet the right person. And he was a charmer, such a charmer!" - The Sun, 12 Jun 2009

"I fell for her immediately. She is a very calming influence. She has been very supportive and we are blissfully happy together." - ‪George Harrison‬, 1992, The Mirror, 1 Dec 2001 (x)

“‘Jerry Moss [A&M co-founder] put my mom on the Dark Horse project because she was the only person cool enough there,’ adds Dhani. ‘She was a meditator, and they figured she would get on with my dad real well, which evidently she did.’ (The two were married in 1978, the year Dhani was born: ‘I was one of their early releases,’ he says drolly.)” - Rolling Stone, 9 March 2020 (x)

[harrisonarchive]

George Harrison and John Lennon, December 1974, photo by Patti Daley (?).

"The idea of John not being here doesn't bother me so much because — he is here, to me. That's what the whole life of Christ was, to show people, 'You dug him then — re-dig him now.' To realize that it's the spirit, not the body. And I've learned that over the years. In a way, you don't need a living guru in front of you, because he's in front of your spiritual eye, every time you close your eyes and go inside. They're all there, all our friends and loved ones, all our relatives. Everybody is there." - George Harrison, Musician, Mar 1990

"Maybe I'm peculiar but to me he isn't dead. When I never saw him for years before he died I thought, 'Oh well, he's living in New York and I just haven't seen him in a while.' It's kind of still like that. Ok, the physical body falls off, but the soul lives on, we're going to meet again. It was a terrible thing that his death occurred and it made me feel terrible at the time, but in retrospect life is just shadows, we are just shadows on this sunny wall and that’s all it is." - George Harrison, Q, 1995 (x)

[harrisonarchive]

George Harrison and Eric Clapton, 1974, from Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars, photo © Prod DB © Passion Pictures/TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock Photo; a note from George and Olivia to Eric and Pattie, written during the Dark Horse Tour, photo: screenshot from the e-book edition of Pattie's book Wonderful Tonight.

"There's so much in life to do and to deal with... I don't know, maybe I'm just lucky, you know, maybe I'm just lucky to be able to think of things the way I do. There's no point in getting hung up about things, you know. It's easier just to deal with it. And you go through ups and downs and, you know, sad things, but all that for me it... like The Beatles, when we actually split up it was just the relief, we should have done it years before because you could see it coming if you look back. And the same with like marriage for me. We [George and Pattie] should have split up years before. Because all the songs to do with, you know, the miserable side of it were all done, a lot of them came before there actually was public knowledge that we split. Except there’s another one on the Dark Horse album [released in 1974] which is a really nice song, the only problem with it is it's sad, it's too sad... but that's what it was. That's 'So Sad.'" - George Harrison, BBC Radio, Feb 1977 (x)

"I went on a bit of a bender [...]. If you listen to 'Simply Shady,' on Dark Horse, it's all in there – my whole life at that time was a bit like [laughing] Mrs. Dale's Diary [radio soap opera]. [...] I could put back a bottle of brandy occasionally, plus all the other naughty things that fly around. I just went on a binge, went on the road... all that sort of thing, until it got to the point where I had no voice and almost no body at times. Then I met Olivia and it all worked out fine." - George Harrison, Rolling Stone, 19 Apr 1979

"I think really we were going in different directions. You know, he wanted different things out of life, I wanted different things out of life, and we decided that perhaps we should split up." - Pattie Boyd, Sverige Radio, 16 Sep 2014

"I think everybody was in love with everybody else permanently during the Sixties, you know. I would have been surprised if any of our friends had not all been in love with each other. You know, there's sex and there's love. And I think the Sixties period, there was a genuine love for mankind, generally. I'm very liberal, actually, very liberal person. But at that time anyway, over the years, we [George and Pattie] were splitting up. And contrary to what some people think, I was very pleased that they [Pattie and Eric] got together because for me, you know, I didn't ever want it to be, you know, the bad guy who split it up, like kicked her out or whatever the situation was happening. But really, for years we'd been — potential divorces for, you know, long before all that 'Layla' and all that stuff happened. And I think it was just a natural thing that happened." - George Harrison, undated, included in "I Was There: Pattie Boyd," BBC Radio 2, 26 Sep 2019 (x)

"George's note was like a forgiveness. It meant a lot to me. I didn’t feel great about leaving him and it showed me he was happy. It was as if the hurt had finally been accepted and healed." - Pattie Boyd, Sunday Times Magazine, 2011

"That's the one thing that I think none of us have ever really been sure of, because George was — like his record label — was a dark horse. And he didn't always tell you exactly what he was thinking. So it may have been that it hurt him more than he let on, you know.” - #EricClapton, CNN Larry King Live, 12 Oct 2007

"Actually we'd been splitting up for years. That was the funny thing, you know. I thought that was the best thing to do, for us to split, and we should've just done it much sooner." - George Harrison, Crawdaddy, Feb 1977

Q: "Do you ever see Pattie?" George Harrison: "Occasionally. And occasionally [Eric] sees her too! After all the experiences with The Beatles, surely that experience must lead to some sort of knowledge, and knowledge is supposed to lead to liberation. And I certainly liberated myself from some of the mundane things like not talking to your friend just because you all had a divorce." - Q, 1988

"Does [Pattie] regret leaving [George]? 'I don't know. Eric and I went to a party once. And George, bless him, was there with Olivia [Harrison]. I said to George, "Darling, do you think I made a big mistake in leaving you?" And he said, "No, no. I was a bit of shit." I thought that was terribly sweet and generous of him to admit he had been behaving badly, and that he didn't hold it against me that I left him.'" - The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 Aug 2007 (x)

[harrisonarchive]

On 9 December 1974, George Harrison's album "Dark Horse" was released.

"[The album] was all done in a rush, with rehearsals [for the tour] by day and mixing at night. For the artwork on the inner sleeve. I was so behind that moments before we went on the road I got a blank dust cover and wrote out all the credits by hand, put a few thumb prints on it and gave it to ‪the record company‬ for the printers. The cover shot was my high school class photo from Liverpool Institute, with lots of gray students who all look the same, and this big gray building in the background. I positioned the blown-up photo so that I'd be in the middle, put an album cover over the length of it and cropped it off. I moved the headmaster, who never liked me anyway, from where he was in the photo and I put him in the middle with a bull's eye Capitol logo on his chest. I got the art guy to paint the Himalayas in the background with a few yogis in the sky, and put exotic T-shirts on everybody. [...] The bubble caption in the photo of Peter [Sellers] and me on the Dark Horse jacket is from The Producers, from Max Bialystock's line to his partner Bloom: 'Well Leo! What say we promenade though the park?'" - George Harrison, Musician, Nov 1987

"To take the GCE (General Certificate of Education) at 16, we had first to pass three subjects in the 'mock' GCE. The first result in the 'mock' was art, which I passed. But that's because Stan Reid, the art teacher, was nice, you see (he's the one with OM on his tee shirt on the Dark Horse album)." - George Harrison, I Me Mine

The vinyl album features a closeup of George’s eyes on one side, and Olivia’s eyes on the other — "That was so sweet of him. He just said, 'Someone's coming over here to take a picture.' I'd only known him for a couple of weeks so it was like, 'Oh, I think we're getting somewhere here.'" - Olivia Harrison, The Sun, 26 Sep 2014 (x)

[harrisonarchive]

Photo 1 courtesy of Cooper Owen Auctions, photo 2 by Henry Grossman.

"I proposed filming one concert in this new, high definition video, where you could shoot and transfer to 35mm right away — and then do a satire of the music industry in between those numbers. [...] He just lit up. He said, ‘Absolutely, let’s do this!‘ It all made sense to him, the idea of breaking new ground both musically and filmically. ‘It’s not sacred, come on, it’s not that important.‘ The first order of business was to shoot one concert, and we set everything up for The Forum in Los Angeles. [...] Dylan saw a rough cut of the film later on and apparently told George that it should never see the light of day. That was how down the whole period was. He wanted to move on." - David Acomba (director), ‪George Harrison‬: Behind The Locked Door

Auctioned in 2014 by CooperOwen: George Harrison’s handwritten text for what appears to be the planned tour film/documentary that never materialized in full. (Some footage from the tour can be seen in the documentary Living In The Material World.)

George wrote: "Voice overs (re-write) 16 to 14 I assembled musicians I knew and respected — Andy Newmark - drummer Jim Keltner - drummer Willie Weeks - bass Ravi Shankar - the man who brought the sitar and Indian music to the world - with Alla Rakha and 15 great Indian musicians and singers. 26-27-31 Perhaps, in a strange way, it was the critics that helped bring the band closer together..... We certainly weren't that together for the first couple of weeks.The audiences may have come to see and hear George Harrison - an ex Beatle - Instead I was just another musician up on the stage - I suppose that confused some of the audience — but in spite of pressures — internal and external — we tried to continue as planned — tho during the tour Ravi was taken to hospital with an alleged heart attack — which made me realise we don’t control ‘the plan.’ All of us were deeply concerned for Ravi’s health - and the effect his absence would have on the spirit of the tour —" (x)

Q: "The footage of George's 'Dark Hoarse' tour [1974] is not easy to watch..." Olivia Harrison: "No, that was not fun to revisit. It was not a good time for George. He had a new manager who didn't know him very well. And this tour — 45 shows in less than two months — it was grueling. And it was not really what George was about. George had just organized the Ravi Shankar Music Festival in India. He'd produced his own album, the Splinter album. He was getting divorced. Everything was changing for him. If it was up to me I wouldn’t have gone there. But Marty [Scorsese] and [George and Olivia's son] Dhani convinced me. You have to have a balance, the dark and the light." - MOJO, Nov 2011

"[David Acomba] presented an edit of his tour movie to Harrison the following year, but 'he didn't want to go ahead with anything,' says Acomba. ‘He said the tour was such a drag for him and his voice was so bad he just couldn't face it. [Bob] Dylan saw the rough cut of the film later on and apparently told George that it should never see the light of day. That was how down the whole period was. He wanted to move on.' In 2007 Acomba recut his director's copy, and screened it for Olivia Harrison. Brief excerpts surfaced in the 2011 Martin Scorsese documentary Living In The Material World, and he hopes the entire film may one day be available. 'It's not really a piece of entertainment, it's a time capsule,' he says. 'It's a story of George and his music and the times he lived through. It was a pretty important period in his life, an amazing focus of different energies and crises coming at him. The film has a lot to say about all of that.'" - George Harrison‬: Behind The Locked Door (x)

[harrisonarchive]

Throughout November and December, the harrisonarchive is exploring George Harrison's Dark Horse Tour on its 45th anniversary.

"He liked the 1974 tour, Harrison said. 'That is, except for the fact that I had too much work on that year. I was really tired and didn’t have a throat; I wasn’t physically in good condition. I thought the band was great. 'I found the people who came to see it who didn’t have preconceived ideas enjoyed it. It was the people who came expecting to see the Beatles who didn’t enjoy it. That’s part of what I was trying to say, “I’m not the Beatles. I’m me, you know."'" - Observer-Reporter, 8 Dec 1976

[During] his 1974 tour, when, overworked, Harrison says, he felt at times like ‘a raving lunatic.’ Harrison produced three albums that year, including his own, then hustled to recruit 20 musicians from India and the West to play with him on tour. The crowning blow came when he blew out his voice in rehearsals. The guitarist justifiably notes that his blend of Eastern rhythms with rock ‘was ahead of its time,’ but many critics at the time didn't agree." - Chicago Tribune, 13 Jul 1992

"He wasn’t going to quit, it just wasn’t the done thing, so he went on tour and took a lot of flak for not having a voice. He really took a beating, although some of it was self-inflicted. But he was out there. It was very brave to carry on." - Olivia Harrison, Extra Texture 2014 remaster liner notes

"The ‘Dark Hoarse Tour,‘ he called it. [...] Drugs and brandy had ruined his voice on that tour, and I think he had set out to challenge and defy the expectations of his North American audiences, presenting ‪Ravi Shankar‬ and the Indian music first and then doing jokey versions of various of his songs. The good news was that he met Olivia, the love of his life, and retired to Friar Park, where he felt safe and from where he would only rarely emerge. Here he would discover the other great love of his life, gardening, which became a living example of his concern to create beauty on the planet wherever he could." - Eric Idle, The Greedy Bastard Diary (x)