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For @missapplescruff & because everyone needs to hear this wonderfulness.
I was being unfair to Paul before, as @kenobatch pointed out, Paul is helping George with the music and developing the bass part. And I think Paul’s said this is one of his favourite songs.
“Something in the way she moves, Attracts me like a cauliflower…”
George at ZDF Studios, Unterföhring, Germany appearing on Disco '77 where he performed (mimed to) This Song, on 5th February 1977.
George sued Ringo??
Yeah. Oh dear. But don’t worry, they got over that as well. Ringo brings it up in this interview from 1988:
(clip at 1:45)
Michael Aspel: What about now? What makes you cross with each other now?
Ringo: Well, the last time we were cross was when George was suing me. […] He called me up […] and said ‘I’m going to sue you.’ I said, ‘Nah, George, don’t be silly.’ He said, ‘No, I’m going to sue you. I don’t like what you’ve done.’ Because he wrote this song and I had it mixed by somebody else, and he didn’t like the mix, so he starts suing me. So in the end I said, ‘Sue me if you want, but I’ll always love you.’
Ringo’s talking about the Harrisong, ‘I’ll Still Love You’ (also known as ‘When Every Song Is Sung’) which was a song George wrote and sorta recorded in 1970 for the All Things Must Pass sessions but George didn’t release it. It seems a bit like a ‘One After 909′ as several people gave the song a try (Shirley Bassey, Cilla Black, Leon Russell) but no one did much with it. Eventually George donated the song to Ringo for ‘Ringo’s Rotogravure’ in 1976. George was under pressure to complete 33 and 1/3 so he didn’t take part in Ringo’s recording sessions. For reasons unclear, George took exception to Ringo’s version.
Although Ringo didn’t release it as a single, he made a promo video for it (filmed in Hamburg) so maybe he was considering it as a single, but didn’t release it because obviously George would have objected. I’m not sure, really, what grounds George would have to sue Ringo over the song as he willingly gave it to Ringo to record. (Presumably there was some agreement George thought he’d broken??) But it was settled out of court in late 1976.
In the Michael Aspel interview it’s 12 years later and Ringo’s making light of it and joking around. George is laughing but looks (rightfully) rather embarrassed about it. As you should, Georgie.
(The sound is awfully out of synch in that clip. There is a longer version of the whole interview on YouTube if you search for “George Harrison and Ringo Starr Aspel and Co 1988″).
George’s version of the song is quite nice. I can’t find that on YouTube currently (though I’m sure it’s been on there before. Maybe it’s been removed for release?!) After Ringo’s version, no one else recorded it (as far as I’m aware), you can find George’s original on bootlegs.
This was the occasion I was referring to, but I think all the Beatles merrily sued each other in the early 70s, so this probably wasn’t the only time.
“We had a great time [being The Beatles]. I think fondly of it all, especially as we’ve been through all the aftermath of Apple. Everybody’s sued each other to their hearts’ content, and now we’re all good friends.”
[George, Rolling Stone interview, 1979]
‘Sue me if you want, but I’ll always love you.’
[Ringo]
Interview: Aspel & Co, 5th March 1988.
I have an interesting tidbit about the whole George/Maureen relationship that I stumbled upon today. There's a moment in the A/B Road sessions, on January 6th 1969 to be exact, where George starts riffing a random song. He says it's called "Maureen" & claims that it was written by Bob Dylan. It's a crooning sort of love song and he sings and plays it briefly. Despite George's claim as to where the song came from, no Dylan performance, recording or any proof of him authoring this song exists. ;)
Have you listened to the song?!
Here’s a nice version someone’s put to pictures and footage of Mo.
It’s a funny song - where did it come from? What’s the truth behind it? If anyone speaks to Bob Dylan anytime, would you mind asking him if he wrote it or not?
I mentioned it in this post here, because of the name of the song and who it’s coming from…
It can only be one of two things, can’t it? Either what George says on the tape is true - it’s a Bob Dylan song that George suggests might be good for Ringo to sing - or George wrote it himself. About Maureen.
If George speaks the truth - and the Beatles were doing lots of covers during the Get Back sessions, so it wouldn’t be that out there to suggest covering it (although a lot of the other songs covered are old rock and roll tunes) - why doesn’t the song seem to exist anywhere else? Why hasn’t Bob Dylan recorded it, or even a bootleg of a demo surfaced anywhere in the last 50 years? If it is an unknown, unrecorded Dylan song, then how come George knows it well enough to play and sing it like this? (Although, George did make his own Bob Dylan bootlegs so… possible).
If George is telling porkies, and he wrote it… blimey. Could that mean he’d harboured feelings for Maureen for that long? This is 1969 and that famous dinner party doesn’t happen until 1972. But if he did write it, then he might have stuck the name Maureen in there because it fit. Paul wrote songs about Michelle, Eleanor Rigby, Lovely Rita, Lady Madonna, etc, about people who were characters and not real figures (kinda).
Does it sound Dylan-esque? Or does it sound Harrison-esque? It doesn’t sound that Dylan like to me, but I’m not the greatest authority on Bob Dylan songs… It could be George like, but he did do Dylan pastiche style songs, so hard to say. You know, it’s sort of like a speeded up version of Everybody, Nobody (The finger picking bit) - Anyone hear that too? Or am I imaging it? (Quite possible. I’m useless at that sort of thing.).
However, George didn’t tend to write songs about people. I can’t think of another song with a girls name in the title from George. And if he said, “this is a Dylan song, Ringo could record it,” and the other Beatles thought that was a great idea, that’s going to cause problems further down the line when it’s discovered Dylan didn’t write it - they’d want to credit it on the album and then George would have had to come clean that it was his song actually. Cue lots of odd looks and awkward moments then.
He could, I suppose, have argued he denied being the songs author to get them to listen to it - because otherwise they were kind of ignoring him. But as you can hear on the recording, they carry on ignoring him anyway and the song Maureen is never heard of again.
I’d love to know the truth of it though. Anyone have any more info? Can anyone decipher the lyrics while we’re at it?
Thank you for your ask and info! It is actually a very nice song.
Can we just talk about Simply Shady for a moment? A song literally describing cheating and it making his life a tad more difficult? 😂 I love George, but a part of me feels like he never really realized it was wrong to sleep around. Especially being so into karma and the laws of karma, it shocks me how nonchalant he was about it. Love your blog btw, great to find someone as obsessed with him as I am 💕
Simply Shady is what happens to naughty boys in the music business. I suppose I got the idea here, at home, and then I escaped to India after that, and I wrote it in Bombay - it was a funny sort of song to be writing in Bombay - especially the one about Karma!
[George, I Me Mine]
I went on a bit of a bender to make up for all the years I’d been married. If you listen to “Simply Shady”, on Dark Horse, it’s all in there – my whole life at that time was a bit like Mrs. Dale’s Diary.
[George, Rolling Stone, 1979]
Simply Shady, not just about infidelity, but a whole load of other things to - drugs, booze, selfishness, not really being very good to those around you. Hedonism, in other words.
Simply Shady was written in Jan/Feb 1974 while George was in India, visiting Ravi Shankar. The song George is talking about in the I Me Mine quote is It Is ‘He’ (Jai Sri Krishna) which George had written directly before Simply Shady. It Is He is a song inspired by a sort of spiritual epiphany George experienced while he was in the holy city of Vrindavan, and Simply Shady is about George’s hedonistic lifestyle of the early 70s. Two completely opposing ideas and concepts. And you know, that’s George, isn’t it?
If you look at George’s lyrics which I’ve snapped from I Me Mine, the lyrics are perhaps revealingly different. The lines ‘Karma took a trip’ and
The moment I start drowningI’ll cling onto any strawIf it can/will get/keep me floatingStand me back up on the floor/I’ll come back up for more
Which became…
And as I started drowningI clung onto a strawThat somehow kept me floatingWhile my madness craved for more
…in the final version. The present tense turning to the past tense. There’s a motif of liquid in the song and water and drowning which makes me think a little bit of Sour Milk Sea, and there’s often water in George’s songs, this idea of drowning and wanting to be saved. Although as you say, it’s also a song about cheating and it making life difficult (Oh! Poor you, George!) but I think it does - not quite directly in so many words - acknowledge that this life is not where George wants to be or where he should be.
The juxtaposition of It is He with Simply Shady paints a George struggling with what he wants to do with the rest of his life - does he dedicate himself to spirituality or does he continue live like a hedonistic 70s rock star? George has spoken about how he felt uncomfortable going to India (particularly at this time) or meeting with other spiritual people at this time because he knew he wasn’t living the life he should. (That would have made him a hypocrite. There’s that word again). I think he very nearly lost his faith at this point in his life, it’s something he came back to in song over and over again.
This was early 1974 and despite that epiphany, I don’t think he really started to climb back out of that hole he’d dug himself until directly after the Dark Horse Tour at the end of 1974. George is suffering from laryngitis when he recorded Simply Shady too - maybe that was a little dose of Karma.
As for whether he thought it was wrong to sleep around, no, I don’t think he did. Quite the opposite in fact, but that is perhaps a different matter. At the end of the day, George was human. He made mistakes, he was flawed and he could be wrong sometimes. He was also brilliant, unique, talented and loving. I wouldn’t have him any other way.
Thank you for your ask and kind comments! Sorry its took me ages to answer you. I’ve saved my favourite questions for last! ;)
Om Hare Om Radha Krishna Om Hare Om Rama Radha Om Hare Om Bala Shiva Om Hare Om Rama Sita Om Hare Om Gopala Krishna Govinda Jai Gopala Jai Jaya Om Hare Om Gopala Krishna Govinda Jai Gopala Jai Jaya Gopala Krishna Govinda Jai Gopala Jai Jaya
Happy Birthday George. Haribol, bolo Krishna, bolo George ॐ
The slightly freaky gif created for the promotion of the new George Vinyl Boxset to be released on George's birthday.
The new George Harrison Pro-Ject Audio Systems record player, to be released on George's birthday. "The limited edition Pro-Ject George Harrison record player boasts an entirely unique appearance created by design specialists, Studio Number One. Studio Number One was founded by Shepard Fairey, and the Pro-Ject George Harrison record player makes use of an image taken from the world-famous artist’s work." Want. (But it's mega expensive! *sigh*)
