The Georgian Style
A tribute in 13 Harrisongs
Based on official records, today marks the 82nd anniversary of George Harrison’s birth.1 It also sees the release of my Harrison tribute album The Georgian Style, which you can now find on Bandcamp and most major music streaming platforms. All proceeds from sales of the album will go to the Material World Charitable Foundation, which George founded in 1973 as a response to the mismanagement and delayed delivery of the initial funds he raised for UNICEF with the 1971 Concerts for Bangla Desh.
If you visit The Georgian Style’s Bandcamp page, you’ll find a brief explanatory essay, which should be enough information for most listeners. But for those who have to have more, here’s a rundown of all 13 tracks in order, giving further insight (I hope) into my arrangement choices.
I still can’t believe that George’s version of this song, one of the highlights of 1973’s Living in the Material World, was never released as a single. I’d long suspected that it would make a great power-pop number, with super-tight drums and big blustery guitar chord flourishes, so that’s the treatment I’ve given it here.
On the original Beatles take, from 1965’s Rubber Soul, Paul McCartney famously plays two bass parts, one clean and one through a fuzz pedal. Which led me to thinking: What if not just the bass but everything in the song was fuzzed out? Voilà!
A little gem from 1970’s All Things Must Pass, rearranged here to showcase the inimitable reverb tone of my Sears-Roebuck 40XL solid-state amplifier, which dates from roughly the same era as that album (lead guitar, right channel).
George gave this one away to his pal Jackie Lomax, which was an unforced error. His 1968 solo demo, recorded originally for White Album consideration, is a far superior vocal performance to Lomax’s; I decided to take George’s falsetto approach from the demo and give it the kick-ass rock backing it’s always deserved.
Written for the infamous Madonna/Sean Penn movie Shanghai Surprise and eventually showing up on 1987’s Cloud Nine, this is a beautifully weird song that suffered the misfortune of getting trapped in dated “Oriental” production. Time to let it out.
Back to Living in the Material World for an operatic aria masquerading as a pop song. The George version is packed with strings and horns, all ready for Roy Orbison to take the stage. My version strips almost everything away; what’s left are two basses, one voice and some vintage pickup hum to add to the ambience.
Instrumental Interlude: “Within You Without You”
The first George song I ever heard. It was Christmas night 1980, and I’d just received the Sgt. Pepper album as a gift from some dear family friends. “Lucy in the Sky,” “Getting Better,” “Mr. Kite,” “Good Morning,” “Day in the Life,” and this tune blew my eight-year-old mind. I felt like I’d stepped into another universe. Much as I love the lyrics, I opted to concentrate on the melody here, rendered with acoustic guitar rather than voice. At first I intended this to be a solo guitar piece, but in the end I couldn’t resist the pull of the sitar—which I’d never have learned to play, possibly never even have known about, if not for George.
One of several songs that George demoed for All Things Must Pass but never returned to. I imagined that a full-band version would probably have sounded something like the Byrds, so here you go. Electric 12-string had to show up somewhere, right? (Only mine is a Gibson Melody Maker, not a Rickenbacker 360.)
The Beatles recorded more than 100 takes of this song during the White Album sessions before abandoning it. Ten years later, George resurrected it; the take that appears on 1979’s George Harrison has a mellower, jazzier vibe than the Fabs arrangement. I’m cool with both versions, so I put together the bits I especially liked from each one. The Sears-Roebuck amp returns, this time used for the vocal.
If I ran a church, this song—from 1981’s Somewhere in England—would be in the hymn book. It’s also the tune that started this whole project. One morning in the early spring of 2024 I awoke with “Life Itself” in my head and one of my acoustic guitars in DADGAD tuning. I found myself thinking, “That song might sound cool in that tuning.” And lo, it did. It’s the one album track on which I play slide in the Georgian style (or indeed any style); Harrison’s status as a slide giant needed to be acknowledged somewhere, and this seemed like the best place. The Neil Young-ish guitar explosion in the outro, however, enters a realm of bombast that George never would have visited. What can I say? It felt right.
Another discarded All Things Must Pass demo. On the sole surviving recording we have of this one, before George starts playing, he says to (I presume) producer Phil Spector that the arrangement he envisions is “mostly voices.” I took him at his word, while also adding a touch of rockabilly—always a safe call with George.
George’s version of this on his self-titled solo album is utterly gorgeous, and I can’t compete with that. So I tried doing it as a folk song instead: no electric guitars, no backing band, sweet and simple.
For my money, the Beatles’ version of “It’s All Too Much,” cut in May 1967 but not released on vinyl until January 1969, is one of the greatest recordings in the history of mankind. It’s elation in sound. I stayed pretty faithful to their arrangement while varying the instrumentation and modernizing the production. The master stroke was my co-producer Tom Beaujour’s suggestion to overdub a Fender Strat in Nashville tuning; the jingle-jangle makes everything pop. There could have been no other ending to this particular love fest.
Harrison’s birth certificate states that he was born on February 25, 1943, but in later years he disputed this, saying that, according to his parents, he was born slightly before midnight on February 24.