This is Love: The George Harrison Club for Fiendish Thingies | Page 91 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

It’s time to say goodnight to Day 14. Unfortunately we must send our shipment of club tee shirts back to the manufacturers. The Ding-Dongs spelled Thingy wrong. 

I just read those posts the other day @Beatlebug! When I came along a few months later, I assumed you were already a George Harrison expert. You must be a quick learner! You and Parlance are a lot of fun in this thread. My daughter keeps asking me what am I smiling about. Btw-Parlance sent a nice reply to the birthday invitation, so maybe she’ll drop by on the 25th.

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Per posts further upthread, I couldn’t recall where I had seen George Harrison ‘s dad before. I was looking through my George albums and finally figured it out.

From the gatefold of the 33 1/3 album. (1976)

According to Dave Stewart, George loved posing with the garden gnomes and addressed each of them by name. 

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I ran into a site displaying watercolors of famous places. None of them are identified, but this one caught my attention.

Note ~ we have a Favorite George Harrison picture theme going in the 30 Best Pictures Thread.

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As day 16 draws to a close, here are a few final thingies to consider.

That is so good. They should have figured out a way to release both versions. Would have been an awesome B side!

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To be truthful, it took me a while to hear raga as music. The first time I heard Within You Without You , it sounded like it came from outer space. I can hear it now and it fits in wonderfully with how I appreciate the groove of jazz improv. In the last paragraph, Dhani’s description of the music is a kick.

The story of Wonderwall,  the first Beatle solo album.

New York–born Joe Massot had been shooting documentaries for Fidel Castro before the Cuban Missile Crisis forced him to flee to London, where he fell in with a social circle that included Roman Polanski and screenwriter Gerard Branch. It was Branch who conceived of Wonderwall, the story of an elderly man who becomes obsessed with spying on a young model next door through a hole in his wall. Once Massot signed on to direct the film in 1967, it became the cinematic equivalent of a swirling psychedelic trip.

For set dressers, he enlisted the help of Dutch design collective the Fool, who had spent earlier part of the year painting the walls of Harrison’s home, the exterior of Lennon’s Rolls-Royce, and the Beatles’ first (and only) foray into commercial retail, the Apple Boutique. The store’s grand opening gala gave Massot the chance to approach Harrison about providing a soundtrack to the film. His original choice, the Bee Gees, had turned him down, but Harrison proved more receptive.

“I told him, ‘I don’t do music to films,’” Harrison remembered in The Beatles Anthology. “And he said, ‘Well, whatever you give me, I’ll have it.’ I thought, ‘I’ll give them an Indian music anthology, and, who knows, maybe a few hippies will get turned on to Indian music.’” The film’s investors, eager to have a Beatle’s name attached to the project, gave him carte blanche. Free from the rigid confines of the Lennon-and-McCartney-helmed Beatles, Harrison let his imagination run wild.

He viewed a rough cut of the film to time the sequences that needed scoring. “I had a regular wind-up stopwatch and I watched the film to ‘spot-in’ the music with the watch,” he said in the soundtrack’s liner notes in 1992. “I wrote the timings down in my book, then I’d go to [the recording studio], make up a piece, and record it.” For more ambitious ideas, he would sing tunes to John Barham – an arranger and, like Harrison, a former student of sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. The shared love of both Western and Indian music would forge a powerful bond between the two, and they would later collaborate on Harrison’s All Things Must Pass  and Living in the Material World.

Preliminary work on the soundtrack began in November 1967 at London’s EMI Studios at Abbey Road . For help, Harrison called upon a number of old friends: Ringo Starr manned the drums, Eric Clapton took lead guitar, and Peter Tork of the Monkees played banjo. The Remo Four, old schoolmates of Harrison’s and fellow denizens of the Merseyside club scene, also pitched in.

Sessions continued in several London studios until January 9th, when Harrison decamped to HMV Studios in Bombay (now Mumbai) to record the majority of the Indian compositions. For five days he struggled with antiquated 2-track machines and poor soundproofing. The sound of street traffic bled onto several songs, notably “In the Park.”

Despite the technical challenges, these recordings form the most enriching pieces on the album. Immersed in exotic sounds, Harrison utilized comparatively uncommon instruments like the shenai (a reed instrument similar to the oboe, typically used in religious ceremonies), the lute-like sarod and a 100-stringed hammered dulcimer called a santoor. To translate his musical vision, he had help from Shambu Das, another Shankar protégé. Prior to his return to London, he found time to also record the basic track for “The Inner Light ,” later released as a B side to the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna .”

Work continued in England until mid-February, when Harrison was due to fly back to India to study Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi alongside the other Beatles. By this point he had spent 15,000 pounds on a project that had an allotted budget of 600 pounds. Harrison paid the difference himself.

It was a small price to pay for the ultimate token of autonomy. Wonderwall Music  was a first solo album from any of the Beatles, as well as the first LP issued by their new label, Apple Records. Released on November 1st, 1968, it beat the White Album into shops by several weeks. The disc broke the Billboard Top 50 in the United States, but the parent film did not fare as well. The Times panned Wonderwall as “a right load of old codswallop,” and many other critics agreed.

Harrison grew to have a dim view of the album in later years, eventually dismissing the work as “loads of horrible Mellotron stuff and a police siren.” This opinion led to Wonderwall Music  earning the dubious distinction of being the first Beatles-related release to be deleted from Apple’s catalogue (albeit briefly). Still, some praised the daring collection as an innovative blend of Western and international music. Quincy Jones described the album as the greatest soundtrack he had heard, according to author Spencer Leigh.

“It’s such a deep, psychedelic record,” Harrison’s son Dhani told Rolling Stone in 2014. “I remember getting a CD of it in the early Nineties and thinking, ‘What is this?’ You’re sitting there, almost meditating to the music, literally drooling in your lap. Then a shenai will come in and practically take the top of your head off. … it’s a full-on freakout record.”

SgtPeppersBulldog said
Some pictures of George’s birthday celebration from 1967 – including George and Pattie putting together a cool looking lamp and chatting with The Byrds’ David Crosby and Roger McGuinn:

Looks like Pattie had a haircut the same day too! 

@SgtPeppersBulldog posted this on George’s birthday in 2018. In one of the images, David Crosby is wearing his black cowboy hat from the Byrds era. The interior of the Kinfauns house looks so weird to me with the cheapie panelling and low ceilings.

A SPB original…