new introductory bit here.
This is a reviews page based on my own collection, which just keeps growing despite itself. If it isn't listed here, it's because I don't own it yet, or I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Also, bother your local "new rock" radio station and make sure they are playing "new rock" and not "Rock the Casbah," which is not new.
note: entries in red text indicate my pick for the artist's best available album. A gold numeral indicates the POPocalypse winner of the year's best album; second- and third-place winners are in blue. Green lettering indicates an obviously exploitative record company compilation without apparent artist input.
Harrison, "the quiet Beatle," actually was the first one to go solo, releasing the instrumental Wonderwall Music a few weeks before Lennon's Two Virgins. He followed that up with the barely listenable synth experiment Electronic Sound, which hardly damaged the US charts with its #191 bow.
His proper solo career began with the truly splendid All Things Must Pass, which quite a few pundits still contend is the best of all the ex-Beatle albums. George had hooked up with Phil Spector while Phil was remixing Let it Be, and the result here was a "wall of sound" that buried even Spector's big sixties productions for the Ronettes or Ike and Tina. "Wah-Wah" sounds like it has a dozen guitars, three drum sets and a brass band of a hundred. The artist's newfound spiritualism makes its first appearance here, but religious sensibilities do not overshadow the production in full. All Things was originally released as a triple-LP: two discs of conventional songs and a third with improvised jams which would best serve your average Phish phanatic. The album was reissued in 2001 with five bonus tracks, a reduced price and a redesign.
After the heady critical and commercial praise for All Things Must Pass, all of it deserved, George stepped away from rock's center stage for a while, doing guest work with everyone from James Taylor to Ringo, and doing charity work for Bangladesh. His next album, Living in the Material World, came out amid all the glam and pomp of Ziggy Stardust's London in 1973 and was his final British hit for a real long time. World is, at its best, produced and played extremely well, but an album's worth of half-gospel odes to Sri Krishna were not what the pop doctor ordered. These were the worst sort of religious lyrics: the preachy, sanctimonious demands that nobody wanted to hear. Perhaps worse for George were the performances on some of the tracks. While some of the songs ("Give Me Love," "Try Some Buy Some") are indeed very good, others are fronted by an unusually whiny voice trying odd vocal tricks, like pronouncing "here" in the otherwise fine "Be Here Now" with about ten syllables. Worst of all is "The Lord Loves the One (Who Loves the Lord)," which has obnoxious and dated staccato contributions from some session brass players. George couldn't have shot himself in the critical or commerical foot faster, and releasing such an uneven treatise to faith the same summer as Aladdin Sane and Houses of the Holy guaranteed that no British teenagers would touch a George Harrison record for fourteen years.
Very little of what followed is worth the $3 apiece for used vinyl I paid for them in the late 80s. 1974's humorless Dark Horse lacks even a single interesting tune, and George, who lost his voice while recording, lacked the sense to come back to the material when he could sing in anything other than a pained croak. The disaster failed to chart in England. The next year's Extra Texture is musically dated, sounding like something recorded without concern hundreds of years ago and lacks even one original idea. 1976's Thirty-Three and 1/3 contains a pretty good single called "This Song" which reflected amusingly on his being sued for stealing the melody of "My Sweet Lord" from "He's So Fine," but the inertia of the music promises it is only of interest to people who think Carly Simon and the Eagles were really rocking, and of course aging or new Beatlefans who haven't tasted real ale or heard the Sex Pistols or the Jam yet.
Speaking of which, George hid under a rock during the punk explosion, emerging in 1979 with the easy listening borefest George Harrison. He then had an album rejected by Warner Brothers for being so out of touch; this was reworked into 1981's maudlin Somewhere in England, which at least contained the decent single "Teardrops." A year later he had become so disenchanted with the music business that he refused to do even a lick of promotion for the execrable Gone Troppo, an album with more steel kettle drums than ideas, and the turkey missed the top 100 in both the US and England.
After a five year absence, which was a long time then, Harrison returned to the fold with Cloud Nine, a carefully crafted, radio-friendly co-production with his new collaborator Jeff Lynne that yielded the 1987 US #1 "Got My Mind Set on You," one of the most surprising and welcome comebacks in pop music. Overall, this is a charming album, and far and away his best material in 17 years, although hardly challenging.
Following Cloud Nine, George and Jeff Lynne formed the Traveling Wilburys with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty, a venture that occupied him through 1991. He then toured Japan with Eric Clapton and went into retirement, emerging only for the 1995-96 Beatles Anthology project and to complain about Oasis. In 1998, he was said to have successfully beat throat cancer. In 1999, he was attacked and nearly killed by an intruder in his London home. The incident energized him and sent him back to work, where he prepped new material and a revitalizing of his back catalog. First to emerge was the revamped, remastered All Things Must Passin early 2001. In November of that year, a new song, "Horse to the Water," emerged from a Jools Holland collection, where the ex-Squeeze pianist and TV celebrity played with a number of British singers.
Sadly, George Harrison would not live to see whether his new work would be a success. Hospitalized from what is thought to be lung cancer for most of the autumn, he finally passed in Los Angeles on November 29. His recording highlights may have been sporadic, but they truly were highlights, and if All Things Must Pass should be a man's ultimate artistic legacy, then it's one that virtually nobody else can match, and no number of subpar records made with sessioners or with a weak voice can change that.
GEORGE HARRISON: Best of Dark Horse 1976-1989 (1989, US #132, **)
Over the course of five albums, George went from laid-back midtempo bore-rocker to one of rock's critical elder statesmen. This features some of his favorite tunes from that period, although arguably not his "best" ("Life Itself" is a barely listenable ode to Krishna), including all the hit singles and three new songs, among them the really smashing "Poor Little Girl."