40 Year Itch : A Dark Horse in the White House

  On December 13, 1974 George Harrison and members of his band, including Billy Preston, Tom Scott and Ravi Shankar visited President Gerald Ford at the White House. Invited by Ford's son Jack, the musicians apparently had a swell time with "the accidental president". Both were beaming despited muddling through difficult times and bad press. Some clips of the visit appear below.

George and Olivia that day

40 Year Itch : The Dark Hoarse Tour

    In November of 1974, George Harrison became the first former Beatle to tour North America. Beatle fans got to hear George perform "Something ", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "Here Comes the Sun" and Lennon's "In My Life" with the lyrical change "In my life, I love God more..."
   The tour got off to a rocky start when, the night before his first show, in Vancouver, the hard partying George lost his voice. He'd never recover fully despite gargling a "secret mixture of honey, vinegar and warm water" recommended to him by Eric Clapton and Barbra Streisand. ( see the video below at 1:00 in)




   George also insisted on handing over the spotlight to Ravi Shankar and other classical Indian musicians. For what must have seemed far too long to many concertgoersAs one reviewer put it "Tragically, Shankar's beautiful music was wasted on a noisy minority of meatheads".
   All of which led to George's often grumpy appearance onstage. From the stage in LA, he croaked "I don't know how it feels down there, but from up here you seem pretty dead!"
    Who knows what those shows might have been like without Billy Preston's vocal and emotional support? While overnight reviews from newspaper critics were mostly positive, Rolling Stone called the tour "disastrous", an adjective critic Jim Miller also used to describe Harrison's new Dark Horse album. That, perhaps unfairly, is the way history remembers the tour. Harrison wouldn't tour again until Clapton forced him to play some shows in Japan. Seventeen years later in 1991.

One fun footnote : drummer Jim Keltner asked George for a Mercedes 450SL in lieu of payment for the tour. This would inspire one of his better songs "It's What You Value".

40 Year Itch: The Godfather of World Music

"Only one artist in the world performed at the three most significant musical events of all time: Monterey Pop, Woodstock, and The Concert for Bangla Desh. Dark Horse Records is proud to present his new music."
-Billboard Magazine ad

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   Ravi Shankar, the man George Harrison crowned 'The Godfather of World Music"  released his most successful foray into pop, Shankar Family and Friends, on Harrison's Dark Horse label in October of 1974. The album broke into the Billboard 200, peaking at #176.

    The album is a meeting of East and West with Shankar and members of his actual family, along with some Indian superstars,  recording on an album produced by Harrison with the ex Beatle's favorite musical friends including Tom Scott, Billy Preston and a drummer by the name of Ringo. To Harrison, this was nothing less than having the world's greatest composer agreeing to jam with pop musicians. You can hear his reverence in this snippet from a radio interview:

George Harrison discussing Ravi Shankar 

   Harrison would even bring Shankar and family on his much maligned 1974 tour. Maligned first and foremost because Harrison lost his voice before the tour ever started. But also because he would leave the stage after a few songs so Shankar could perform a long, many thought too long, set. Audiences grew restless with the unfamiliar song structure. But more on that tour later.

   Side One opens with the single "I Am Missing You". This is about as mainstream pop as the album gets . Vocal performances fill out the rest of the side. Side Two is more intriguing and more welcoming to these ears. Originally a score for a ballet split into three parts( DREAM, NIGHTMARE and DAWN), Shankar mixes Eastern and Western music to great effect.

   Five years later Shankar produced something even more widely welcomed by Western ears: a daughter who would grow up to record by the name of Norah Jones.

40 Year Itch: Sammy!

"All in all, I'd say all my dreams came true"

-Sammy Davis, Jr

On November 16, 1973, NBC and General Electric presented "Sammy!", a TV special starring Sammy Davis, Jr. MGM followed the performance with a soundtrack album. There are moments here that capture the glitz and glitter of 1973 better than anything Marc Bolan or David Bowie did: like this cover of the 1971 Chase hit "Get It On!" 

That's a lot of yellow!

Top Ten Soul Hits This Week:

1. Billy Preston : Space Race

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2. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes The Love I Lost

3. Gladys Knight and the Pips Midnight Train to Georgia

4. Temptations Hey Girl ( I Like You Style)

5. Tavares Check It Out

6. Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye You're a Special Part of Me

7. The Jackson 5 Get It Together

8 Johnny Taylor Cheaper to Keep Her

9 Ovations Having a Party

10 Dells My Pretending Days Are Over

40 Year Itch: Rolling Stones Saxman Takes a Bath

On September 30, 1973 The Rolling Stones played two shows at the Festhalle in Frankfurt Germany rounding up the first month of their 1973 European tour. Despite the sexy poster, designed by John Pasche from a photo by David Thorper, this tour wasn't as wild as the '72 American Tour. Billy Preston, a big star in his own right and the opening act for the tour, played keyboards. Keith Richards wasn't always keen on his musicianship as he related in his autobiography Life:

There was one time in Glasgow when he was playing so loud he was drowning out the rest of the band. I took him backstage and showed him the blade. "You know what this is, Bill? Dear William. If you don't turn that fucking thing down right now, you're going to feel it." It's not Billy Preston and The Rolling Stones. You are the keyboard player with the Rolling Stones.

   The Frankfurt show is missing saxophone player Bobby Keys. Richards says  found Keys and some French chick  in a bathtub full of champagne and Bobby told Richards he wasn't going anywhere. This was also the last tour to feature Mick Taylor on guitar.

By the way, the Stones had planned to put out a live album of their European tour. They has their mobile recording unit at almost every gig. The talk at the time was of a part live/part studio album ( not unlike Humble Pie's most recent outing) with the studio tracks coming from the same Jamaican sessions that produced Goats Head Soup.

   Below: an out of breath and over-heated Jagger sings the last song of the night.

40 Year Itch : Right On, Right On, Summer Soul from '73

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Curtis Mayfield followed up his #1 Superfly soundtrack with more smoothly sung, politically conscious R and B. Back To The World, a Top 20 album, features the Superfly sound-a-like single "Future Shock" but the real treats are the title cut, about a disillusioned Vietnam vets return home to the US ( known as "the World" to vets) and the monster jam "Right On For the Darkness"--one of our very fave cuts from 1973.




To help promote the album, Curtis hosted The Midnight Special June 8, 1973.

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Velvet voiced Bobby Womack keeps it real on this follow-up to Understanding. Facts of Life, recorded in Muscle Shoals, may be Womack's best. The single, a cover of the standard "Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out", came out a month earlier and peaked at #2 on the R and B charts.

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With the Brothers Johnson backing him up, Billy Preston continued his hit making roll with Music is My Life, featuring the future #1 hit "Will It Go 'Round in Circles". Most of the album is a mixture of feel good piano-based pop and songs celebrating God. The title cut sounds like an off the cuff autobiographical confession: "I may not be the best around/But I'm surely not the worst."

Funky Friday : Outa-Space

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    By running the sound of a clavinet through a wah wah pedal, Billy Preston created the funky sounds of "Outa-Space", originally a B-Side to the title cut from his 1971 album I Wrote A Simple Song.

    Of course any DJ that actually liked music flipped the disc over to play four minutes of pure funk. Re-released in April of 1972,  "Outa-Space" climbed all the way to #2 on the pop charts, went gold and won the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance of 1972.( "I Wrote A Simple Song" stalled at #77.)

 The "Fifth Beatle", Billy played on "Get Back" and on Abbey Road's "I Want You (She's So Heavy)". Among his other major hits were the #1 hits "Will It Go Round in Circles" (1973) and "Nothing From Nothing" (1974). He also recorded with The Rolling Stones and co-wrote Joe Cocker's big hit "You Are So Beautiful" with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and Bruce Fisher.

Billy died in 2006 of an illness related to kidney disease, He was 59.

6 Songs with Alan White #2 "Instant Karma!" 1970

John Lennon enlisted George Harrison, Billy Preston, Klaus Voorman and future Yes drummer Alan White on "Instant Karma!". Lennon claims he "wrote it for breakfast, recorded it for lunch, and we're putting it out for dinner."

1001Songs asked Alan about those memorable "fall down the stairs" drum fills. Alan explained he was playing a lot of prog rock at the time and experimenting with time signatures.


I was going through a phase in my life when I thought "Wouldn't it be interesting if a drummer is playing a certain groove and when you get to a drum fill you take it out of that meter into another meter and then come back into the song again?"
So that was what that was all about. And when I first tried it in the studio John said "What was that?" and I said "I had this idea to take it out--"
He said "It was fantastic!" He said "Whatever you're doing, just keep doing it!"

TOMORROW: IMAGINE