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Morning Harrison

27 August 2009 in music | No comments

Jim James of My Morning Jacket has recorded some pared-down, reverbed-up covers of George Harrison songs under the name Yim Yames. I’ve included one here: “Long, Long, Long” from the White Album, and I appreciate the quiet, deferential treatment that Jim James gives his songs. Good stuff, “Yim.”

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Here’s a good story in the engineer’s notes from the original recording of “Long, Long, Long” on Monday, October 6, 1968:

There’s a sound near the end of the song [best heard on the right channel] which is a bottle of Blue Nun wine rattling away on the top of a Leslie speaker cabinet. It just happened. Paul hit a certain organ note and the bottle started vibrating. We thought it was so good that we set the mikes up and did it again. The Beatles always took advantage of accidents.

From the indispensable Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn.

Journalist Mikal Gilmore discusses the research of his Rolling Stone cover article, “Why the Beatles Broke Up.”

What I found most troubling, most tragic, in all of this was two things: Both Lennon and Harrison (Lennon, clearly, in particular) did their best to sabotage the Beatles from mid-1968 onward, and when it all came irrevocably apart, I believe that both men regretted what they had wrought. I don’t think that John Lennon and George Harrison (but Lennon, again, in particular) truly meant the Beatles to end, even though they might not have known it in the moment. I think they meant to shift the balance of power, I think they meant for the Beatles to become, in a sense, a more casual form of collaboration, and I think they clearly intended to rein in Paul McCartney. But they overplayed their hand and — there’s no way around it — they treated McCartney shamefully during 1969, and unforgivably in the early months of 1970.

26 August 2009 | No comments