NOVEMBER 1, 1968 – George Harrison released his first solo album, ‘Wonderwall Music” on the Apple label in the UK (released on December 2nd in the US). The songs which were mostly Harrison instrumentals featured Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr and an unaccredited banjo contribution by Peter Tork of The Monkees. The soundtrack to director Joe Massot’s film “Wonderwall” (1968), the LP was George Harrison’s first formal musical project outside the Beatles, created during a time when he was immersed in his discovery of Indian classical music. It also coincided with a period when Harrison had had minimal interest in the Beatles’ recent activities, namely their 1967 album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and the TV film “Magical Mystery Tour”.
Having met the Beatles while the band were shooting their 1965 film “Help!”, Massot offered the soundtrack project to Harrison after the Bee Gees had dropped out in October 1967. Harrison viewed the film at Twickenham Film Studios and was intrigued by the storyline, in which a lonely professor (played by Irish actor Jack MacGowran) first glimpses and then becomes obsessed by his glamorous female neighbor, a Vogue model (played by Jane Birkin), via a hole in the wall separating their apartments. Harrison biographer Simon Leng writes: “The lack of dialogue left acres of room for music to speak, and a soupçan of cosmic apotheosis also helped. Beneath all its glaring trippiness, ‘Wonderwall’ touched on themes that would come to preoccupy George Harrison – critically, the objectification of celebrities and the shallowness of fame.”
With Massot allowing him full artistic control, Harrison treated the soundtrack as an opportunity to further educate rock and pop audiences in facets of Indian music. Following his use of Indian musical instruments such as sitar, tambura, swarmandal, dilruba and tabla in his work with the Beatles, Harrison chose to write pieces for less well-known instruments. These included the oboe-like shehnai, traditionally used in religious ceremonies; the sarod, similar to a lute; and the santoor, a type of hammered dulcimer with up to 100 strings. In addition, he would provide selections in the more familiar, rock music genre.
Harrison’s key collaborator on the project was John Barham, who, as a classically trained pianist and musical arranger, annotated the melodies that Harrison sang to him and transcribed them onto sheet music for the Indian musicians. Leng describes Barham as Harrison’s “fellow traveler”, due to the two musicians’ shared appreciation of Indian classical music, and writes that because Harrison needed a collaborator who “empathized with his [musical] ideas”, Barham was a natural choice over George Martin, the Beatles’ producer and orchestral arranger.
All of the soundtrack music was written by Harrison. As with his songs for the Beatles over this period, including the Indian-styled “Within You, Without You” and “Blue Jay Way”, he composed many of the pieces on keyboard instruments such as piano or organ, rather than guitar. Harrison later described how he went about preparing the score: “I had a regular wind-up stopwatch and I watched the film to ‘spot-in’ the music with the watch. I wrote the timings down in my book, then I’d go to [the recording studio], make up a piece, record it.”
Having been allocated a budget of £600, Harrison eventually spent £15,000 on recording the film soundtrack, paying the difference himself. Also recorded in Bombay was the backing track to “The Inner Light”, which became the B-side to “Lady Madonna”, the Beatles’ final single on Parlophone Records. Another product of the London sessions was the Remo Four song “In the First Place”, although it would remain unreleased until the late 1990s.
Harrison’s name does not appear among the performers on the original album sleeve, and many commentators have traditionally credited him only as producer and arranger at the sessions. After consulting Barham for his book “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, Leng credits Harrison as a performing musician, and Spizer also recognizes him in his track-by-track list. Among other changes, the performer credits in the 2014 reissue include Harrison, on piano and guitar.
Harrison attended the world premiere of Wonderwall, held at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 1968, accompanied by his wife Pattie Boyd, Starr and Birkin. Although he had expected the film’s producers to purchase the soundtrack rights and issue the album independently, they declined to do so, leading Massot to suggest that Harrison release it on the Beatles’ new label, Apple Records. Wonderwall Music therefore became Apple’s first album release, as well as the first solo album by a member of the Beatles.
Massot was impressed with “the accuracy with which [Harrison’s music] illustrated and enhanced the images on screen”, Inglis writes, and asked Harrison to provide the soundtrack for the next film he planned to make, Zachariah, a western with Ginger Baker in the title role. Although Harrison declined, he later supplied incidental music for “Little Malcolm” (1974), a film he produced under the aegis of Apple Films, before going on to contribute to soundtracks for his HandMade Films productions in the 1980s, including “Time Bandits” and “Shanghai Surprise”.
Author Robert Rodriguez writes that scoring the “Wonderwall” film “got the [Indian music] genre out of Harrison’s system”. After taking part in filming for the Shankar documentary “Raga” in June 1968, Harrison decided to abandon his sitar studies and return to his first instrument, the guitar. As another legacy of the “Wonderwall” soundtrack project, Harrison cited the Bombay sessions as the inspiration for his 1974 collaborations with Shankar – namely, the Music Festival from India and their subsequent North American tour – both of which featured Indian musicians Harrison first worked with in January 1968.
TRACKLIST:
SIDE ONE
1) Microbes
2) Red Lady Too
3) Tabla and Pakavaj
4) In the Park
5) Drilling a Home
6) Guru Vandana
7) Greasy Legs
8) Ski-ing
9) Gat Kirwani
10) Dream Scene
SIDE TWO:
11) Party Seacombe
12) Love Scene
13) Crying
14) Cowboy Music
15) Fantasy Sequins
16) On the Bed
17) Glass Box
18) Wonderwall to Be Here
19) Singing Om
[wp_ad_camp_2]
