Happy Birthday, George Harrison: It Don't Come Easy (Or Maybe It Does)

Happy Birthday to George Harrison, born 67 years ago today.

In the Fab Four's heyday, George was known as "The Quiet One" of The Beatles, and was completely overshadowed by the epic talents of Lennon & McCartney. But George's stature has grown immensely in the last 15 years or so.

Now we know that George was a supreme instrumentalist with an elegant, melodic style that was key to much of the greatness in the Beatle catalog. He was also wrote some of the group's most interesting songs and was a true visionary in his blending of Western & Eastern musics. And he consistently had the best hairstyles in the band.

But here's something I didn't know about Mr. Harrison until very recently: It was George, not Ringo, who wrote Ringo's first post-Beatles hit "It Don't Come Easy." For years, it has been credited as a Richard Starkey composition, and neither George or Ringo ever said anything to deny it, but recently a George-recorded demo of "It Don't Come Easy" came to light.

How can we prove it's George? Just listen for the Hare Krishnas.


George was bursting with great songs in 1970, so he could more than afford to toss one to his mate Ringo. It was a good move for everyone: "It Don't Come Easy" was a huge smash and the first hit by a solo Beatle. They played it together, along with famous mates like Eric Clapton, at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971:


Harrison likened being freed from the shadows of John & Paul's overbearing ways to having "musical diarrhea," and in 1970 he had even had more songs than he could fit on his triple album All Things Must Pass.

To illustrate and celebrate, I have uploaded Beware of Abkco, a truly fab collection of acoustic demos Harrison recorded in the wake of the Beatles breakup. Several of these tracks, such as "Beware of Darkness" and "Wah-Wah," became highlights of All Things Must Pass; others, like "Nowhere to Go," written with Bob Dylan, and "I Don't Want to Do It" written by Dylan alone, didn't make the record at all.

You can download Beware of Abkco below. Happy Birthday and Hare Krishna, George.
Download: George Harrison, Beware of Abkco

Beatles Not For Sale

Music fans around the world, including the global Rock Turtleneck readership, were relieved to hear that Abbey Road studios was not for sale by EMI as rumoured, and was in fact being given protected status as a historic building by the British government.

Abbey Road, of course, is where The Beatles recorded all of their albums, with the exception of Let it Be. Other masterworks recorded there include Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Radiohead's Kid A.

Its massive Studio B, one of the few remaining studios which can accommodate a full orchestra, is where the Fabs made most of their magic. Here's some rare footage from the early days of Beatlemania, accompanied to the Please Please Me nugget "Misery":


Ideally, Abbey Road would be given the same treatment as Sun Studios in Memphis - open to the public for tours, yet still a working studio. If EMI wants to raise a few quid, many will gladly pay to stand inside the massive space where the orchestral swells of "A Day in the Life" were recorded.

The "A Day in the Life" sessions were also filmed, as the following video demonstrates. This being the height of Swinging London, the Beatles turned the early-1967 orchestral recording into a party and invited the beautiful people of the era, including the Rolling Stones, Donovan and even the Monkees, to turn on and tune in.


A few months later, they recorded "All You Need is Love" in Studio B for the first worldwide TV broadcast Our World. It was arguably The Beatles' peak as a global and cultural phenomenon.



Much more recently, Paul McCartney returned to Abbey Road, which is right down the street from his flat in St. John's Wood, and filmed a wonderful special to coincide with the release of his excellent 2005 CD Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. Herein he shares many anecdotes about recording in Abbey Road, and lays down some pretty amazing tracks himself. Had the Queen not stepped in to save Abbey Road, it's easy to picture Macca saving it himself.

This special is an hour long, but it's well worth watching, so eat lunch at your desk. Mr. McCartney's talent and charm are still very much intact. And now, for the forseeable future, so is his fab studio. God Save the Queen.

Part I:


Part II:


Part III:


Part IV:


Part V:


Part VI:


Part VII:

R.I.P. Doug Fieger: He Had The Knack

The Knack, led by Doug Fieger, who passed away a couple days ago at age 57, was to New Wave what Creed was to Grunge - a cynically marketed imitation that outsold the real thing, proving that perhaps the cynicism of the record execs wasn't so cynical after all.

Unlike Creed, however, and more like The Monkees, The Knack actually had a few good songs. Everyone knows "My Sharona," one of the monster hits of the late 70s/early 80s, with one of the most memorable riffs in rock.


The song was so big it spawned the musical parody "Ayatollah," an homage to the Iranian leader who was enjoying his 15 minutes as a brutally old-school dictator and American hostage-taker, and whose name happened to scan perfectly with "My Sharona."


The Knack's look and sound was a clear homage to the British Invasion - their look was Ed Sullivan Beatles (only 15 years prior), but their sound was more like The Kinks. They also threw in a bit of the New Wave anger that was in vogue thanks to Elvis Costello, Pretenders, The Jam and The Clash. But for whatever reason, The Knack didn't ring true. As I recall, the band began refusing to do interviews, and The Knack soon found themselves the victim of a critical and commercial backlash.

But in the early 90s, as Generation X invaded the mainstream media and revisited their LP collections, The Knack enjoyed a brief resurgence. "My Sharona" was prominently featured in the film Reality Bites, starring sticky-fingered Gen-X pinup Winona Ryder.

More importantly to the hipster crowd, they received the Kurt Cobain Seal of Approval. Nirvana cited "My Sharona" as an early influence on their blend of hard rock and power pop, and the band even covered it live, as this incredibly poorly recorded clip demonstrates.


Their smash debut Get the Knack featured another big hit: "Good Girls Don't," a nugget that would have been right at home on Nick Lowe's Pure Pop for Now People, despite Fieger's blatantly Lennonesque mannerisms with his "I Should Have Known Better" harmonica and way of leaning into the mike.


Rather than becoming the next Beatles, The Knack went down in history as one of the greatest two-hit wonders of all time, right up there with Steppenwolf. How did this make him feel? We'll never know for certain now, but I'm guessing he felt pretty frustrated.


R.I.P. Doug. Thanks for contributing to my junior high soundtrack.

Get the Knack on iTunes here.

Rock Turtleneck Is On Snow Patrol

With the awesomely-named SNOWMAGEDDON dumping record-breaking amounts all over the northeast corridor, my thoughts turn to the band Snow Patrol. And then they quickly turn away.

That's because they are probably the band in the world I know the least about. I couldn't name a single member, I have no idea how many members there are (at least until I uploaded this band picture), I don't know their country of origin (my guess would be Scotland) or how many albums they've made. The sole factoid I know about Snow Patrol is they have an LP called Songs for Polar Bears that has a gorgeous Elvis figurine on the cover.

But they do have two songs that I absolutely love. The first, 2007's "Shut Your Eyes," has an infectious kraut-rock guitar figure that reminds me of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" by Wilco. I used to make a lot of party mix tapes in college specifically designed to take a shindig up a notch. "Shut Your Eyes" would have made a perfect opener - had it been recorded 20 or so years ago. It's rocking but not fist-pounding, the perfect song to nod your head to while you suck down those first couple of Strohs.

Here's the band, who I now know is a quintet, playing "Shut Your Eyes" at the most counterproductive rock festival of all time, Live Earth.


While preparing this post, I learned Snow Patrol also have a song called "Open Your Eyes," making them the only band I can think of with two songs with diametrically opposed song titles. It's like if The Beatles had, in addition to "Carry That Weight," a song called "Put Down that Weight."


The other tune I love by them is not an alternative radio smash like "Shut Your Eyes." It's one I came across rather randomly on iTunes called "Starfighter Pilot" which hails from the aforementioned Polar Bear tribute collection.

And what makes me think Snow Patrol might be a band with staying power is that "Starfighter Pilot" sounds nothing like "Shut Your Eyes" or "Open Your Eyes." In fact, it more closely recalls the punkier 90s Brit-pop of Blur.


Here's something else I learned about Snow Patrol: You can find all of these songs on their recent best-of called Up To Now on iTunes here.

The Who: Minimum R&B

The Who is playing the halftime show at Super Bowl XLIV Sunday. I’m guessing it will go something like this:

The theme to CSI: New York will start playing and two old guys will take the stage. The singer will raise his fist in the air and swing his microphone, all in tribute to the glory of rock.

Also enraptured by the rebellious, liberating nature of the music, the large-nosed guitarist, who also happens to be a registered sex offender, will jump up and down and do several windmill-style guitar strums. Words will be sung about this being a teenage wasteland and a handicapped pinball prodigy with a supple wrist. Then the two sexegenarians, backed by a hired-gun rhythm section, will play the theme to CSI: Miami. Fireworks will explode and then the second half of the game will start.


Forty years ago, around the time of Super Bowl III, the first and only bowl won by the New York Jets, The Who were probably the best band in the world. And they were certainly the best live act - maybe ever.

Keith Moon was the heart and soul of the Who, the greatest rock drummer ever and the element that truly made them great. They should have broken up after his death in 1978. Bassist John Entwistle was equally brilliant. He died in 2003. Without them, The Who isn't really The Who.

Nevertheless, Daltrey and Townshend are still trudging on, and in a Super Bowl promo acoustic set they did this week they actually sounded pretty good.


I'm sure what's left of this great band will provide perfectly fun, family-friendly musical entertainment, but let's take a moment to remember The Who at their Maximum R&B best. And if you don't have Live at Leeds, their incredible concert record, pick it up and turn it up - it's the best live album of all time. And pick up the DVD of The Kids are Alright. Go Saints!

"My Generation" The Smothers Brothers Show, 1967


"A Quick One (While He's Away)" The Rolling Stones' Rock & Roll Circus, 1968


"Young Man Blues" The Isle of Wight, 1970


Buy Live at Leeds on iTunes here.

J.D. Salinger Forever

In addition to being a flat-out genius writer, the late great J.D. Salinger was the embodiment of rock & roll alienation before rock & roll existed. Reading Michiko Kakutani's brilliant appraisal of Salinger in the New York Times today, I couldn't help but think of John Lennon.

"Mr. Salinger’s people tend to be outsiders — spiritual voyagers shipwrecked in a vulgar and materialistic world, misfits who never really outgrew adolescent feelings of estrangement. They identify with children and cling to the innocence of childhood with a ferocity bordering on desperation... Such characters have a yearning for some greater spiritual truth, but they are also given to an adolescent either/or view of the world and tend to divide people into categories: the authentic and the phony, those with an understanding of 'the main current of poetry that flows through things' and those coarse, unenlightened morons who will never get it — a sprawling category, it turns out, that includes everyone from pompous college students parroting trendy lit crit theories to fashionable, well-fed theater-goers to self-satisfied blowhards who recount every play in a football game or proudly wear tattersall vests."

Many Lennon songs, including "Rain" and "Working Class Hero," encapsulate the Salinger "Us vs. Them" ethos perfectly.

But none more so than The Beatles' 1967 masterpiece "Strawberry Fields Forever." Strawberry Fields, as any RT reader should know, is the name of an orphanage in Liverpool. Lennon never did any time there, but he saw the orphanage and its lovely name as an apt metaphor for loneliness and innocence lost. It is truly the song of "a spiritual voyager shipwrecked in a vulgar and materialistic world... who never really outgrew adolescent feelings of estrangement."

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me.


It's important to note that Salinger came from a prosperous New York City family and was well-educated, and that Lennon was a world-famous multimillionaire when he wrote "Strawberry Fields Forever." But for both of these gifted artists, no amount of success could make these feelings go away. And that's what made them who they were.
Tragically, Salinger's work also played a major role in Lennon's death. His assassin, whom Rock Turtleneck will not dignify by name, was carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Rye when he gunned down the great Beatle, often referred to himself as Holden Caulfield, and told police that all the reasons for his horrible act could be found within the book's pages. In any case, as this surprisingly moving singalong on Lennon's birthday in Central Park's Strawberry Fields demonstrates, voices like Lennon's and Salinger's can never be silenced. RIP, gents.

Rock Turtleneck's SHOCKING Grammy Wrap-Up

Last night's Grammy Awards was chockablock with SHOCKING MOMENTS! There was a near-naked Pink singing upside down on a trapeze. Lil' Wayne rapping or whatever you call that only weeks before he's due to hit the slammer - don't drop the soap Wayne! Lady Gaga wearing Frank Gehry's latest building concept on her head. And above all, a truly ridiculous 3D tribute to Michael Jackson. The only institution that should be paying tribute to Wacko Jacko is the California Bar Association.

None of that crap was shocking, in fact it was completely expected. Truly shocking was Jeff Beck and Imelda May's duet of Les Paul & Mary Ford's "How High the Moon" was shockingly short, tasteful, full of musicianship and paid loving tribute to someone who actually deserved it.


For the record, I will say I enjoyed Beyonce's cover of Alanis Morrisette's "You Oughtta Know" and am extremely glad my daughters live in a world dominated by Taylor Swift and not Lil' Kim. And I don't get the fuss over Green Day.


Anyway, Jeff Beck, one of the greatest guitar gunslingers of all time, is back in a big way. He won a Best Rock Instrumental Grammy last night for his cover of The Beatles' "A Day in the Life."

Here's JB TCBing the tune in 2007-check out his female phenom bassist from Down Under Tal Wickenfield.


Jeff Beck is also hitting the road for some arena shows with Eric Clapton this year - good to see him cashing in. Hopefully, Beck, who has never lost his raw tone, will edge Slowhand away from his more middle-of-the-road instincts. Here are the two at the Secret Policeman's Ball in 1981.