‘Electronic Sound’: The George Harrison album he thought sounded like “rubbish”
By the time The Beatles split, it was anyone’s guess as to what they were going to come out with. There were still pieces that were left on the cutting room floor from their previous sessions, and even if Paul McCartney and John Lennon started from scratch during their solo tenure, George Harrison was ready to take off once he finally got the chance to spread his wings. While All Things Must Pass still has some of the finest solo tracks of any Beatle’s solo career, Harrison did have the clarity to realise when something wasn’t up to his standard.
Before the band had even properly finished, Harrison had already realised he couldn’t be playing with the Fab Four forever. He was growing exponentially as a songwriter, and even if he contributed two of his best songs to Abbey Road, it made no sense for him to keep stockpiling tunes in the hopes that he might get one or two on an album by the time he got a proper word in.
So that meant giving some tunes away at the start of his career. He had already begun collaborating with Cream by co-writing their hit, ‘Badge,’ but even when working with Jackie Lomax on the song ‘Sour Milk Sea,’ it’s easy to hear him slowly getting a handle on what it means for him to be a proper songwriter.
Harrison was not the only one to get the solo bug, either. While McCartney’s The Family Way may have allowed him to collaborate with George Martin for a film soundtrack, Lennon was already miles ahead when working with Yoko Ono on their own compositions. Some may have been hopeful messages like ‘Give Peace a Chance’, but that also meant dealing with some harsh noise on albums like Two Virgins and Life With the Lions.
This kind of avant-garde music is nowhere near The Beatles’ usual wheelhouse, but that didn’t stop Harrison from throwing his hat in the ring. After all, he had already started to develop a fascination with Indian music. Since he had a new toy in the Moog synthesiser, Electronic Sound became his entry into the avant-garde, complete with the sounds that would be enough to trigger someone’s migraines if they aren’t careful.
Although both of them were released on the Zapple record label, Harrison had to admit that he wasn’t particularly proud of the final results, saying, “See, we conceived of an offshoot of Apple Records that would be arty music that wouldn’t normally gain an outlet, a series where people could talk or read their work. But as with so many other things at Apple, it seized up before it really got going. Both of the albums that did come out are a load of rubbish, yet they’re interesting from a collector’s point of view.”
Still, that’s not to say that both Lennon’s and Harrison’s albums weren’t influential in some way. Though none of them should be listened to sincerely for more than two minutes, Harrison’s experiments did help give the band a new tool on ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ and Lennon’s way of screaming did add to the gusto behind a song like ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ halfway through the record.
Nevertheless, given how close they were to calling it quits, Harrison didn’t have time to waste on putting together discordant experiments. He had been sitting on tracks like ‘All Things Must Pass’ and ‘Wah-Wah,’ and it was time for the world to see him for the massive songwriter force that he had to keep under wraps for so long.
