The 1982 album George Harrison didn’t spend any time on: “All these strange things”
George Harrison didn’t plan to have a massive solo career when he first left The Beatles.
He probably knew that the world was desperate to hear what he had been cooking up in the background all of those years, but compared to everyone else who wanted to make the biggest hits possible, Harrison was all that bothered with that side of fame. He simply wanted to write songs that he thought sounded best to his ears, but that did mean a few records ended up getting lost in the shuffle along the way as well.
But for someone who was known as the quietest member of the group, it’s insane to think that he was going to be the one with the biggest solo career right out of the gate. Everyone was awaiting what John Lennon and Paul McCartney were going to do, but All Things Must Pass is the kind of musical wrecking ball no one else could mess with. Harrison needed to get all of his songs out there, and there’s hardly a weak moment on the entire project, which is really saying something given that it’s a triple album.
Then again, it’s hard to think of anywhere to go but down when you start off on that high of a note. Harrison wasn’t going to fade away into obscurity by any stretch, but while Living in the Material World and even later records like 33 and ⅓ were fantastic for their time, there came a point where people were only going to get tired of his religious schtick that he was promoting throughout his records.
The public frankly didn’t want to know, and while that was a massive blow to Harrison, the real low point of his career was when he tried to conform to what the rest of the world was doing. Warner Bros had already rejected one of his albums because it didn’t have the same kind of potential hits that they heard out of other ageing rockers, but while Somewhere in England was at least salvageable for a few songs, Gone Troppo was the moment where everyone seemed to stop caring.
Even Harrison, by his own admission, said that there was no chance that the record was going to sell because of how little he tried to promote the thing, saying, “When I did my last album, Gone Troppo, at that period I felt that I had done so many things in the past, and I didn’t feel, you know, I never really spent time promoting that record, and I didn’t really give the record company much help, put it that way. But at the same time, the record business was going, it seemed – from the way I could see it – to be going through all these strange things.”
It was certainly a strange time to be a 1960s rocker by the time that Harrison made this record, but the sound of the record also feels like someone who doesn’t really care. He was trying to wait out his contract, and when he wasn’t going on vacation in between making the record, all that he was stuck with was a few leftovers from his Beatle days like ‘Circles’ and songs that sound too overproduced for their own good like ‘Baby Don’t Run Away’.
Since that was the music that Harrison was being told to make, the fact that Cloud Nine ended up sounding so refreshing is because you actually believed that he loved what he was doing. Getting to work with Jeff Lynne was a treat for him, and since the Traveling Wilburys weren’t that far ahead, Harrison could at least go the extra mile and make tunes that had more of a Beatles flair to them every now and again.
Is Gone Troppo the worst Beatles solo album? No, not by a long shot, but it is a great lesson for people that try to get the most trendy songs out of their artists. George Harrison was going to make whatever album he wanted to, and if anyone was going to force him to make more cheery songs, all they were going to be left with was the kind of album that sounded like nothing but musical fluff.
