The 1990 song George Harrison called better than pop music: “The sound of it’s good”
George Harrison didn’t really need to play by anyone else’s rules once The Beatles broke up.
He was the one who had to go along with everything that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were saying whenever they were working on their songs, and since he had his first solo album proper in 1970, he was going to make sure that he got out every single song he could and had all of them produced to absolute perfection when All Things Must Pass dropped. But around the time that Harrison’s star began to wane in the late 1970s, he wasn’t exactly eager to get back to the world of pop in the next decade.
While The Beatles were pioneers of making promotional films for their songs, the music video world wasn’t something that Harrison was equipped for all that much. He could still make the odd video of himself and his friends having fun on a tune like ‘This Song’, but in the era when Michael Jackson and Madonna were becoming the biggest stars in the world, it was much easier for him to kick back and work on Handmaid Films instead.
Even when he managed to get back on the charts with Cloud Nine, Harrison wasn’t interested in playing the game all that much. The video for ‘This is Love’ was just a few shots of him goofing off while on vacation, and while MTV was about to fall in love with the Traveling Wilburys, Harrison had one rule when he put together his supergroup: never write trying to get a massive hit.
It would have been great if the Wilburys kept going and released one record after the next, but the lion’s share of their best material was about getting a more organic sound out of everything. There was the odd song where they might use a synthesiser, but almost every tune that they ever released was usually based around five rhythm guitar players cranking out a bunch of old-time rock and roll tunes.
That might not have been en vogue at the time, but Harrison felt that a song like ‘New Blue Moon’ put every other artist on MTV to shame, saying, “For [critics] to say we’re a bunch of old farts, well they’re right, we are a bunch of old farts. But listen to the music being played on radio now and all the stuff that’s on the hit parade. I mean, everybody’s got the same drum sound. Everybody’s got the same keyboard sound. You listen to ‘New Blue Moon’ on there which is played live with four acoustic guitars and a drummer. I mean, that’s all played live and the sound of it’s good.”
Granted, it’s not like four guys with acoustic guitars were going to endear themselves to the crowd that listened to the likes of Pet Shop Boys. This was the sound of every rock and roll legend reaching content middle age, but even when they were working on some of their greatest tunes, Harrison could still deliver a stunning melody when he had the rest of his band behind him.
And while Harrison does add some beautiful slide guitar flourishes throughout the tune, the unsung hero of the song is Jeff Lynne. Lynne was the one sculpting many of the band’s tunes even before they were formed, and while everyone sounds great on the main verses, his voice shining through on the title line of the song feels like a modern update of what they may have heard The Everly Brothers do.
But even if the pop crowd was interested in something a little different from modern skiffle tunes, that wasn’t going to stop the Wilburys for a second. Everyone else was looking to get their next massive hit on the charts, but there wasn’t a single song that they made that didn’t come from a place of fun for them whenever they rolled the tape.
