The song George Harrison didn’t do justice to: “It’s not a good production”
Writing one’s own songs can be both a blessing and a curse. While it’s nice to have the final say on what an album is supposed to sound like or what any of the session musicians should be playing, it can be absolute murder trying to work through the sounds that you’re hearing in your head and not having them turn up on vinyl. George Harrison usually didn’t have that kind of problem, but as soon as he took his foot off the gas in the 1980s, it didn’t take long for his music to start unravelling.
Then again, Harrison wasn’t exactly safe when he started making his masterpiece on All Things Must Pass. Every song on the first discs could justifiably be considered perfect in many respects, but considering how much layering is on everything thanks to Phil Spector, the amount of reverb and echo on every instrument makes the entire feel like a slog for anyone who tries to take the plunge in one sitting.
‘The Quiet Beatle’ did eventually get a better handle on his production, but the bit of odd luck kept following him around throughout his career. He had one of his most honest albums on his hands with Dark Horse but had to suffer through laryngitis while making it, and despite having a great album ready to go in the early 1980s with Somewhere in England, he didn’t bother promoting it that much when his label forced him to go back to the studio and churn out something that could be a hit.
At that point, Harrison was being looked at as a cash cow for the label, and if his songs were being treated like another piece of meat, he wasn’t going to be putting his best foot forward any more. He now had his hands in projects like HandMaid Films, and listening back to what turned up on Gone Troppo, you’d swear that Harrison is trying his best to make something intentionally bad to spite his record company.
If the strange pop songs on Somewhere in England were at least, tunes like ‘Baby Don’t Run Away’ are mystifyingly terrible. Outside of the strange vocals that run throughout the song, hearing Harrison sing in a lower register makes him sound like a childhood monster trying to sing a love song to the person that he’s chasing.
While a lot of Harrison’s albums were meant to be from the heart, he admitted that this was one of the few great tunes from this era songs that never managed to work even with the new style he was working with, saying, “There’s one good song I wrote called ‘Baby Don’t Run Away’. It’s not a good production, but it could be a good R&B song.”
If this was considered the highlight of the album for him, though, that should tell fans that this is far from his greatest achievement. There is still the occasional tune that sticks out as distinctly Harrisonian like ‘That’s The Way It Goes’ or ‘Mystical One’, but this feels more like a slap in the face to his label than something that anyone would genuinely want to listen to, and considering Harrison never toured the record, he was most likely more than happy to leave this album in the vaults as well.
‘Baby Don’t Run Away’ is far from a terrible song, but it definitely illustrates everything wrong with what Harrison was doing around this time. I know that the record company was forcing him into making music, but if there’s anyone who’s truly suffering here, it’s the fans having to put up with this kind of record company shenanigans. Because if this is what Harrison sounds like when he’s being forced to make pop tunes, maybe they should let him do whatever the hell he wants instead.
