George Harrison was always a musician who craved exploration and sonic diversity, both in The Beatles and his solo career. Over the course of his expansive discography, he explored virtually every avenue of musical expression open to him, and that included synthesisers and sitars to ukuleles and more.
The Beatles finally went their separate ways in 1970, after multiple years of ever-expanding tensions, musical differences, and rapidly rising stress levels. In the wake of that musical divorce, each band member went their distinctive direction, but none of them boasted quite the same level of exploration of the soundscape as Harrison.
Despite writing some of the Fab Four’s greatest efforts, from ‘Something’ to ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, Harrison’s songwriting was routinely undermined and overlooked within The Beatles camp, so his solo career seemed to open a pressure valve of unparalleled creativity which had been brewing for some time.
It was he, after all, who released the first Beatles solo project in the form of Wonderwall Music in 1968. That album, like virtually all of Harrison’s subsequent projects, featured a wide range of experimental sounds and diverse instrumentation, including everything from a Mellotron to the ancient bansuri. The songwriter’s deep, unwavering interest in the traditional sounds of communities and people across the globe certainly aided in creating that expansive repertoire of sound.
Additionally, All Things Must Pass is an incredible insight into the innovative, incredible songwriting mind of George Harrison. Awash with ideas of spiritualism and musical experimentation, the triple album redefined expectations of Harrison, as well as paved the way for the hugely successful solo career he went on to foster. In fact, sessions for the solo album were so productive that a multitude of excellent tracks were cut from the final listing for space.
One such effort was the widely bootlegged ‘I Live For You’, which, according to Harrison, “sounded like we hadn’t nailed it properly” and was “a bit too fruity”. ‘I Live For You’ was recorded with the aid of sought-after Nashville session musician Pete Drake. A titan of country music thanks to his mastery of the pedal steel guitar, Drake was sought out by everybody from Bob Dylan to Tammy Wynette, but Harrison held a particularly profound appreciation for his instrument of choice.
“The main thing about it for me is the Pete Drake solo on pedal steel guitar,” he said of the track, which was eventually released on the 2001 reissue of All Things Must Pass. “He died [in 1988], and I often thought if his family is still around, then suddenly they’ll be hearing him playing this thing that they’ve never heard before,” adding, “I really loved his pedal steel guitar—the bagpipes of country and western music.”
What the musician meant by that comparison is ultimately unknown to everybody apart from the man himself. Perhaps he meant that the pedal steel guitar, like the bagpipes, is beloved by a small minority of people, but viewed as an earache waiting to happen by many others.
Alternatively, the bagpipes are often an instrument of rousing national pride for the people of Scotland, in a similar fashion to how the pedal steel guitar is synonymous with the country-focused sounds of the American South (despite actually originating in Hawaii). Either way, the former Beatle’s appreciation for the instrument, and Pete Drake, in particular, was always clear.
Although Drake was originally recruited to provide a country-esque feel to Harrison’s record, he did so much more than that. With the pedal steel guitar, the Nashville musician helped to elevate songs like ‘I Live For You’ onto an entirely different plane of existence, adding intriguing new layers to the ever-expanding sound of George Harrison. It is no wonder that the songwriter always maintained a deep appreciation for Drake’s contributions.