George Harrison - Cloud Nine
On November 2, 1987, "Cloud Nine", the eleventh solo album by George Harrison, was released, his first after five years of almost complete silence.
On the cover, Harrison holds an old black guitar, and in it lies the whole idea of the album. It is a 1957 Gretsch Duo Jet, his first American-made guitar, bought in Liverpool in 1961. He gave it to his friend Klaus Voormann, who kept it for some twenty years, then asked for it back, had it restored and put it in front of Gered Mankowitz's camera. An album that opens with a guitar from 1961 does not pretend to compete with the present.
And that is indeed the idea. "Cloud Nine" is an album of nostalgia recorded with the tools of 1987. Radio that year was ruled by synthesizers and drums that sounded like steel doors, and Harrison, back after five years out of the game, decided to do what he knew. Short, melodic, smiling songs, with a little of the old light. That is exactly the album's charm, and also its problem.
Those five years were not empty, but they were quiet. After the album "Gone Troppo" from 1982 was received lukewarmly, Harrison lost interest in the record business and moved his energy to his film company, HandMade Films, which was founded to finance "Life of Brian" by "Monty Python" and later also produced "Time Bandits" and "Mona Lisa". In 1986 he wrote songs for "Shanghai Surprise", one of the company's films, starring Madonna and Sean Penn. The film flopped, but two of the songs he wrote for it, "Someplace Else" and "Breath Away from Heaven", got a new version on this album.
At the end of 1986 he turned to Jeff Lynne and proposed that they make an album together. There was an almost excessive poetry in this, because Lynne built "Electric Light Orchestra" on the idea of continuing from where "I Am the Walrus" stopped, and anyone who has heard the band's "Out of the Blue" knows how far that dream could be taken. Now he was asked to work with one of the people that dream was born from.
On January 5, 1987, the two entered Harrison's home studio at Friar Park in Henley-on-Thames and recorded, by March, backing tracks for seventeen songs. The overdubs were finished in August. In an interview with Creem magazine, Harrison said that Lynne played the bass and keyboards, that they both played the guitars, and that all the little embellishments, from the autoharp to the backing vocals, were the work of those two men alone. In other words, an album by two men and a room full of friends.
The friends came as needed. The guitar on four of the songs was added by Eric Clapton, the same friend who once played the solo on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on "The White Album". The piano and Fender Rhodes were played by Elton John, who was recovering from throat surgery at the time. The drums were split between Ringo Starr and Jim Keltner, Gary Wright also played keyboards and co-wrote "That's What It Takes", percussion came from Ray Cooper and saxophones from Jim Horn.
The album opens with "Cloud 9", a surprisingly hard mid-tempo rocker with a dark bluesy riff in which Harrison and Clapton converse. The numeral 9 in the title was reportedly meant to avoid confusion with "Cloud Nine" by "The Temptations" from 1968. Years later Harrison said that had "the Beatles" still existed, this song would have appeared on one of their albums. Maybe it is boasting, but in "Rolling Stone" David Wild wrote in 1987 that it was Harrison's best album since "All Things Must Pass", and this first song does nothing to refute him.
But the song that explains the whole album is "When We Was Fab", written with Lynne and originally called "Aussie Fab", because it was written in Queensland, Australia. It is psychedelia in the service of nostalgia for the days of "the Beatles". Sitar, cello, backwards effects, and at the end a short quotation of the melody of "Drive My Car". Ringo played drums on it and sang backing vocals, and the single's sleeve combined Voormann's line drawing from the cover of "Revolver" from 1966 with a new drawing of him made 22 years later.
The video, directed by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, presented Harrison as a many-armed street musician in front of a brick wall, with old friends passing by. He wears the uniform from the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", Ringo appears first as a roadie and then as the drummer, Elton tosses a coin into his hat, and there is also a figure in a walrus costume. Harrison hinted in an interview that Paul McCartney was hiding underneath, but McCartney himself said in 1995 that he was unavailable and suggested putting someone else in and saying it was him. The video received six nominations at the 1988 MTV Video Music Awards.
That is the winning half. The other half is the production. Lynne adorns every song with layers of tight snare and glittering synthesizers, and whoever looks for the soft guitar of the past sometimes finds it only behind the glare. As early as 1987 the Chicago Tribune claimed that Lynne's influence was too strong, and Mojo wrote in 2011 that the production had aged but the songs were excellent. The ballads are the weak link, led by "Breath Away from Heaven", which sounds like someone straining to be gentle.
On the other hand, "Just for Today" rescues the quiet side of the album with a slide solo of the kind only Harrison knows how to play, "Someplace Else" could have sat comfortably on "All Things Must Pass", and "This Is Love", the album's third single, is a jewel of melodic pop. "Devil's Radio" is a song about the power of gossip, and "Wreck of the Hesperus" borrowed its name from Longfellow's famous ballad.
And closing the album is "Got My Mind Set on You", the song that is easiest to dismiss and hardest to get out of your head. It is not even Harrison's. The song was written by Rudy Clark, and James Ray recorded it in 1962. Harrison first heard it in 1963, on a visit to his sister in Benton, Illinois, where he bought records, five months before "the Beatles" appeared on Ed Sullivan's show. Twenty-four years later he recorded it with Lynne on bass and keyboards and Keltner on drums.
The single was released on October 12, 1987, a few weeks before the album, and on January 16, 1988 reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart, Harrison's first No. 1 in fifteen years, since "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)" in 1973. In the UK it was stuck at No. 2 for four weeks. It is also the only one of his three No. 1 hits that he did not write himself, and apparently the last time a former Beatle reached the top of the chart as a solo artist. Even "Weird Al" Yankovic noticed it, and the parody he recorded, "(This Song's Just) Six Words Long", pokes at the repetitiveness of the lyrics.
Two videos were shot for the song. The more famous one, directed by Gary Weis and inspired by the film "Evil Dead II", shows Harrison in a study where the furniture and ornaments, including a stuffed squirrel, a suit of armor and mounted animal heads, burst into song and dance, and the video was nominated for three MTV awards.
But the greatest contribution of "Cloud Nine" was born of a joke. During the recording, when faulty equipment created mistakes, Harrison said to Lynne "We'll bury 'em in the mix", and from then on every small slip was called a "Wilbury".
In April 1988 Warner Bros. asked Harrison for a B-side for the album's third single, "This Is Love". He recorded "Handle with Care" with Lynne, together with Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, in a garage that had become Dylan's home studio in Malibu. The song was too good to be buried on a B-side, and so "Traveling Wilburys" were born. We already told the story of their formation in our review of "Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1".
Harrison would never again release a new solo album in his lifetime. He passed away on November 29, 2001, and "Brainwashed" was released in 2002, after his death.
On "Cloud Nine", Harrison set out to bury the mistakes in the mix. What was not buried is the tone. Warm, smiling and steeped in longing, it can be heard to this day, every time the slide guitar comes in at exactly the right moment.
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