GEORGE HARRISON "Electronic sound" UK press on Zapple label
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GEORGE HARRISON ElectronicSound First UK press 1969 Rare.
Electronic Sound,’ released on May 9, 1969 as the second and last project on the Beatles‘ avant-garde imprint Zapple Records, stands as George Harrison‘s most experimental project, his worst-selling solo
album, and one of his more controversial ones. Yet, it opened the door for something important.
Featuring but two lengthy experiments on the then-new Moog synthesizer, one for each side, the aptly named ‘Electronic Sound’ isn’t so much music as it is a swirling journey through imagination and discovery — one that took Harrison as far as he’d ever venture outside of his pop-song comfort zone.
Unfortunately, it arrived just as the Beatles’ money-hemorrhaging business venture Apple was restructured under new manager Allen Klein, who promptly shut down the Zapple boutique imprint. Couple that with tepid sales — ‘Electronic Sound’ peaked at No. 191 in the U.S., and failed to chart at all in the U.K. — and it’s perhaps easy to see the album as a best-avoided musical blind alley.
Careful listeners, however, will note that this growing interest at the Moog directly impacted Harrison’s next two projects, both of which stand at the pinnacle of his output. Harrison would contribute memorable synthesizer parts to both ‘Because‘ and ‘Here Comes the Sun‘ for the Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road,’ while white-noise experiments — first featured on the 25-minute Side 2 track ‘No Time or Space‘ from ‘Electronic Sound’ — had a huge impact on John Lennon‘s ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy),’ also from ‘Abbey Road,’ and on ‘I Remember Jeep‘ from Harrison’s titanic triple-album solo debut, ‘All Things Must Pass,’ in 1970.
Barry Miles, a friend of Paul McCartney‘s who later wrote the authorized ‘Many Years from Now’ biography, oversaw the Zapple subsidiary, which was actually founded in October of 1968. Its only other official release was ‘Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions,’ a soundscape recording from Lennon and Yoko Ono. Acetate copies of a third Zapple project, a spoken-word album by writer Richard Brautigan, were pressed — and there were plans for similar releases by Lenny Bruce, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure — but Klein’s intervention brought all of that to a screeching halt.
“The Zapple label was folded by Klein before the record could be released,” Miles later said. “The first two Zapple records did come out. We just didn’t have (Brautigan’s record) ready in time before Klein closed it down. None of the Beatles ever heard it.
Cover and vinyl are EX”
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