classic rock

They may not have had quite as bountiful of a vault as for the All Things Must Pass anniversary edition, but the George Harrison estate and Dark Horse Records had no shortage of, well, material in putting together the new 50th anniversary edition of George Harrison’s fourth solo (and second post-Beatles) album, Living in a Material World.

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The expanded two-disc set, which was curated by Harrison’s widow Olivia and son Dhani, is part of an expanded deal with BMG that Dark Horse signed last year. Out Friday (Nov. 15) with a new mix by Grammy Award-winning engineer Paul Hicks; in addition to the 11 original tracks that came out on May 30, 1973, a second disc (on LP and CD) includes an outtake of each song as well as two rarities, “Miss O’Dell” and, on CD only, the unreleased “Sunshine Life For Me (Sail Away Raymond)” (which Harrison contributed to Ringo Starr’s 1973 album, Ringo, and recorded with Starr and members of The Band). The package also includes a 60-page hardcover book featuring previously unseen images and memorabilia from the period.

“We’re going in chronological order,” Dhani Harrison, Dark Horse’s CEO, tells Billboard about the estate and label’s approach to reissuing his father’s catalog. “There was obviously (The Concert For) Bangladesh in-between but that’s a full concert movie, so that doesn’t affect the order as we release his solo studio albums.”

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Harrison adds that his father “really loved this album because of what it stood for. It was designed to help people living in the material world — it had a purpose. It always meant a lot to him. He named his charity after it, so it was also the beginning of the foundation, which still goes on today.” Royalties from the 50th anniversary edition will go to the Material World Foundation.

Living in the Material World was Harrison’s second consecutive No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart and was certified gold, spawning the Billboard Hot 100-topping single “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth).” It was also the first album Harrison recorded at the studio in his Friar Park estate in Henley-on-Thames, England, which he’d purchased in January 1970. Unlike All Things Must Pass’ legion of contributors, Living in a Material World was made with a small core band that included keyboardists Nicky Hopkins and Gary Wright, bassist Klaus Voormann, Starr and Jim Keltner on drums and Jim Horn on woodwinds.

“It was very cozy,” recalls Voormann, who was living in a cottage at Friar Park at the time. “It was a very personal atmosphere, very comfortable. It was a beautiful house, and the (studio) room itself was one end and very secluded and not really big, so it was very intimate. And George was in a very calm state. He was very happy with his meditation and his friends from India, so he was in a certain mood which made it into this wonderful atmosphere.”

Dhani Harrison, meanwhile, views the album as the start of a new era for his father, the first of “a long line of Friar Park albums that stretch all the way to the end of his career,” including albums by Ravi Shankar and the all-star Traveling Wilburys, whose debut album was mixed there. Having worked through a backlog of Beatles-era songs for All Things Must Pass, Living in the Material World offered a spate of brand-new songs, many reflecting Harrison’s spiritual focus at the time.

“He also produced this album all by himself,” Dhani notes. “It’s the first time we see him in his element in his home studio, producing and writing…. If you listen to the album that’s a real band on there, which is what makes it different from All Things Must Pass. They were really ripping as a band on those sessions. It was also coming off the back of Bangladesh, so there was a lot of synergy with the musicians from that on this album.”

Hicks, who’s also worked on reissue projects by the Beatles and John Lennon, says the streamlined process benefited the remixing as well. “I think in general my mission is to just start fresh and have a new sort of sonic take on the album,” he explains. “Timeless is the term I always use; we’re not trying to make things sound modern…although I think people maybe listen differently now — on their phones and headphones — so to me there’s a different sort of detail in what you’ve got to do.

“It’s obviously a lot simpler production than All Things Must Pass. Apart from a few songs, like the title track, it’s almost sort of like an acoustic album, but with some extra instruments. It doesn’t strike me as a rock album. So I kind of went into it emotionally mixing it and really trying to bring out the lyrics, because (Harrison) is saying some really fascinating things. I thought we should have a bit more focus on George on this one, and the Harrisons agreed.”

The vaults held plenty of options. The additional material ranges from a third take of “The Lord Loves the One (That Loves the Lord)” to some takes in the 20s and even the 93rd take of “Who Can See It.” “We did that — but, you see, I don’t remember it,” Voormann says, with a laugh, about the process. “We were just playing the songs and going through them. We weren’t keeping count…George was very precise. John was more direct; if there were mistakes on the take it didn’t matter, the feeling had to be right and that was good enough for him. But with George…all the details had to be right.”

Dhani adds that, “the fact there was a take 93 shows how deep we went. Ultimately, we only put stuff in that makes the album stronger…what we’re looking for is the really worthy stuff, and if you have to go through 90 takes to find that one take, that’s what we do. It wasn’t just a ‘remaster’; we’ve gone back to every single master track. It’s really an ‘ultra remaster,’ as we went back to the original masters and remixed them without stepping on the original, which is what we did with All Things Must Pass. We did a deep, deep dive, and that’s what the fans deserve.”

George Harrison Box Set

Courtesy Photo

Despite the substantial number of takes, however, Hicks notes that “they’re all basically the same. George taught (the band) the songs, and then they did it. All Things Must Pass was kind of a treasure trove — that one’s loads slower, that one’s faster…. On this (album) they definitely seemed to have a plan. Maybe the title track outtake (take 31), that’s possibly one of the most different because it’s a much more square bit, not as swung as the (album version), so that’s quite interesting. But they didn’t really experiment with styles… they were just playing the songs until (Harrison) felt they’d done it enough.”

The Harrisons are already working on what’s next. The estate began working concurrently on The Concert for Bangladesh, with Peter Jackson helping to restore footage of the film “so it’s of the same quality as Get Back,” according to Dhani. “It’s just incredible when you see the show. It took it into another level, which is why you haven’t seen it yet as we’ve been taking our time with it. But when you de-grain it and up-res it, it becomes a whole new thing. With the level of musicians who are in that show, it deserves that attention.” Dark Horse is looking at doing something similar with Harrison’s 1974 tour as well.

“If there’s any way of doing Dark Horse (the album) and the Dark Horse ’74 tour in the same way as well, that’s my ultimate goal,” Dhani says. “The band is incredible, and the shows set the template for bringing classical Indian music and rock n’ roll together.

“All these releases require so much work. It took us five years to do the All Things Must Pass 50th anniversary. We started doing all this in 2001 — we’ve been at it for nearly 25 years and we’re only up to the second album.”

“Can you see it?”
Those were probably the last words Paul McCartney expected to hear after stepping into the cockpit of a plane carrying him and Wings bandmates Linda McCartney and Denny Laine to Lagos, Nigeria, in August 1973. Hoping to watch the landing from the front of the aircraft, McCartney – one of the most famous and successful musicians in the world — instead found himself helplessly standing by as the pilots went back and forth trying to locate the landing strip under the mist-covered jungle canopy. “Oh my God, are we even going to land?” McCartney later recalled of the panicky incident that marked the start of the sessions for Band on the Run, his 1973 masterpiece that turns 50 this December.

To record his fifth post-Beatles album and third LP with new band Wings, McCartney decided to relocate to Lagos for a change of scenery and musical inspiration. It was exactly the sort of bold gambit that his three former Beatle bandmates, just before the split, probably would have shot down without blinking. So, goodbye London, Beatles litigation and paparazzi; hello Africa, the warm sun, open air and Lagos’ music culture.

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In hindsight, perhaps what McCartney really needed was chaos and disorder, ingredients that often inspired his best work. Ready or not, that’s what Lagos and the Band on the Run sessions were about to give him, his wife and Laine — one dramatic complication after another, threatening to undermine an endeavor that was more shambolic and seat-of-the-pants than the average McCartney fan realized back in the ‘70s.

“In order to move forward, you have to try new things,” Laine tells Billboard in a phone interview from his home in Florida while describing how he thinks about the landmark album now. “It’s like being a gambler. You gamble with things because it’s more exciting. It’s more appealing. It’s not the normal, everyday 9-to-5 job, it’s more of a ‘Let’s try something new.’”

Even if Band on the Run was more of a gamble than McCartney anticipated – the plane landed safely, but it was far from his last brush with danger on the trip – he certainly needed a chance of pace. At that point, McCartney himself was very much a man on the run — from the shadow of The Beatles, and from the critics who’d knocked (if not savaged) his previous four efforts: McCartney, Ram, Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway. (Many critics now celebrate Ram as a masterpiece, with Rolling Stone naming it one of the 500 greatest albums of all time in 2020.) Sure, he could move plenty of units in stores, but reviewers circa 1973 had grown accustomed to panning the writer of “Eleanor Rigby” and “Hey Jude” as lightweight and inconsequential.

The new lyrical ideas he’d started sketching spoke of imprisonment and the allure of freedom. “Stuck inside these four walls”; “If I ever get out of here”; “Climb on the back, and we’ll go for a ride in the sky”; and “I’ll come flying to your door.”

While he rhapsodized about freedom, though, life had other ideas. Following two defections from Wings just before they were all due to fly out to Nigeria, shrinking McCartney’s existing quintet down to a trio, Laine was now the only remaining member of the group with a surname other than McCartney. The English rocker remembers the finished album that emerged from the Lagos sessions as largely a grand adventure.

“I know why it was appreciated so much,” Laine says. “Because it had a certain feel. It was basically just me and Paul doing the backing tracks. And it was more of a relaxed approach to doing an album than if you’re going in with a band and there are all these parts. We were thrown into that as a last resort because two of the guys didn’t come to Lagos.”

When asked how he responded to the idea of a remote getaway for the project back in the day, Laine adds: “When (McCartney) said, ‘Let’s do it in Africa,’ I understood completely. We wanted to go somewhere where it was different. We’d be influenced by the music and the atmosphere, and it was far away from anything else we’d ever done. Because it was an EMI studio, I think they just put a pin in the map and said, ‘How about Africa?’ I just went: ‘Great, let’s do it.’”

Laine already knew McCartney prior to getting the call to join his post-Beatles band. “Because of his fame, of course, I was in the shadows more, but I wasn’t bothered by that at the time. I was traveling the world and learning a lot and having a good time in many ways. So from that point of view, it was easy for me. I’m very adaptable. When I’m around people who are not adaptable, I get a little bit nervous.”

He and the rest of the entourage couldn’t have foreseen it at the time, but adaptability was the personality trait above all others that would be required of Band on the Run players — who, in spite of everything, ended up producing an album that topped the Billboard 200, produced three Billboard Hot 100 top 10s (including the chart-topping title track) and attained triple-platinum certification.

McCartney would, in interviews over the years, laugh off the adversity that accompanied these sessions. But Band on the Run might represent the most danger he’s ever put himself in for the sake of his career. During his time in Lagos, for example, he and Linda were mugged at knifepoint while walking the streets, oblivious to the warnings they’d been given about wandering at night. Robbed of their belongings — including studio demo tapes – Wings would have to start all over again, redoing from memory what had already been recorded.

As McCartney engineer Geoff Emerick recounts in his memoir, meanwhile, a visa was required for entry into Nigeria — and a resulting visit to the authorities to obtain one revealed the prerequisite of getting yellow fever, typhoid and cholera shots (and that malaria tablets would need to be taken throughout the stay). The McCartneys and Laine were venturing into an area where maladies like typhoid and cholera were an endemic risk. Furthermore, Nigeria was under the control of a military general at the time, and public executions were not an uncommon occurrence in Lagos.

The EMI studio where McCartney and Laine worked overlooked a lagoon at 7 Wharf Road in the city — and it was here that one of the most frightening episodes of all unfolded. At one point, McCartney began struggling to catch his breath, stepped outside and then upon coming back in from the stifling heat, fainted and collapsed. A stunned and shouting Linda feared he was having a heart attack. (It was, rather, a smoking-related bronchial spasm.)

Once he’d returned home, McCartney deadpanned about it all at London’s Gatwick airport: “It was a great experience, and we had no problems whatsoever.”

From the listener’s point of view, none of that adversity is apparent – the record is peak McCartney songcraft. The Abbey Road-like medley of the title track gives way to the full-throated escapism of the rollicking “Jet,” which in turn prefaces the gently melodic “Bluebird,” with its chorus of tight, soaring harmonies. No fewer than three of the record’s tracks — “Band on the Run,” “Jet” and “Let Me Roll It” — would go on to become decades long staples of McCartney’s setlists.

“Me and Paul, we had the same influences musically and had known each other since the ’60s,” Laine says. “It was just easy. It was easy to get a good groove on each other’s songs, and I think that’s what made the album popular.

“We did it almost as though it was a home recording. A lot of the equipment that was out there really wasn’t workable. It was all hand-me-downs from EMI, and they really didn’t know what they were doing.” Fortunately, McCartney had brought along his own engineer, “And we kept it basic. No frills.”

“Normally,” Laine continues, “me and him would get together somewhere and write together — before we go in the studio. He’d come up with an idea, or I would, and then it would be a co-written thing. Or he would have written the songs and I would have known them before we go into the studio because we’d rehearsed them together. That’s what I really enjoyed about [Band on the Run]: the fact we were thrown in the deep end, and we had to swim, and we came up with that feel that we always had anyway.”

The critical and commercial acclaim that followed Band on the Run (it was nominated for the prestigious album of the year Grammy) prefaced the success of Venus and Mars two years later, which was the Wings album McCartney used to reestablish himself as a major touring artist. And there were still other benefits of his African sojourn, including a bit of unstinting praise from the most improbable voice of all: John Lennon. In 1975, Lennon told Rolling Stone that Band on the Run was “a great album,” adding, “It’s good Paul music.”

Everything you need to know about Poison was summed up in the title of their 1988 hit “Nothin’ But a Good Time.”

Since forming in 1983 in Mechanicsburg, Pa., the stalwart glam-metal quartet has made music for literally nothing but a good time. Sure, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” may have dampened a hanky or two, but Poison’s raison d’rock has been to get the party started and keep it going until dawn and beyond. And the good times rolled to the tune of four multi-platinum albums and eight top 20 hits on the Billboard Hot 100.

Poison laid any doubts about its staying power to rest with its performances during 2022’s The Stadium Tour, warming up for Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe with an ebullient greatest set that had thousands of fans rocking each night like it was 1988.

“I never knew what would happen, but I never thought it couldn’t happen,” frontman Bret Michaels tells Billboard. “We just found a way to get it done and enjoyed it. My pot of gold is the journey. I’ve met incredible people, I got to play incredible places and travel the world and play music and have a great time doing it. I think that’s something everybody who comes to see us relates to.”

During its tenure, Poison released seven studio albums, from the triple-platinum blockbuster Look What the Cat Dragged In in 1986 up to the 2007 covers set Poison’d! The classic lineup of Michaels, guitarist C.C. DeVille, bassist Bobby Dall and drummer Rikki Rockett has remained intact since 1996, and the frontman says the group is looking at 2025 for another tour and possibly some new music.

From Billboard chart hits to deep cuts, here are our picks for the group’s 10 best songs.

“Unskinny Bop” (1990) 

There’s often ambivalence over this song because it’s so silly. But that’s the point. There are no artistic pretensions to “Unskinny” — it’s just a good-time romp with a chorus that sticks in your ears after the first pass. You can feel conflicted about it on principle, but when you hear it, you know you’ll be bop, bop, bopping along. Listen here.

“Stand” (1993)

Heartland rock wasn’t exactly within Poison’s milieu, but the group did a creditable job on this lead single from Native Tongue. Co-penned by new guitarist Ritchie Kotzen, the rootsy flavors of mandolin and acoustic guitar (along with a gospel choir) took Poison somewhere different — think John Mellencamp in the last half of the ’80s. It certainly raised a few eyebrows among the faithful, but it gave the group one final appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 (No. 50). Listen here.

“(Flesh & Blood) Sacrifice” (1981) 

Image Credit: Courtesy Photo

Poison’s collective libido did not necessarily make for poetic lyrics, but nobody really comes to this band looking for Shakespearean sonnets, do they? The title track from Poison’s third album leans toward the band’s grittier side, making for some guilt-free headbanging thanks to Rockett’s muscular wallop and a steady bottom pulse provided by Dall. 

“Fallen Angel” (1988)

Poison tells its own story here — about moving west to find success — by creating the character of small-town girl (not that small-town girl) who takes the bus but doesn’t find the City of Angels to be quite so welcoming. The song won big, however, hitting No. 12 on the Hot 100. It’s not the last we’d hear of the Angel in question, either.  Listen here.

“Shooting Star” (2002)

A sequel of sorts to 1988’s “Fallen Angel,” this chugging rocker from Hollyweird has a thicker, heavier tone than much of the band’s previous material with an opening riff that straddles ‘80s glam and ‘90s alt-rock. This time, Angel is fist-pumping throughout a compact, tightly executed track. Listen here.

“Look What the Cat Dragged In” (1986) 

Image Credit: Courtesy Photo

The title track from Poison’s debut album sounds like the group found a Runaways/Joan Jett outtake in a back corner of some club and latched onto it like an unexpected Christmas present. “Cat” scratches just the right blend of punk, metal and personality to give a new band its sense of identity, and Poison drives the message home in a tight three minutes and 10 seconds.  

“I Want Action” (1987)

The third single from Look What the Cat Dragged In is bouncy fun dipped in the glammy trough of Slade and Sweet — right down to the spoken exchanges after DeVille’s guitar solo. Like so much of the group’s oeuvre, “I Want Action” wears its message on its sleeve, and the video is four-minute calling card for all things Poison. Listen here.

“Every Rose Has Its Thorn” (1988) 

“Every Rose” was the king of the power ballads at a time when power ballads were king. Heartbreak makes hits, of course, and Michaels’ spun Poison’s only Hot 100 No. 1 hit from hearing a male voice in the background of a phone call with his girlfriend while he was drying clothes at a laundromat in Dallas. His pain, our gain. Who knows how many Bic lighters or cell phone batteries have been drained while this was being played in concert. Listen here.

“I Won’t Forget You” (1987) 

It’s been eclipsed in the power ballad department by “Every Rose” and “Something to Believe In,” but it sounds fresher because it hasn’t been played into the ground. It was an early highlight for DeVille as a guitar soloist, and its gentle, earthy production (especially compared to what came in its wake) makes it an easy, timeless listen. Listen here.

“Nothin’ But a Good Time” (1988)