Not Guilty

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Not Guilty ( English 'not guilty') is a song by the British musician George Harrison from 1968. It was recorded by the Beatles for the White Album in August 1968 , but then discarded. Harrison released a re-recording of the song on his George Harrison album in 1979 instead . The Beatles version did not appear until 1996 as part of the Anthology series.

background

Harrison wrote Not Guilty immediately after the Beatles returned from India , where they visited the guru , author of books on Vedic philosophy and founder of Transcendental Meditation , Maharishi Mahesh Yogi . In terms of content, the song describes Harrison's confrontation with the counterculture of the 1960s as well as his dissatisfaction with his subordinate position in the Beatles' band structure. In May 1968 the band recorded a demo version of Not Guilty at Harrison's Esher estate .

Musical structure

Not Guilty is written in E minor; the song, composed in four-four time, has a running time of 3:36 minutes.

production

Not Guilty was recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London in August 1968 . The producer was George Martin , assisted by Ken Scott . The Beatles recorded a total of 101 takes of the song on August 7th and 8th . No more takes were recorded for any Beatles song. On August 9 a was of Take 99 mixdown made (Take 102) on the overdub recorded further process instruments. Usually the vocals are recorded in the recording studio while the singer listens to the playback via headphones . Harrison asked, however, that the song should be recorded in the control room and that the playback should be played aloud through the monitor boxes .

At the end of the recording session on August 9th, the song was mixed in mono . A short time later it was decided not to publish the song. A stereo version was therefore no longer produced in 1968.

publication

Like What's the New Mary Jane , Not Guilty was removed from the White Album and the song was initially unreleased.

In February 1979 Harrison released his tenth solo album George Harrison , for which he re-recorded Not Guilty . On this version Harrison plays the acoustic guitar , accompanied by Steve Winwood on the Fender Rhodes piano .

In 1985 the album Sessions was supposed to be released, which would have contained a number of unreleased Beatles songs. For this album, Geoff Emerick made a first stereo version of Not Guilty in 1984 , but it was cut by around a minute. The album Sessions was not released.

The Beatles version of Not Guilty was only released in October 1996 as part of the Anthology series (Track 18 on Anthology 3 , Disc 1). The mix originally intended for the album Sessions from 1984 was used here.

The demo version from May 1968 is included on the 2018 edition of the White Album (part of the so-called Esher Demos ). The unabridged studio version based on Take 102 of the recordings is only on the Super Deluxe Edition of this release.

Cast (1968 version)

(According to Not Guilty in the booklet to the Super Deluxe Edition of the album The Beatles from 2018)

Cast (1979 version)

(after Rohde, p. 148)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Harrison, p. 136
  2. ↑ Not Guilty at www.beatlesbible.com
  3. ↑ The Dark Horse Years, pp. 189-192
  4. ^ The Dark Horse Years, p. 189
  5. ↑ Leng, p. 151
  6. ↑ Harry, p. 286
  7. ^ Mark Lewisohn: The Beatles Recording Sessions , Harmony Book, New York 1989, ISBN 0-517-57066-1 .
  8. ^ The Road To Sessions ( Memento from May 1, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ MacDonald (p. 322) lets Harrison or Lennon play the harpsichord
  10. ↑ Leng (p. 151) and Blaney (p. 375) also mention Andy Newmark (drums).