Apple 3410
Producer: George Harrison
Track listing: Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth) / Sue Me, Sue You Blues / The Light That Has Lighted the World / Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long / Who Can See It / Living in the Material World / The Lord Loves the One (That Loves the Lord) / Be Here Now / Try Some, Buy Some / The Day the World Gets ‘Round / That Is All
June 23, 1973
5 weeks
With All Things Must Pass, George Harrison and Phil Spector “tended to produce everything to the max, with strings, voices, and horns,” says Harrison. “For Living in the Material World I felt people had already heard that type of album, so what I did was reduce it down to something more simple.”
For the album, Harrison cut the cast of guest players considerably, but still called on the talents of a number of noted musicians, including keyboardists Nicky Hopkins and Gary Wright, bassist Klaus Voorman, and drummers Jim Keltner and Ringo Starr. The album’s title track featured Harrison returning to his Eastern musical influences. “I had Zakir Hussein playing tabla on the bridge,” he says.
Phil Spector was once again slated to co-produce with Harrison, as he did on All Things Must Pass, but this time he had trouble making the sessions. In the end, Spector’s involvement on Living in the Material World was limited to a co-producer credit on “Try Some, Buy Some.” Says Harrison, “At that point in time I was just chanting, ‘Hare Krishna’ all the time, and Phil and a couple of musicians that wanted to take drugs were in the toilet hiding from me, because I was so straight.”
Rather than return to Abbey Road Studios, Harrison opted to record Living in the Material World at the Apple Studio located at 3 Saville Row in London. “We [The Beatles] recorded some of Let It Be in there and up on the roof, but the studio was a problem and they had to change a lot of the equipment. Living in the Material World was one of the first things recorded there after the studio had been changed around a bit,” Harrison says.
Yet the problems in the studio persisted during the Living in the Material World sessions. “It turned out the control room was bass-light,” Harrison says. “So we kept adding low end to everything and not any highs. When I played it, it was really woolly, it sounded like there was about 18 sheets of cotton wool in front of the speakers. I got quite depressed, because right around that time Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book came out and it sounded so brilliant and my record sounded so dull.”
Harrison temporarily abandoned Living in the Material World while he went to work on the benefit concerts for Bangladesh, which featured Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, and Ravi Shankar. The three-album The Concert for Bangladesh, which featured live recordings from the benefit, peaked at number two in early 1972.
When Harrison went back to work on Living in the Material World, he decided to have the album remastered for the European and American release “For the one in Europe, I just let the bloke in Apple Studio master it,” says Harrison. “I didn’t give him any instructions. I just said, ‘Do what you can.'” For the American remastering, Harrison turned to Doug Sax. “He was the hot guy at the time,” Harrison says. “I spent a long time with him and we mastered the shit out of that record. But in retrospect, I think we went over the top, we actually changed the mix a little. For the English version, they cleaned it up a bit and it was fine.”
The album opener, “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth),” went on to become Harrison’s second Number One single on June 30, 1973, a week after Living in the Material World became Harrison’s second chart-topping solo album. Ironically, in order to reach the summit a second time, Harrison had to knock Red Rose Speedway, by his former bandmate Paul McCartney, from the Number One position.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of June 23, 1973
1. Living in the Material World, George Harrison
2. Red Rose Speedway, Paul McCartney & Wings
3. Houses of the Holy, Led Zeppelin
4. There Goes Rhymin’, Simon Paul Simon
5. The Beatles/1967-1970, The Beatles