#All he knows how to play on his banjo is Wonderwall

[cinnamonbirdanon]

It’s Jackson, my bard doggo! I still gotta come up with stats and his species, but hey. Here he is!!

[harrisonarchive]

(First four images) At the Wonderwall Music sessions: George Harrison with with Vinayek Vora, Shambhu Das, unknown, and Rijram Desad at HMV Studio in Mumbai, India, January 1968. (Last image) George (accompanied by Alexis "Magic Alex" Mardas) signing autographs at the airport prior to his departure, 18 January 1968 (photo courtesy of The Hindu Archives).

“I remember doing it [the film music for Wonderwall] in London at the end of 1967, and then went to Bombay and recorded part of it in a studio there. There was this guy who directed the movie, Wonderwall, called Joe Massot. I don’t know where I met him, but he said he wanted me to do the music to this movie - which didn’t come out until 1969. I said, ‘I don’t know; I haven’t got a guess of how to write music for a movie.’ He said, ‘Aw, we’ve got no budget for the music anyway, so whatever you give me, I’ll have it!’ [...] It gave me a great opportunity. I was getting so into Indian music then that I decided to use the assignment partly as an excuse for a musical anthology to help spread it.” - George Harrison, Musician, November 1987

Did you know...? Near the end of the song “Save The World” on the 1981 album “Somewhere in England,” there is a snippet of Wonderwall Music’s “Crying”: “At the end, I just wanted to let the whole song go out with something sad, to touch that nerve and maybe make you think, ‘Ohhh shit.’ I thought of that instrument I used on Wonderwall Music called the thar-shanhai, which means ‘string’ shanhai. It’s like a one-string fiddle, a bowed instrument with the sympathetic strings resting over a stretched skin, so it has that hollow, echoey resonance, a wailing, crying sound.” - George Harrison, Musician, November 1987 (x)

“So that he’d have something to start with George got his musicians to play one of several thousand alternative ragas. Then he’d change it bit by bit until he had them playing what he wanted. Sometimes he got them doing things they’d never done before and they were delighted. There are no harmonies in Indian music but at one session George got three sitars playing harmonies together and it worked marvellously! One thing we loved about the EMI Bombay studios. They kept a gang of full-time musicians on call. When they were not being used these men would just sit in their own special room playing cards. Sometimes a set-up like this would be very welcome in London. You never know the moment you’re going to want extra musicians at a Beatles’ session! All these studio men were very versatile. They could play any number of instruments – harmonium, banjo, drums, piano – and play them all exceptionally well. Usually George worked with a trio or quartet. A typical line-up might be a sur-bahar (like a bass sitar), a sitar and a santoor (a table harp played with sticks). Or a sitar plus a dilruba (the bowed instrument George used for ‘Within You, Without You’) and a thar-shenhai (a bowed instrument which has a sort of flute attached to amplify the music).” - Mal Evans, The Beatles Book, March 1968 (x)

“It was fantastic really [in India]. The studio is on top of the offices but there’s no sound-proofing. So if you listen closely to some of the Indian tracks on the LP you can hear taxis going by. Every time the offices knocked off at 5.30 we had to stop recording because you could just hear everybody stomping down the steps. They only had a big EMI mono machine. I mixed everything as we did it there, and that was nice enough because you get spoiled working eight and sixteen tracks.” - George Harrison, CD reissue sleeve notes (x)

"Probably the most striking track on Wonderwall Music in terms of future development is 'Dream Scene.’ Opening with swathes of backwards sitar, it drifts into beautiful Indian vocals, apparently hailing from some vintage recording of playback singers. After this interlude, the track gets seriously avant-garde. Discordant piano, slowed down voices and tape loops of sound effects create a disturbing sound melange, which surprisingly presages The Beatles’ free-for-all stoned-athon 'What’s The New Mary Jane’, recorded several months later for the 'White Album’. George as the most way-out of the Fab Four? Here’s the proof.” - Martin O'Gorman, The British Beatles Fan Club (x)

“George made good use of his time [at HMV Studio in Mumbai, India], wrapping up early enough to make additional recordings of other ragas for possible Beatle use – two of which appear as bonus tracks on the CD reissue, ‘Almost Shankara’ and another, which would become ‘The Inner Light.’ Recorded on January 12 [1968] over four takes (with a fifth the following day), the recording features (along with likely players): a harmonium (Desad), taar-shehnai (Vora), sitar (Das), a dholak (a two-headed drum, like the pakavaj) (Desad or Ghosh), flute (S.R. Kenkare, Hari Prasad Chaurasia), and a bul-bul tarang (player unknown, but perhaps Das or Bhattacharya). The latter is the song’s signature plucked string instrument, played by depressing keys, like on a table harp, and picking strings with the other. Again, as Bhaskar Menon described, one can clearly hear George communicating with the musicians as only musicians do, gently guiding them with his ideas.” - Matt Hurwitz, uDiscover Music (x)

“We worked closely on the soundtrack for his album Wonderwall. I organized the Indian musicians and played sitar. I now realize that that album was one of the origins of Indian jazz fusion. I have performed with a number of local jazz musicians in this style since 2005. I suppose I owe it to George for sparking my interest. Otherwise, I see myself mostly as a teacher and ambassador of Indian classical music in Canada. I believe that is why guru Ravi Shankar sent me here.” - Shambhu Das, National Post, 15 November 2010 (x)

[bustyandauberonvstheworld]

High School AU is good, but consider.... College AU

Auberon: Business Major™; too good for this place; wearing a blazer literally right now; flips through frat houses like they're the Sears catalog; his daddy has a building named after him and he slips B-Dubs a $50 every month to spray-paint dicks on it

Busty: Got into school on a basketball scholarship but now only wants to play rugby; relationship status: the entire ladies' rugby team; decided to major in earth sciences and is about to be Surprised; quit her sorority because she realized they would all be sisters (and dating your sister is a big no-no)

Banjo: Pre-med senior who has seen (and been exhausted by) it all; is the guy who plays Wonderwall on the quad but instead his sad country music songs give people depression (but like the cool depression where you create works of art and shit)

Bilgewatter: Is the ultimate super-senior; has been in school for like nine years and plans to never leave (no one knows what his degrees are in); your neighborhood weed dealer; keep an eye on your electronics if he lets himself into your dorm room (and he will)

Wren: Philosophy major; gets Scooby-Doo knock-knees if anyone asks him how he expects to get a job with that; Certified Rec Center Yoga Instructor; one time B-dubs told him that Unelma Hall was haunted and he literally moved dorms; buys tea from the C-store

Jack: Lowkey terrifying theater kid, 1 of 2; has taken just enough economics and religion classes to be dangerous; if he offers to get you in on Bitcoin or something, run away as fast as possible; 9 times out of 10 is the asshole playing the dorm piano at 3 AM

Cosima: Scary theater kid part 2; gets dickweeds expelled by hacking into Blackboard and submitting badly plagiarized essays for their midterms (or straight-up planting cocaine in their dorm rooms); made a dark pact with an ancient and feared biology professor; why the FUCK isn't Dance a major

Kaelynn: WILL be the dude yelling at you across campus; had an internship at a wolf sanctuary over the summer and it changed her life; crashes every party she's ever been invited to and yet the invitations keep coming

Merc: Independent studies major, the minmaxer of college; tried to be an RA but people are just too annoying; that guy who brings his own booze, only drinks his own booze, and won't share; transferred colleges and does nothing but bitch about how the other school "was basically a cult"

Legend tells of another, mythological friend who was a frat bro, but only the wind remembers his name... Bro Mayonnaise something, maybe...