~/brianamoah/audio-visual/exhibits/hidden-gems
Outtakes, B-sides, and songs that slipped through the cracks. Nothing here was a hit the first time around. All of it deserves a wall.
centerpiece
George Harrison with Pete Drake
I Live for You, Recorded 1970 · Released 2001
George Harrison's original 1970 vocal and Pete Drake's pedal steel guitar, with new accompaniment added by George and Dhani Harrison in 2000.
Recorded at Abbey Road during the All Things Must Pass sessions and left off the album. First released January 22, 2001, as a bonus track on the 30th-anniversary reissue.
Recorded at Abbey Road in the spring of 1970, “I Live for You” is a devotional song, its you as easily God as a person. It points toward the spiritual life that would come to define Harrison’s later work. He called the take “a bit fruity” and left it unfinished.
Thirty years later he went back to the tape and kept only two things: his own vocal and Pete Drake’s pedal steel. Free of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, the steel carries the song. What survives sounds less like an outtake than a late letter.
side exhibit
Forever, 1964
Pedal steel guitar played through a tube in the mouth, the "talking steel guitar."
Single on Smash Records. Peaked at No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964 and sold over a million copies.
Five years before Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, and six before George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and Ringo Starr’s Beaucoups of Blues, Pete Drake had a hit of his own. “Forever” reached No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964.
It is built on the instrument that made his name. Despite the name, the steel guitar is played flat, its notes slid and bent with a metal bar rather than fretted by fingers. Drake added one more trick, piping the sound through a tube into his mouth so the guitar seems to sing. Rock picked up the talk box in the 1970s, through Peter Frampton, Joe Walsh, and Jeff Beck.
October 8, 1932 · Augusta, Georgia — July 29, 1988 · Nashville, Tennessee
pedal steel guitarist · session musician · producer
February 25, 1943 · Liverpool, England — November 29, 2001 · Los Angeles
singer · songwriter · guitarist · producer
Books for anyone who wants to fall further in.