This Guitar (Can't Keep From Crying) - Background

Background

George Harrison's stated aim for his North American tour with Indian musician Ravi Shankar, which took place from 2 November to 20 December 1974, was to offer concert-goers "another kind of experience" from the typical mid-1970s rock show. With its blending of Western rock, funk and jazz genres with Indian classical music, author Robert Rodriguez describes the result as a musical form " one day would be called 'world music'". Of the critical reception given to the Harrison–Shankar venture, tour-wide, Rodriguez writes of the "genuine highlights that went mostly unreported", since: "Smaller press outlets without axes to grind tended to review the shows the best, whereas rock establishment coverage, such as Rolling Stone's, tended to spin the tour as something close to an unmitigated disaster ..." Simon Leng, Harrison's musical biographer, describes this phenomenon as "one of the stranger episodes in rock music" and writes: "While the majority of reviews were positive, in some cases ecstatic, the 'given' view of the tour comes from the Rolling Stone articles."

I know we get ten people who say the show sucks every night. we get a hundred who, when we ask them did they like the show, say, "We got much more than we hoped for."

– George Harrison on audience reaction to his early "Dark Horse Tour" concerts, November 1974

On 12 November, music journalist Ben Fong-Torres compiled a radio report for the Rolling Stone News Service, syndicated throughout the United States, in which he condemned the tour, and particularly Harrison's refusal to pander to critics' and the public's nostalgia for the Beatles. Fong-Torres followed this with a Rolling Stone feature article on the West Coast portion of the tour, an equally scathing piece titled "Lumbering in the Material World". This feature provided an unreliable picture, Harrison's band leader Tom Scott argued soon after publication, by focusing excessively on the uneven opening concert at Vancouver's Pacific Coliseum. "Everyone's first show has problems with sound and programming," Scott told journalist Michael Gross in Toronto. "In fact, the music is sensational ... and that's what pisses me off about Ben. He travelled with us from Vancouver to LA, long after we'd made all the changes ." Harrison, who had arranged for audience opinion to be canvassed after each of the West Coast shows, refuted Feng-Torres' assertions that the majority of fans were leaving the venues dissatisfied, saying that for nine out of ten people, their expectations had been exceeded.

Following a series of what Leng terms "very well received" performances in America's South, the tour arrived on the East Coast on 10 December. There, the majority of reviews were again unfavourable, as reported by Larry Sloman in a second Rolling Stone feature. "Testimony" on the Harrison–Shankar tour, and a "savagely personal" attack on Harrison, Leng writes, came with the magazine's review for his delayed Dark Horse album, published two weeks after Sloman's piece. Under the heading "Transcendental mediocrity", Rolling Stone critic Jim Miller wrote of the "disastrous album" appearing "in the wake of his disastrous tour" – completing what Harrison biographer Elliot Huntley describes as the magazine's "volte-face" on an artist it had traditionally supported.

Besides Scott and Harrison, tour musicians Jim Horn, Jim Keltner and Andy Newmark have also challenged the descriptions by Rolling Stone and other detractors in the music press, Horn declaring the Harrison–Shankar tour "one of the best I've been on". Concert-goers likewise questioned the accuracy of these negative reports; author Nicholas Schaffner wrote in 1977 that Beatles fanzine Strawberry Fields Forever had been "deluged with letters protesting the nasty reviews". Harrison never completely forgave Rolling Stone for its treatment of the so-called "Dark Horse Tour" and for "edit everything positive out" in its reports, which Fong-Torres later told him had been the case with his article.