If there’s anything that George Harrison learned from being The Beatles, it’s the importance of patience. He had the potential to be one of the greatest songwriters of his time, but the amount of time that he had to stir around with his ideas with John Lennon and Paul McCartney must have been torturous for him. So when he launched his solo career, many of his tunes were fully formed, but he admitted that the tune ‘Dark Horse’ could have been a lot better than it turned out.
But by the time Harrison actually started working on the album of the same name, what he really needed was to step away from the business for a while. It’s not like he was getting overexposed or anything, but the amount of work that he had undergone was bound to take its toll on his body.
Outside of becoming the first Beatle to have a hit album on the charts, Harrison also managed to put on the first-ever charity benefit gig by musicians in The Concert for Bangladesh, which involved him getting everyone from Ravi Shankar to Ringo Starr to Bob Dylan under one roof to put on a show.
Living in the Material World worked perfectly fine as the next album of highlights, but Harrison was blindsided when his marriage began falling apart. After discovering his wife Patti Boyd’s affinity for Eric Clapton, the couple separated right before the Dark Horse sessions, and many of the songs were directly about the separation.
The pieces were all there for Harrison to make a quality album, but after getting laryngitis right before he went into the studio, fans are hearing ‘The Quiet Beatle’ in his most weathered vocal tone. That kind of vocal starts to grow on you throughout the record on tracks like ‘Far East Man’, but Harrison thought the title track was far from the masterpiece it should have been.
The version that we know is still great for what it is, but Harrison said that fans are hearing the worse version of what was initially a great piece, saying in his autobiography, I Me Mine, “The pity with ‘Dark Horse’, the song, was that I hadn’t finished the record when I had to go to the States to rehearse the band for the American tour in 1974. So I taught the band the tune, and we recorded it live, and by that time, I had no voice, so it’s a shouting, hoarse version of it, while the other remains unfinished.”
This other version can be found on various reissues of the album, though, including a demo in which Harrison’s voice is completely unphased and sounds as good as it did back in the day. But since time is money, the world had to settle on the one in which it sounds like he had been smoking three packs a day for the last two weeks before he went into the studio.
Harrison eventually included the song in various live performances after the fact, where his voice was completely intact, but there’s a certain magic to the less-refined version of the tune. It’s not him at the top of his game, and you’d have to really argue to prove that it’s a stellar performance, but that kind of husky vocal state is actually more revealing about the sad rock star watching his other half walk out on him.
