Crackerbox Palace (1977)

Performer: George Harrison                                 Writer: George Harrison
Highest US Chart Position: #19                            Label: Dark Horse Records
Musicians: George Harrison, Richard Tee, Tom Scott, Willie Weeks and Alvin Taylor

During the seventies I was almost completely unconscious of the Beatles in any way that really mattered. As a little kid I vividly remembered watching the Beatles’ cartoon show, and of course there were Lennon and McCartney songs that could be occasionally heard on the radio. One of my best friends and I even worked out “Hey Jude” on our guitars. But in terms of really understanding who they were and what their contribution to music had been--let alone all of their actual music--that didn’t happen until I was out of high school and joined my first band in 1981. And since I wasn’t really conscious of pop music in general until after 1973, the early hits by the individual members of The Beatles are a bit murky in my memory as well. “Crackerbox Palace,” then, is a standout song for me because it was the first time in my memory that George Harrison emerged from the ether as a real solo artist in my mind. It also came out during a very memorable musical winter for me that marked the midpoint in my journey through high school. The song was off of the album Thirty Three & 1/3, Harrison's fifth album after leaving the Fab Four. It entered the charts at the end of January at the number sixty-six spot and slowly climbed the charts for another two months, peaking at number nineteen at the end of March.

The song begins with a snare drum fill that goes into a signature melodic slide guitar intro. Beneath the guitar is the baritone sax of Tom Scott playing a countermelody, Emil Richards on the marimbas, and the syncopated rhythm of the snare and hi-hats of Alvin Taylor’s drums. The stop-and-go sort of rhythm of Taylor’s continues as the verse starts, and in tandem with the vocals throughout the verse is a nice, hollow-sounding slide guitar part by Harrison. It’s not until the chorus that the drums begin to play a straight-ahead rhythm and the effects-laden electric piano comes to the fore as the only melodic instrument. At the end of the vocals on the chorus the electric piano holds, going in and out of phase, while an acoustic guitar strums beneath the vocals, and then the band repeats part of the chorus with the same hold and the slide guitar playing the vocal part. This leads into the second verse and the rest of the song is essentially the same. Tom Scott begins his solo on the lyricon by playing the melody of the verse before improvising the last couple of bars. Then this is followed by another chorus-verse-chorus, and finally an extended chorus where the marimbas are pushed up in the mix, followed by an actual ending on the keyboards rather than a fadeout.

As The Beatles had done in the late sixties, Harrison was into making promotional films for his singles long before MTV had even been thought of. The film was produced by one of Harrison’s good friends, Eric Idle of Monty Python fame, and Idle brought along a lot of his friends to help out. But it made the song appear as if it was about a lunatic asylum, when in fact it had nothing to do with that. The manager of the late British comedian Lord Buckley had invited Harrison out to Buckley’s home in Los Angeles, which had been called the Crackerbox Palace. Harrison wrote down the name and thought it might make an interesting title for a song. The actual lyrics are a bit obscure, but what I like to think is that they are a reference to Harrison’s lifelong enjoyment of comedy, and that being born into Buckley’s palace is a metaphor for that. The B-side of the disc is the minimalist “Learning How to Love You,” a rather tuneless affair that meanders around without ever finding anything catchy to hold on to. For me, “Crackerbox Palace” will always remain my true introduction to George Harrison as an individual artist, as well as one of my favorite songs that winter of 1977.