page_title: Dark Horse (George Harrison album)
section_title: November 1973 backing tracks
hierarchical_section_title: Dark Horse (George Harrison album) / Production / November 1973 backing tracks
caption_attribution_description: Dark Horse Records ad.
context_page_description: Dark Horse is the fifth studio album by English rock musician George Harrison, released on Apple Records in December 1974 as the follow-up to Living in the Material World. Although keenly anticipated on release, Dark Horse is associated with the controversial North American tour that Harrison staged with Indian classical musician Ravi Shankar in November and December that year. This was the first US tour by a member of the Beatles since 1966, and the public's nostalgia for the band, together with Harrison contracting laryngitis during rehearsals and choosing to feature Shankar so heavily in the program, resulted in scathing concert reviews from some influential music critics.
  The Dark Horse album was written and recorded during an extended period of upheaval in Harrison's personal life, when he dedicated much of his energies to business issues such as setting up Dark Horse Records. Author Simon Leng refers to the album as "a musical soap opera, cataloguing rock-life antics, marital strife, lost friendships, and self-doubt", due to its focus on Harrison's split with first wife Pattie Boyd and his temporary withdrawal from the spiritual certainties of his previous work.
context_section_description: Recording for Dark Horse began in November 1973, midway through the extended sessions for The Place I Love, at Harrison's 16-track home studio, FPSHOT (short for Friar Park Studios, Henley-on-Thames). As on Living in the Material World, Harrison produced the sessions himself and Phil McDonald again served as recording engineer. Using the same line-up of musicians as on Material World – Ringo Starr, Jim Keltner, Klaus Voormann, and Gary Wright and Nicky Hopkins alternating on keyboards – Harrison taped basic tracks for his hoped-for Christmas/New Year "classic", "Ding Dong, Ding Dong", an early version of "Dark Horse", and "So Sad". Harrison had originally given the latter song to near-neighbour Alvin Lee to record, in August, and had guested on the session along with Ron Wood. Harrison, Lee and Wood all subsequently added lead-guitar parts to "Ding Dong", in the first of Harrison's attempts to build up the song's layers of instrumentation, and so re-create his former collaborator Phil Spector's celebrated Wall of Sound. This overdubbing session took place sometime after Harrison's return from India in early March 1974, judging by the pre-overdubbed version of "Ding Dong" that Harrison included on a tape for David Geffen shortly before leaving. "So Sad" would similarly receive a significant amount of overdubbing, creating a "harrowing encounter", as Harrison stated his "great despair" at the end of his relationship with Boyd.
caption: Trade ad for Dark Horse Records, August 1974
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