I'm a huge fan of anything Beatles related, so I was surprised today to stumble across a mention of a George Harrison solo song I'd never heard of, called "Doing the Bonzo Dog." It turns out to be a really nice song in my opinion, but the only available (bootlegged) version contains just the first minute and a half of it. So I've edited it to make it sound like a complete song.
Harrison was a very big fan of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a zany late 1960s musical group best known for their hit song "I'm the Urban Spaceman." It turns out that there was going to be a reunion/tribute album for this band to be released around 1998 called "It Was a Great Party until Somebody Found a Hammer," but for some reason it never came out. In 1996, Harrison recorded an original song for this project called "Doing the Bonzo Dog."
I don't know why the only bootlegged version is only a minute and a half long, but it clearly is incomplete. After two verses, with a chorus after each one, it fades out right as the song is moving into a bridge section. There's no way to do anything with that bridge, since there's only a couple of seconds of it fading out. So instead I edited the song to repeat the first verse and chorus. Then I repeated the chorus twice more to allow the song to fade out.
Certainly this is not how the rest of the song would have gone, but at least it allows one to appreciate this wonderful lost gem until the full version hopefully becomes available someday. The edited version is a full minute longer, at two and a half minutes.
I've made a compilation of all of Harrison's stray tracks from the 1990s, and I've added this song to that. You can download that here:
https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/05/george-harrison-portrait-of-leg-end.html
Yes, Jim Yoakum here. Me and Legs Larry spearheaded this project in 1996. What you are hearing is part of a sampler of the project for potential investors. The entire song was cut. The project was a Bonzo tribute CD that was to feature famous fans doing Bonzo tunes, but GH decided to cut an original, the CD was to be called It Was a Great Party (Until Somebody Found a Hammer) and had a load of peeps lined up. But then GH died, then project producer Gus Dudgeon died, and it lost its steam.
ReplyDeleteWhat a bummer! It would be really great to have that album released. Is there any chance the full George Harrison song can at least come out somehow?
DeleteAnything is possible but I doubt it. GH told me he "recorded all the time" at FPSHOT (why not it was down the hall) so this track is just one of a zillion. I had the honor (alongwith Dave Stewart) to once help him routine another tune at FPSHOT that's yet to see the day, a quasi-dance thing called "Bring on the Dancing Girls."
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Deletedo you happen to have the unedited version still?
ReplyDeletehttps://we.tl/t-cxv9AeT1Ul Doing The Bonzo Dog ( unedited ) 1 min 44 sec
Deletethank you!!!
DeleteThanks Paul for the Portrait Of A Leg End and Cheer Down posts , great work and much appreciated. Bonzo Dog edit is so cool.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteMy other site just quoted your site...you're an authority now!
ReplyDeleteGH - Pure Harrison (Pear 1915)
Post by 20YearsAgo » Sat Oct 07, 2023 6:15 am
Hmm... I sought this out because it contained one supposedly unbooted song, "Doing the Bonzo Dog."
Well, it's not unbooted. It appeared on Misterclaudel's 2013 release, ALL THOSE YEARS LATER Vol. 2, where it was identified as a 1996 demo with Jim Capaldi. On the Misterclaudel, the track faded out at about the 1:43 mark. Here, the song is artificially extended to about 2:33...
... and matches perfectly with the edit that someone made in 2019 for the "Albums That Should Exist" website. If you have a moment, read through the comments about this track over there. Interesting, to say the least:
hxxps://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2019/01/george-harrison-doing-bonzo-dog-song.html