That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.
George Harrison seemed an artist reborn upon the release of “Got My Mind Set On You” in 1987, in a way that compared with Paul Simon on “You Can Call Me Al” the previous year. No sad relic here of a legendary 1960s act with fading powers, whose days of selling gazillions of records were a long, long, long time past. No whiff of recent flop albums, or flop movies. Instead, a pop star wielding an insanely upbeat and wonderfully infectious pop nugget, reveling in an MTV-conquering video, and quite rightly storming up the singles charts in a style we’d come to associate with Madonna, Whitney Houston, and the Pet Shop Boys.
Caught up in the fun of it all, there was no reason to believe the track was anything other than a Harrison original, either, being exactly the kind of catchy rock ‘n’ roll number someone who’d been in the Beatles would come up with (right?). Only with a big 1980s pop sound: big drums, big horns, and big backing vocals. Besides, no other version of the song ever got played on the radio.
But the truth was this: Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set On You” was a cover. And a cover very much in the vein of early Beatles cuts “Please Mr. Postman,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Music,” and more specifically the George-fronted “Devil in Her Heart,” and “Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby.” It was a cover that had everything to do with the American soul, R&B, and rock ’n’ roll that first inspired Harrison as the lead guitarist/singer in what would become the toppermost band in the world. It’s just that the original was by an artist a lot more unsung than the Marvelettes, Chuck Berry, the Donays, and Carl Perkins.
Essential to Harrison’s 1980s revitalization, then, on his biggest solo single since “My Sweet Lord” in 1970, was a mighty sayonara! to years of tribute and soundtrack doldrums and a nostalgic reconnection with an obscure and sorrowful 1962 non-hit by an unsuccessful and largely unknown black soul singer by the name of James Ray. Unlikely, we know! So it’s high time we offered more in the way of explanation. Specifically, the illumination of several key moments.
February 1962: Harrison discovers Ray. He’s 19 years old. He’s a pre-record-deal, pre-Beatlemania and mostly pre-fame Beatle. He’s playing unsanitary Liverpool club The Cavern and listening to bandmate Paul McCartney rave about a US single he’s heard at NEMS Record Shop called “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody,” on New York independent label Caprice. He’s part of a Liverpool beat group desperate to stand out from the other Liverpool beat groups, which is why he’s also learning to play this sole Ray hit: a waltz in R&B style! – with the unheard-of combination of harmonica, strings, and tuba.
September 1963: Harrison discovers the fateful song. He’s twenty years old. He’s visiting his sister in the small mining town of Benton, Illinois, USA, while on a break from recording sessions for the Beatles’ second album at Abbey Road, London. He’s famous back home with “She Loves You” rocketing up the singles chart, but here he’s a sorry-looking kid in brown sandals and socks, in seemingly desperate need of a haircut. He’s playing Hank Williams tunes with local group The Four Vests. He’s visiting drive-ins, and radio stations. He’s buying a Rickenbacker 425 from Fenton’s Music Store in Mount Vernon. And he’s buying Booker T and the MGs’ Green Onions from a local record store. That and the eponymous 1962 debut LP by James Ray with the Hutch Davie Orchestra & Chorus, featuring “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody” and “I’ve Got My Mind Set On You – Pt. I Pt. II.”
February 1964: Harrison absorbs the song. He’s going on 21. He’s listening to his Ray album on repeat with the other Beatles during their first tour of the States, in the wake of their historic Ed Sullivan Show appearance and first US #1 with “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” He’s reading liner notes that tell him he’s discovering the “true meaning of the word Soul,” while “Fool,” sung by bandmate John Lennon, is still prominent in the group’s setlist. He’s harboring a particular interest in “Mind” — like “Fool,” composed by prolific songwriter Rudy Clark. It isn’t the hit sound “Fool” is, but he’s taken by the “strangeness” of its earworm chorus, its Caribbean rhythm, its “screechy girl singers” and old-fashioned, jazzy arrangement (none of which found their way onto a Caprice single, due to the label having folded in 1963).
January 1987: Harrison gets set to cover the song. He turns 44 in a month. He’s a former Beatle. He’s ready to record his first album in five years at his home studio at Friar Park in Henley-on-Thames. He’s keen to put paid to recent involvement in the huge turkey of a Madonna/Sean Penn movie that was Shanghai Surprise, for which he sang (unreleased) songs with such lines as “I’d like to trust you but I’ve broken my rickshaw.” And he’s keen to rekindle his early passion for music, with the help of producer Jeff Lynne, saxophonist Jim Horn, maracas-ist (?) Ray Cooper, and drummer Jim Keltner, who’s the one, in fact, to spark the famous cover by spontaneously playing a rhythm reminiscent of the long-lost Ray track.
October 1987: Harrison releases “Got My Mind Set On You.” He’s sitting with a Fender Telecaster in the study of a gothic mansion (à la Friar Park), miming to a sprightlier and catchier version of “I’ve Got My Mind Set On You,” with a snappier title, fewer lyrics, and superior production worthy of ELO man Lynne. He’s performing the track as furniture and ornate paraphernalia come to life around him and start dancing, including a caged parrot, a bear-skin rug, mounted swords, a suit of armor, a grandfather clock, and a mounted stag head, with a taxidermied squirrel performing the sax solo on a tobacco pipe. He’s backflipping off his chair and throwing himself into an acrobatic dance routine (okay, that might not actually be him), while basically being the star of a totally fun, Evil Dead II-inspired video, tailor-made for thrill-seeking MTV viewers. He’s guaranteed, in other words, a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic, as the perfect promotional tool for the really rather fine Cloud Nine album.
January 1988: Harrison scores a chart-topper. He’s at #1 in the US with “Got My Mind Set On You,” after reaching #2 in the UK the previous November (held off by big-haired, soft-rock balladeers T’Pau, with “China in Your Hand”). He’s got another retro single, “When We Was Fab,” ready to go, and he’s succeeded in making the James Ray tune his own, while booting the heavily dated original even further into obscurity.
So that’s how it happened. Moments like these. But Harrison didn’t mean to usurp the memory of the James Ray original. Not exactly.
Later, in fact, the former Beatle could be seen to have done much to restore the legacy of the “lost Soul Man” who tragically died from a drug overdose in 1964, aged just 22. When McCartney discussed the Beatles’ adoption of “oddball song” “If You Want To Make A Fool of Somebody” with Rick Rubin in the McCartney 3, 2, 1 documentary in July 2021, he remarked: “George had the album–the James Ray album–and he took–much later–”Got My Mind Set On You”…that was a James Ray–off that album.” Plus, when Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright released the horror movie Last Night in Soho in October 2021, he featured Ray on the soundtrack, stating: “I like songs that become famous in a different realm. Like we use “Got My Mind Set On You,” the original by James Ray, which most people know as the George Harrison cover.”
Forget Shanghai Surprise, certainly, but let’s not forget James Ray.
