Oakland's Vinyl Vault - Wonderwall Music

Today we dip into the vinyl vault and pull out an album that has some fun trivia attached to it: it was the first album to be released by Apple Records, and it was the first official solo album by a member of the Beatles. It is also one of the few albums I own that was given to me as a present (thanks Justin!).

It's Wonderwall Music by George Harrison!

Release date: November 1, 1968

Although this album is by George Harrison, he isn't on it, he just wrote and produced it.  In case you can't tell, this is actually a soundtrack for the movie Wonderwall, which, if you're interested in watching it, is available on Youtube.  Like most movie scores, it's almost entirely instrumental.

George Harrison had never written a soundtrack for a movie before, and I think that is somewhat obvious when you watch the movie.  I also wonder(wall) if the people who asked George Harrison to do the soundtrack realized that they were going to get a lot of Indian music out of the deal, because there's nothing particularly Indian about the movie.

But enough about the movie, I'm here to talk about the music, independent from anything else. This album was made while George Harrison was a member of the Beatles, but there's nothing Beatle-ish about it. As I mentioned before, a lot of it is very Indian sounding, and in fact a lot of the album was recorded in India. While I think it fails as a movie soundtrack, it does fairly well for an instrumental album. I think George does a good job of using traditional Indian instruments to play more western music. He also mixes in some non-Indian numbers that were recorded back in England. The end result is fairly interesting and pretty easy on the ears.

Rating: Four thumbs up - certainly not a must-have in the catalog, but a nice addition and a historic one to boot. If you're a Harrison fan, and you can find it, I would recommend getting it.

Now it just wouldn't be a George Harrison solo album without an appearance by Eric Clapton, and this album doesn't disappoint (though he is credited as Eddie Clayton). Here's Clapton on Ski-ing:



Pat is crazy.