#james ray

'Nice one by James Ray who sadly died not long after making this record.'

“In 1963, the year before the Beatles first came to America, I took a trip to St. Louis to visit my sister, how was living there at the time. The whole Beatlemania thing had really begun in the U.K., and we’d had three or four hit singles. So while visiting my sister I went around to all the music shops looking for new singles and especially albums that were really hard to find in Liverpool. And that’s where I finally found the James Ray album [If You’re Gonna Make A Fool of Somebody]. There were a couple of good tracks on it, and one that I really liked was a song called ‘Got My Mind Set On You.’ It would have been great for the Beatles to cover, except it wasn’t really rock and roll; it was trying to rock, but it sounded like it was produced by somebody who was basically a jazz musician — it had all these squawky horns and stuff. But the song stuck in my mind. Years later, in 1987, when I was working with Jeff Lynne on the Cloud Nine album, I finally decided to try and put more of a rock edge on the song. It came together very nicely as a rocker. In fact, it went all the way to No. 1 on the charts. And it only took 25 years.” - George Harrison, Guitar World, 1992 “I’d like to thank Rudy Clark, who was the guy who actually wrote it [‘Got My Mind Set On You’] years ago and nobody actually noticed it at that time. It was lodged at the back of my brain, and I know I did the sort of pop version of it, Rudy, but if you’re listening, I love it, and we chopped that bit out the middle that we didn’t like and got rid of the screaming girls, but it was a great song, actually, it was a great song.” - George Harrison, Rockline, February 1988 “[‘Got My Mind Set On You,’ recorded by James Ray, was] written by this guy who discovered James Ray, a former mailman named Rudy Clark. […] Jim Keltner got this drum pattern going one day that was a cross between swing and rock. Gary Wright turned around and said, ‘Hey! Doesn’t that remind you of that song, ‘Got My Mind Set On You?’ [laughter] I was so surprised that anybody else had ever heard that tune!” - George Harrison, Musician, November 1987 “My boy [Dhani], while we were recording it [Got My Mind Set On You], he kept saying, 'That’s the single.'” - George Harrison, In The Studio With Redbeard, 1987

I am somewhat glad to say I have never heard of any of this, and am somewhat sorry that I looked up this Jamesgetspolitical creature. At first glance I thought he was a Babylon Bee post: the world's whiteguy-iest white guy, posturing with a Palestinian flag and the autobiography of Malcolm X. Turns out if someone puts a little effort into leftwashing, they can indulge in all the narcissistic and sadistic depths of internet trolling but still get upvotes for it, just as surely as someone can hide their misogyny and sexual harassment behind loudly saying "Karen" every now and then.

Morgan Brittany as Vivien Leigh

I was reading Andrew Loog Oldham’s book Rolling Stoned, and he mentioned this great RnB tune as a song that the Stones might possibly have recorded, except that Freddie and the Dreamers beat them to it (their version is dreadful).  James Ray’s recording is pretty damn good, but I can sort of imagine what the Stones would have done with it.

Not only was it the last US No. 1 hit by Harrison, but the last from any of the ex-Beatles. When the song hit No. 1, it broke a three-way tie between Harrison, John Lennon, and Ringo Starr, all of whom had two No. 1 hit singles as solo artists (Paul McCartney has had ten, but most were with his band Wings or other artists such as Michael Jackson). It also happened to be the No. 1 single in the US the week immediately preceding the induction of The Beatles into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, making Harrison one of the few inductees to have an active single on the US record charts at the time of induction.