George Harrison – Got My Mind Set On You (Version II)

The last No.1 by a former Beatle was a song no Beatle wrote, found in a small-town Illinois record shop twenty-four years earlier.

In September 1963, George Harrison walked into a record store on the downtown square in Benton, Illinois, and left with a stack of records. He was visiting his sister Louise, and America had not yet heard of the Beatles. One of the records was a single by a Washington, D.C., singer named James Ray, a song that had gone nowhere on the charts. Harrison held on to it for twenty-four years. In January 1988 it became Got My Mind Set On You, the last record by a former Beatle to top the Billboard Hot 100, and the only US No.1 Harrison ever had with a song he didn’t write.

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The song belonged to Rudy Clark, a New York mailman who wrote on the side. Clark had heard Ray singing in a small club and wrote for him, including Ray’s one real hit, If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody. He later wrote Good Lovin’, a No.1 for the Young Rascals. Ray recorded I’ve Got My Mind Set on You in 1962, with Hutch Davie arranging and producing. The record never charted, and Ray died young, within a few years of making it. Harrison remembered the song anyway, and that memory kept it alive.

He came back to it in 1987, at a point when he needed one. Harrison hadn’t had a No.1 since Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth) in 1973. After Gone Troppo flopped in 1982 he had put most of his energy into HandMade Films, the company behind Time Bandits and Withnail and I. For Cloud Nine, his first album in five years, he worked at FPSHOT, his studio at Friar Park in Henley-on-Thames, co-producing with Jeff Lynne. Jim Keltner was on drums, working out a pattern on the studio’s E-mu Drumulator. Gary Wright noticed the swinging beat sounded like the old James Ray record, which surprised Harrison, who couldn’t believe anyone else remembered it. Lynne played bass and keyboards, Jim Horn added saxophone, and Ray Cooper played percussion. Richard Dodd and John Etchells engineered.

Twenty-four years from the record shop

Dark Horse Records released the single in the US on October 3, 1987, as 7-28178, and in Britain on October 12, as W8178, with Lay His Head on the B-side. Britain took it to No.2 and kept it there for four weeks. America took longer. The Billboard Hot 100 put it at No.1 on the chart dated January 16, 1988, for a single week. It also topped the Adult Contemporary chart and Cash Box, and went to No.1 in Canada, Ireland and Australia. The single ended a three-way tie among Harrison, John Lennon and Ringo Starr, each of whom had two solo No.1s until then. “Weird Al” Yankovic answered it within the year with (This Song’s Just) Six Words Long, a parody of how repetitive the lyric is.

Warner Bros. got two videos for the song. The first, set in an amusement arcade, features a young Alexis Denisof trying to impress a girl who is watching Harrison’s band in a hand-cranked viewer. This is the second video, labeled Version II on the official channel. Gary Weis directed it at GMT Studios in the Los Angeles area, with Kathryn Ireland producing for the Pier Group and Sid Bartholomew designing the set. Weis took his cue from Evil Dead II. Harrison sits in an armchair in a wood-paneled study and plays a blond Telecaster with a straight face, while the room comes alive around him: a stuffed squirrel, a suit of armor, mounted stag and warthog heads, a chainsaw. None of it was digital. “Those effects were created very manually,” Weis said: crew members pulled wires to move each object in time with the music.

The instrumental break holds the clip’s best joke. A dance double in Harrison’s clothes jumps out of the armchair, dances, and does a backflip. Weis’s first edit sold it as Harrison. Harrison saw the cut and asked for a change, because he didn’t want viewers believing he could do that. Weis re-cut it so the switch to the double is obvious, and the joke became one the audience is in on. Plenty of people still took it as Harrison. “Most people think it’s actually me, and it cracks me up,” he said in 1988. That year MTV nominated the clip for Best Male Video, and the arcade version picked up two nominations of its own.

The video and the record are funny for the same reason. Harrison could have made his return on his own reputation, and instead he gave the song to a 1962 flop he’d bought on a holiday, and he gave the video’s showpiece moment to a stuntman, with the switch left for everyone to see. Both choices came from someone who had stopped caring how a Beatle was supposed to look. The comeback worked because he came back as a fan. The last former Beatle to reach No.1 got there with a song by a mailman and a singer who never charted with it, because a visitor in a small Illinois record shop had remembered it for twenty-four years.