30 January 1971
Ireland’s first solo Beatle number one is also our first chart-top encounter with copyright controversy. Since then we’ve had loads of hugely entertaining courtroom action: singer shenanigans with ‘Ride On Time’ and ‘Return To Innocence’; riff-based rifts with ‘Ice Ice Baby’ and ‘I’ll Be Missing You’; vibes-based karmic retribution for ‘Blurred Lines’. I love this stuff.
In the case of ‘My Sweet Lord’, George Harrison eventually settled privately with the owners of ‘She’s So Fine’—its writer Ronnie Mack having died a few months after The Chiffons topped the US charts with it in 1963—and it’s still only George’s name on the writing credits today. Still, the legacy of ‘My Sweet Lord’ is pretty much as a poster-child for When Pop And Rock Go To Court.
Alright, Matlock, says you: what if we neither know nor care about the legal hullabaloo? Well, ‘My Sweet Lord’ is certainly an audiophile’s record: it sounds rich and sumptuous. The personnel here are as galáctico as you’d expect from a Beatle solo flex. With George on lead guitar, among the acoustic strummers in the supporting cast are Eric Clapton and Peter Frampton. Gary Brooker of Procul Harum is on piano, with Hamburg-era Beatle-friend Klaus Voormann of Manfred Mann and Revolver cover art on bass. Most impressively of all, the drummer here is none other than Ringo, the coolest Beatle.
As a song, though, apart from the brief mid-section winding stair up through the key change ‘My Sweet Lord’ is fairly bland and slight ’70s soft rock. Legal notoriety, Beatle fame and studio extravagance certainly go a long way here. But hey: where I enjoy all those music-biz court cases, maybe you get your jollies from jamboree singalongs and folk mass.
