Recording: Electronic Sound by George Harrison

While producing sessions for Jackie Lomax’s debut album Is This What You Want in Los Angeles, George Harrison was introduced to synthesizer player Bernie Krause.

Harrison met Krause on 11 November 1968. Krause had been hired to perform his Moog III on five of Lomax’s songs at Sound Records Studio in Los Angeles.

Harrison was intrigued by the early synthesizer, and after the session ended asked him to demonstrated its range of sounds. Krause duly remained in the studio with Harrison into the early hours of 12 November.

Krause’s demonstration was recorded, and was later edited down to a 25-minute piece featuring two tracks of Moog sounds. The recording was subsequently released by Harrison as ‘No Time Or Space’ on his second solo album Electronic Sound.

We did the [Lomax] session, it was very normal, and we finished in the wee hours of the next morning. Harrison asked me to stick around and show him some more things on the synthesizer. Paul [Beaver] and I were just preparing some new material for our second Warner Brothers album, and I was showing Harrison some of the patches and ways in which we were thinking of doing our work. What I didn’t realise, because it was late and I was tired and I wasn’t paying attention, was that he had asked the engineer to record the session that I was demonstrating. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
Bernie Krause
Behind The Locked Door, Graeme Thomson

Krause demanded that his name be taken off the record, claiming that the recording was made without his knowledge or consent, and was issued without due acknowledgement. His name had originally featured on the cover of Electronic Sound, but was painted over at Krause’s insistence. The album did, however, carry the words “Assisted by Bernie Krause”.

I wrote to Apple and said, ‘Take my name off it, I don’t want to be on it.’ I wasn’t litigious, I just let it go, but it was my stuff. It’s an incredible story, but it’s incredible too about [him plagiarising] ‘My Sweet Lord’ – and Randy Newman has stories too. I had no control over any of it. I didn’t know it was being recorded, I didn’t want it out, and I felt very badly that he had to do that. I guess spirituality comes to different people in different ways. An expression of his seemed to be, ‘Trust me, I’m a Beatle’.
Bernie Krause
Behind The Locked Door, Graeme Thomson
Last updated: 25 August 2023
George Harrison produces Is This What You Want? by Jackie Lomax
George Harrison appears on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
Also on this day...

Want more? Visit the Beatles history section.

Latest Comments

  1. BlueJJ Thursday 4 February 2021

Leave a Reply