‘Thanks For The Pepperoni’ was an instrumental recorded for George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album, and released on the Apple Jam disc.
The title was taken from ‘Religions, Inc.’, the final track on the 1959 comedy album The Sick Humor Of Lenny Bruce.
If you listen to Lenny Bruce’s ‘Religions, Inc.’, he goes on about the Pope and things, and then he goes, ‘And thanks for the pepperoni’ [laughs]. I mean, you got random tracks, so it’s like, ‘What can we call it?’ For the jams, I didn’t want to just throw in the cupboard, and yet at the same time it wasn’t part of the record; that’s why I put it on a separate label to go in the package as a kind of bonus.
Billboard, December 2000
‘Thanks For The Pepperoni’ was based on Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, which Harrison had recorded with The Beatles in 1963.
The track was recorded on 1 July 1970 in Studio Three at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, on the same day as ‘Plug Me In’.
‘Thanks For The Pepperoni’ features some of Harrison’s longest recorded guitar solos. He is one of three lead guitarists on the track, trading licks with Dave Mason and Eric Clapton.
According to writer Simon Leng, the solos are as follows: Harrison from the start to 1:30, 3:00-3:17, and 4:47-5:52; Mason from 1:40-3:00; and Clapton from 3:18-4:46. However, there is some overlap in the performances, and the performers occasionally play a handful of lead notes before returning to the background.
Derek and the Dominos formed before the recording of this jam, as their first show together was on the 14th June 1970 at the Lyceum in London. Full details on the band, and this recording session, will be in my Derek and the Dominos biography: http://www.facebook.com/DominosBook
Derek and the Dominos were a blues rock band formed in the spring of 1970 by guitarist and singer Eric Clapton, keyboardist and singer Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon. All four members had previously played together in Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, during and after Clapton’s brief tenure with Blind Faith. Dave Mason supplied additional lead guitar on early studio sessions and played at their first live gig. Another participant at their first session as a band was George Harrison, the recording for whose album All Things Must Pass marked the formation of Derek and the Dominos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_and_the_Dominos
Is it true that Felix Pappalardi sat in on Thanks For The Pepperoni?
I think this is based more on Carol than Johnny B Goode. In the opening George pulls of Chuck’s intro flawlessly, including the bendy bit that Keith Richards could never quite get right in “Hail, Hail, Rock ‘n’ Roll!”