

In that dark-horse way, people wouldn’t expect you to be a songwriter or be spiritual or funny, because you’re a dark horse. If you looked at him onstage, he didn’t physically jump around and express himself like that. “It’s interesting considering he was so out there. “George always considered himself to be a dark horse - under the radar,” she says. So to me, dark horse is the one not expected to win but who wins.”įor Olivia, the connection was clear. “My dad worked at a racetrack all his life. “We were sitting there one evening and George asked me, ‘What does dark horse mean to you?’” Keltner says. The two were hanging out in the downstairs breakfast room that was the social hub of the house. In 1973, drummer Jim Keltner, who remained a close friend of Harrison right up until his death in 2001 from lung cancer, paid a visit to Friar Park, Harrison’s private estate outside London. With the label now revived by his son Dhani - who has reactivated Dark Horse’s famous logo and is digging into its long-unavailable back catalog, with plenty of unreleased material due to be issued in the coming years - it’s worth looking back on an often-forgotten chapter in the life of a Beatle, the free-wheeling music business era that led to Dark Horse, and the lessons learned when an artist takes the business plunge. But his experience running a company, and touring to promote himself during that time, would reverberate for the rest of his career, in ways both positive and less so. Dark Horse began with the best intentions and was a testament to Harrison’s wide-ranging tastes.

#Best george harrison albums to own how to#
Many current rock and hip-hop artist-entrepreneurs have determined how to own, run, and distribute their own labels, but in the early years of such undertakings, everyone - especially the musicians who fronted the companies - was learning as they went along. “You got to the end of that and Apple had split up, and he said, ‘I want to do something different.’ It was a new day and a fresh start.”

“There was some time and distance between whatever they went through with the breakup of the Beatles,” says Olivia, who met Harrison during this time. During the company’s first few years, Harrison released records in genres few would have ever associated with the Beatles: suave disco, strummy folk rock, funky R&B, Seventies boogie rock, even proto-yacht rock. Dark Horse wasn’t simply one of the earliest artist-headed labels - along with labels started by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jefferson Airplane - but one of the most eclectic. The list of contemporary musicians with their own imprints is vast and includes Drake, the Weeknd, Dan Auerbach, Meek Mill, Jack White, and Kanye West.
