The first sound an audience heard at George Harrison's comeback was not his voice. It was a slide guitar gliding through a tune called "Hari's on Tour (Express)," a track he had recorded months earlier in his home studio at Friar Park with saxophonist Tom Scott and the band L.A. Express. On November 2, 1974, that instrumental opened his show in Vancouver, the first North American tour by a former Beatle since the group's own trip in 1966.
Laryngitis and the slide guitar
Why start with a piece where the singer does not sing? Part of the answer was practical. Harrison had laryngitis during the tour, and his voice was badly damaged. An instrumental bought him time, let the band warm up, and put the focus on the sound that had become his signature as a solo artist: the slide guitar, played in an open E tuning.
The tune itself had a strange life. Harrison recorded "Hari's on Tour (Express)" in April 1974, long before the tour began. It was one of only two true instrumentals he released after the Beatles, the other being "Marwa Blues" from the 2002 album Brainwashed. In the United States it ended up as the B-side of the single "Ding Dong, Ding Dong," but on the road it served a grander purpose.
Monty Python and the nightly ritual
The tour ran from that Vancouver date to New York on December 20, 1974. Every night the same ritual unfolded: before Harrison and the band walked on stage, a recording of "The Lumberjack Song" from Monty Python played over the speakers. Then the slide guitar line of "Hari's on Tour" cut through the room. It was a strange mix of comedy and precision, very much the man who had once been called the quiet Beatle.
Harrison had spent years building toward this moment. After the Beatles split he released the triple album All Things Must Pass, organised the Concert for Bangladesh with Ravi Shankar, and in 1974 founded his own label, Dark Horse Records. The tour was meant to establish him as a serious solo act, not just an ex-Beatle. The slide guitar was his calling card, and the instrumental put it front and centre.
Dark Horse and the reviews
The gamble did not entirely pay off. The album Dark Horse, released on December 9, 1974, drew the worst reviews of Harrison's career. Critics complained about his strained, hoarse vocals, the very problem the instrumental had been designed to sidestep. Yet some reviewers singled out "Hari's on Tour" as an effective opening number for the concerts, a burst of energy before the difficult singing began.
One stop on the tour gave the instrumental an unlikely political footnote. In Washington, Harrison met President Gerald Ford, and a live version of "Hari's on Tour" recorded there later appeared on the 1992 EP Songs by George Harrison 2. By then the tour was remembered less for its flaws than for its nerve: a man with a wrecked voice, a new label, and a slide guitar, betting that an audience would follow him somewhere new.
The tour closed in New York on December 20, 1974. Harrison never repeated the experiment on that scale. But the instrumental that opened every show remains a small, sharp document of what he was trying to do: step out from the Beatles' shadow, not with a hit single, but with the sound of his own hands on the strings. The man behind that sound had come a long way from Liverpool, where he was born on February 25, 1943. As a teenager he had saved up for a cheap guitar and talked his way into a band that would change music forever. Decades later, he was still chasing the same thing: a way to make the instrument speak for him.