Working with George Harrison and Joni Mitchell in the same year was an eye-opening education for a young Robben Ford — and not always in the ways a 22-year-old guitarist might have expected.
Of the two, Ford says his time with Harrison was the more surreal experience, marked as much by excess as by music-making. That brief partnership came during one of Harrison’s most turbulent creative periods: the 1974 Dark Horse tour, his first major run of shows since the Beatles’ breakup, which proved so chaotic it effectively pushed him away from touring for 17 years.
Harrison had first encountered Ford earlier that year through Joni Mitchell, for whom the guitarist had already become an unlikely rising star, contributing to The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Miles of Aisles. Impressed, Harrison described him as a rare talent who seemed to bridge blues and jazz instinctively. “Once in a blue moon,” he said, “there is an artist so natural to the blues and to jazz as Robben Ford.”
When Harrison began assembling a touring band, Ford—then just 22—was brought in.
“I was touring with Joni Mitchell, and we did two shows in London in 1974,” Ford tells Classic Rock. “I’m hanging out backstage, and I turn around and standing before me is the album cover to All Things Must Pass. You know, he had the hair, hat, gardening boots, big plaid coat.”
Ford recalls Harrison arriving at his Henley-on-Thames home the next day in similarly iconic fashion. “We got there about one in the afternoon. George was still asleep. At about four, he came into the kitchen, smoking a Gauloises, making tea—he only drank Typhoo.”
What followed, Ford says, was a night of escalating studio chaos.
“At one in the morning, the band all went up to the studio. Everyone had been drinking, smoking something, snorting something,” he says. “So we’re all set up in the studio, and there’s a shelf running along all four walls of the control room, with a box of cocaine on every shelf. So if you felt like it, you just popped over, had a little toot, and continued. And we did that until the sun came up.”
Despite the mythology, Ford has since downplayed the musical impact of the experience. He’s said he “didn’t learn anything” from his time in Harrison’s band, describing his role largely as playing simple rhythm parts each night. One of the few highlights was trading guitar lines with Harrison on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” the Beatles-era centerpiece that remained a live staple.
The Dark Horse tour itself was widely criticized for its loose structure and minimal Beatles material, and it ended up marking Harrison’s retreat from live performance for nearly two decades. Ford, however, moved on without difficulty, later working with Steely Dan — although his guitar solo for “Peg” didn't make the cut.
Elsewhere, Ford has credited another guitarist with sparking his lifelong relationship with the Fender Telecaster, and has described his stint with Kiss as one of the strangest gigs of his career. Harrison’s former bandmate Jeff Lynne has since reflected on how the Traveling Wilburys helped redefine Harrison’s post-Beatles identity.
