George Harrison’s Dark Horse tour in 1974 has gone down in rock history for all the wrong reasons. The shows were plagued with issues, and the run was so bad that the Beatle wouldn’t tour again for another 17 years. For his foil, Robben Ford, the tour had a completely different set of problems.
Throughout the run, Harrison fought a losing battle with laryngitis, earning the tour its derogatory nickname, “Dark Hoarse”. Fans also resented the limited number of Beatles songs aired, and the lengthy opening set of his close friend, Ravi Shankar.
That, however, was just one side of the story. For a youthful Robben Ford, his big break was anything but. At 22, he was playing in Tom Scott’s jazz-fusion group, L.A. Express. Soon, they’d be hired as Joni Mitchell’s live band, later playing on her studio albums, Miles of Aisles and Hissing of Summer Lawn.
Harrison was in attendance at their London show, and he subsequently claimed the band for himself, ahead of hitting the road to support his fifth studio album. It was meant to be a dream gig for Ford.
“It was an amazing opportunity to be able to work with a Beatle,” he tells Thinking About Guitar with a degree of diplomacy. “George was always my favorite Beatle, but the music was very simple, and it was already done. So you learned the part, and you played the part. It wasn’t a challenging gig.”
Considering his jazz-tinted background, being reduced to a sideman playing cowboy chords wasn’t thrill-a-minute for the hotshot guitarist. His issues, though, ran deeper.
“There was no creativity asked of me in that situation,” he explains. “It was a hard tour; George couldn’t sing; he had really terrible laryngitis. We were in private planes, and sometimes we’d be in venues for 15 hours a day. The show was three and a half hours long. At the Cow Palace in San Francisco, we played twice in one day. It was really hard physically and emotionally, and mentally it was kind of rough, I have to say.”
Then there were the drugs. A day after first meeting Harrison backstage at that Joni Mitchell show in England’s capital, he was whisked into the studio. There, he said, there was “a box of cocaine on every shelf,” and that behavior didn’t change on the road.
The tour ran for 45 shows, and the whole time, Ford felt like an outsider.
“There was a lot of what went on during the ‘70s,” he says, again taking the diplomatic route. “You had all those cats, and I was 22. I had my 23rd birthday on that tour.
“So, I know these guys are older than me, and they’re doing their own thing,” he goes on. “It was very hard for me, actually. I felt like a fish out of water in that bunch, in that group of people. So, it wasn’t really fun. It was something I really kind of had to get through.”
On a positive note, he did get through it. He returned to Joni Mitchell’s side the following year before being invited to write a guitar solo for Steely Dan’s “Peg” in 1977, though he didn’t make the final cut. His next big gig would prove to be his weirdest. That’s probably why he’s largely remained a solo act since.
Thankfully, the marred George Harrison tour did little to douse his flame, and playing a Beatles classic with the man who wrote it remains a memory he holds dear.
