He even imagined the Beatles recording it. But despite his enthusiasm, the song never made its way into the band’s repertoire. Harrison would eventually get another chance with it \u2014 24 years later.<\/p>\n
It all stemmed from an early 1960s vacation.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 1963, the year before the Beatles first came to America, I took a trip to St. Louis to visit my sister, who was living there at the time,\u201d Harrison wrote in The Beatles Anthology<\/a>. \u201cThe whole Beatlemania thing had really begun in the U.K., and we\u2019d had three or four hit singles.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n \n Harrison onstage in 1987. (Image credit: Getty Images)<\/p>\n \u201cSo while visiting my sister, I went around to all the music shops looking for new singles and especially albums that were really hard to find in Liverpool. And that\u2019s where I finally found the James Ray album, If You\u2019re Gonna Make a Fool of Somebody.\u201d<\/p>\n In particular, the song that grabbed his attention most was \u201cGot My Mind Set on You,\u201d and Harrison thought it had the makings of a Beatles recording \u2014 despite one significant drawback.<\/p>\n \u201cIt would have been great for the Beatles to cover, except it wasn\u2019t really rock and roll,\u201d he admitted. \u201cIt was trying to rock, but it sounded like it was produced by a jazz musician \u2014 it had all these squawky horns and stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n As Harrison later recalled, the song \u201cstuck in my mind.\u201d More than two decades passed before he finally revisited it while working on Cloud Nine, his 1987 comeback album after a lengthy break from recording.<\/p>\n Produced by Jeff Lynne, Cloud Nine found Harrison returning to a more electric guitar<\/a>\u2013driven sound. Revisiting Rudy Clark\u2019s song, he stripped away the brass-heavy arrangement that had bothered him in the first place and gave it a contemporary rock treatment.<\/p>\n What to read next<\/p>\n George Harrison – Got My Mind Set On You (Version II) – YouTube Watch On <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI finally decided to try and put more of a rock edge on the song,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n The changes made all the difference. Driven by punchy drums and a leaner arrangement, Harrison\u2019s version of \u201cGot My Mind Set on You\u201d became a massive hit, reaching number one in the United States and giving him one of the biggest singles of his solo career.<\/p>\n In a fitting twist, the song Harrison once hoped the Beatles might record ultimately found its audience through him instead. After carrying it around in his head for nearly a quarter-century, he finally discovered what he’d sensed back in that St. Louis record store: the song had staying power.<\/p>\n Notably, the success of \u201cGot My Mind Set on You\u201d paved the way for Harrison\u2019s next success, the Traveling Wilburys. When his record company asked for a B side to accompany a 12-inch remix of the hit, Harrison enlisted Lynne, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty<\/a> to help him write “Handle With Care<\/a>.” The song was ultimately deemed too good to waste as a flip side and became the debut single by the newly christened Wilburys, one of the biggest supergroups of all time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today is Global Beatles Day. During a 1963 visit to St. Louis, George Harrison found a record he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278],"class_list":["post-631517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Former](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/dpnJXfZUM3BYyrAyGn9fhX.jpg\")
\n<\/p>\n
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