Bangla Desh (song)

Background

By the spring of 1971, George Harrison had established himself as the most successful ex-Beatle during the former band members' first year as solo artists; in the words of biographer Elliot Huntley, he "couldn't have got any more popular in the eyes of the public". Just as importantly, writes Peter Lavezzoli, author of The Dawn of Indian Music in the West, Harrison had "amassed such good will in the music community" during that time. Rather than looking to immediately follow up his All Things Must Pass triple album, he had spent the months since recording ended in October 1970 repaying favours to the friends and musicians who had helped make the album such a success. These included co-producer Phil Spector, whose wife, Ronnie Spector, Harrison supplied with songs for a proposed solo album on Apple Records; Ringo Starr, whose "It Don't Come Easy" single he produced and prepared for release, following the original session for the song in March 1970; Bobby Whitlock, singer and keyboard player with the short-lived Derek and the Dominos, whose eponymous debut solo album featured Harrison and Eric Clapton on guitar; and former Spooky Tooth pianist Gary Wright, whose Footprint album (1971) Harrison also guested on, along with All Things Must Pass orchestrator John Barham.

Another project was a documentary on the life and music of Ravi Shankar, Howard Worth's Raga (1971), for which Harrison had stepped in at the last minute to provide funding and distribution through Apple Films. With Harrison also serving as record producer for the accompanying soundtrack album, work began with Shankar in Los Angeles during April 1971 and resumed in late June, following Harrison-produced sessions in London for the band Badfinger.

A Bengali by birth, Shankar had already brought the growing humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh to Harrison's attention, while staying at the ex-Beatle's house, Friar Park, earlier in the year. The state formerly known as East Pakistan (and before that, East Bengal) had suffered an estimated 300,000 casualties when the Bhola cyclone hit its shores on 12 November 1970, and the indifference shown by the ruling government in West Pakistan, particularly by President Yahya Khan, was just one reason the Bengali national movement sought independence on 25 March 1971. This declaration resulted in an immediate military crackdown by Khan's troops, and three days later the Bangladesh Liberation War began. By 13 June, details of the systematic massacre of citizens were beginning to emerge internationally via the publication in London's Sunday Times of an article by Anthony Mascarenhas. Along with the torrential rains and intensive flooding that were threatening the passage of millions of refugees into north-eastern India, this news galvanised Shankar into approaching Harrison for help in trying to alleviate the suffering. "I was in a very sad mood, having read all this news," Shankar later told Rolling Stone magazine, "and I said, 'George, this is the situation, I know it doesn't concern you, I know you can't possibly identify.' But while I talked to George he was very deeply moved ... and he said, 'Yes, I think I'll be able to do something.'"

As a result, Harrison committed to staging the Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden, New York, on Sunday, 1 August. Six weeks of frantic activity ensued as Harrison flew between New York, Los Angeles and London, making preparations and recruiting other musicians to join him and Shankar for the shows. While conceding that Harrison was no "natural sloganeer" in the manner of his former bandmate John Lennon, author Robert Rodriguez has written: "if any ex-Fab had the cachet with his fan base to solicit good works, it was the spiritual Beatle."

Composition

Foreign journalists had been deported from East Pakistan shortly before the Pakistani army's Operation Searchlight, and even after Mascarenhas' first-hand observations had been published, Shankar and Harrison were concerned that the mainstream media in the West were showing a reluctance to report all the facts. That summer, it also emerged that America was supporting General Khan's military offensive, both financially and with weaponry – despite the Blood telegram in April, in which officials at the US Consulate in Dacca advised their State Department of the "genocide" taking place and accused the US Government of "moral bankruptcy". Realising the need to create greater awareness of the situation in Bangladesh, and particularly the refugee camps of India that had become "infectious open-air graveyards" with the outbreak of cholera, Harrison quickly composed a song for the cause. "Bangla Desh" was "written in ten minutes at the piano", he would later recall. The title translates as "Bengal nation", and the fact that Harrison spelt it as two words is indicative of how little the new country name had been acknowledged by the Western media at this time.

As with the concerts, Harrison made a point of steering clear of the politics behind the problem, his lyrics focusing instead on the human perspective. At the suggestion of Leon Russell, who had participated in the recent Ronnie Spector and Badfinger sessions, Harrison began the song with a brief verse outlining his own introduction to the Bangladesh crisis:

My friend came to me with sadness in his eyes
Told me that he wanted help before his country dies
Although I couldn't feel the pain, I knew I had to try
Now I'm asking all of you to help us save some lives.

These lines refer to Shankar's request for help, and "[in] deference to the Shankar context", musical biographer Simon Leng suggests, Harrison set the opening verse as a rock version of Indian music's traditional alap – "a slow introductory statement of the main ideas". Lyrically, the remainder of the song concentrates on the uncompromising message "We've got to relieve Bangla Desh" as thousands of refugees, particularly children, fell victim to the effects of famine and disease.

Bangla Desh, Bangla Desh
Where so many people are dying fast
And it sure looks like a mess
I've never seen such distress
Now won't you lend your hand, try to understand
Relieve the people of Bangla Desh.

The final verse-chorus reflects a point that former US Fund for UNICEF president Charles Lyons has identified as a perennial obstacle when addressing global issues of poverty – that the problems appear to be too big and too distant for individuals to be able to solve:

Now, it may seem so far from where we all are
It's something we can't reject
That suffering, I can't neglect ...

In this verse, the line "Now won't you give some bread to get the starving fed" contains a "clever pun", Harrison biographer Ian Inglis notes, whereby the word "bread" is used to refer to both money and food.

Recording

With little time to begin rehearsing for the New York shows, the "Bangla Desh" single was rush-recorded in Los Angeles. Sources differ over the venue and date: the Record Plant West seems the most likely studio, with sessions taking place on 4–5 July and horn overdubs perhaps on 10 July. Phil Spector again co-produced, but as with the recording details for the sessions, the exact line-up of musicians is a matter of conjecture. According to Simon Leng, who consulted Klaus Voormann and Jim Horn for his book While My Guitar Gently Weeps, the line-up comprised Harrison, Leon Russell (piano), Horn (saxophones), Voormann (bass), Starr, Jim Keltner (both on drums) and Billy Preston (organ). Leng and Beatles author Bruce Spizer credit a "horn section" led by Jim Horn, which could include regular partner Chuck Findley and even the rest of the six-piece section, christened "the Hollywood Horns", that would go on to perform in New York on 1 August.

The recording begins with Harrison's emotive introduction backed by what Lavezzoli describes as a "rolling piano figure" from Russell. Following the words "help us save some lives", the piano sets up the song's "driving groove", Lavezzoli continues, as the rhythm section and Harrison's electric guitar join in, creating the same musical blend of gospel and rock that Harrison had adopted on much of All Things Must Pass. In a review for the NME in August 1971, Derek Johnson wrote of "Bangla Desh": "Opens almost like a sermon, then the beat come is ... as George wails fervently to a backing of a solid rhythm section and handclaps." The track retains an "urgent 'live' mood", Leng notes, although it is possible that Starr's contribution was overdubbed after the main session, due to his filming schedule for the Western movie Blindman (1971), in Spain. The song features solos shared between Russell, Horn (on tenor sax) and Harrison (slide guitar), and fades out with the ensemble playing in double time, similar to a fast gat section (or drut) used in Hindustani classical music.

"Bangla Desh" marked the first occasion that Harrison worked with Horn, who would go on to become a regular collaborator. Already a veteran of the LA music scene by 1971, Horn recalls his "jaded" mindset before meeting Harrison, but describes the session as a "real turning point" in his career, "because we were doing something for a cause". It was also the first time that Keltner played on a George Harrison session, the two musicians having already worked together on Lennon's Imagine album (1971). The "Bangla Desh" session was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, with the pair remaining "as brothers", Keltner has said, until Harrison's death in 2001. Together with Clapton, Preston, Bob Dylan and the group Badfinger, all these musicians joined Harrison and Shankar on stage at Madison Square Garden.

Ravi Shankar cut a benefit disc of his own at this time, the Harrison-produced Joi Bangla EP. The A-side featured two vocal compositions sung in Bengali – the title track (which translated to mean "Victory to Bangladesh") and "Oh Bhaugowan" – while on the reverse was a six-minute recital of "Raga Mishra Jhinjoti", featuring Shankar, sarod master Ali Akbar Khan, and Shankar's regular tabla player, Alla Rakha.

Release

At Harrison's urging, Capitol Records, Apple's distributor in the United States, set all four of its manufacturing plants to producing copies of the "Bangla Desh" single; one-sided, white label promo discs were also rushed through to ensure immediate radio play for the song. For the US picture sleeve, designer Tom Wilkes chose a suitably topical image, incorporating headlines and text from New York Times articles about the Bangladesh crisis. The articles made mention of vultures being the "happiest creatures" amid the chaos in Dacca, and India's "wait and see" policy regarding events in East Pakistan. The front of the picture sleeve was topped with the line "(We've Got to Relieve)" before the words "Bangla Desh", leading a number of publications to include the parenthetical text as part of the official song title. Boxed off at the foot of the front sleeve were details of the George Harrison–Ravi Shankar Special Emergency Relief Fund (care of UNICEF's New York headquarters), to which proceeds of the single would go and further donations were encouraged. The back cover of the US sleeve was taken from a UPI news agency photograph – an "emotional" image showing a mother comforting her starving child. This photo was also used in the aid project's magazine advertising campaign, as well as for the front of the single's picture sleeve in Denmark and Japan.

Backed with the well-regarded "Deep Blue", the "Bangla Desh" single was issued on 28 July 1971 in the United States (as Apple 1836), with a UK release following two days later (R 5912). It peaked at number 10 on Britain's national singles chart and number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 in America; the other US chart compilers, Cash Box and Record World, placed the single at number 20 and number 13, respectively. "Bangla Desh" attracted sustained airplay in the days leading up to the concerts, and lent the relief project an authentic social and political significance. A Bangladeshi academic, Professor Farida Majid, would later write: "To the utter consternation of [US President] Nixon and [Secretary of State] Kissinger, George Harrison's 'Bangla Desh' hit the chart. It was a thrilling moment in the midst of all the sad news emanating from the battlefront. Even the Western journalists covering the civil war in East Pakistan were not yet using the word 'Bangladesh'." The studio recording was also played at the Concert for Bangladesh shows, following Shankar's opening set, over footage of the refugees and scenes from the war.

Reissue

Despite the song having been a hit – and its status as the first-ever pop charity single, fourteen years before Band Aid and USA for Africa – "Bangla Desh" was mostly ignored by record-company repackagers following 1971. Over a period of 43 years, the studio version received an album release only on the 1976 compilation The Best of George Harrison, which was issued on CD in 1987. The song has since been included as a bonus track, remixed by Paul Hicks, on the 2014 reissue of Harrison's Living in the Material World album, part of the eight-disc Apple Years 1968–75 box set.

Reception and legacy

On release, Billboard magazine described "Bangla Desh" as "a musical appeal to help our fellow-man" that "should find immediate and heavy chart action". In his contemporary review for the NME, Derek Johnson considered the song to be "[n]ot so strong melodically as 'My Sweet Lord', but still nagging and insistent", and added: "one can immediately detect the despair and pity in [Harrison's] voice as he sings of the appalling plight of the East Pakistanis ... his lyric is bound to cause some heart-searching." A wave of public goodwill accompanied the single's release in 1971, as was the case with the two benefit concerts, the subsequent live album, and the 1972 concert film. Simon Leng has identified genuine friendship as being key to the success of Harrison and Shankar's relief project: the friendship between the two of them that saw the ex-Beatle become involved, and the friendships Harrison had cultivated with Dylan, Clapton and Starr that ensured their participation. Leng notes that the opening lyrics to "Bangla Desh" ("My friend came to me ...") could equally have applied to Harrison's efforts to enlist the reluctant Dylan and heroin-sidelined Clapton.

In his concert review for The Village Voice, Don Heckman described "Bangla Desh" as "a song which expresses far better than words what kind of man Harrison is". Heckman went on to compare Harrison's philanthropy with the activities of two of his former bandmates, saying: "I have no quarrel with John Lennon's endless clattering around inside his psyche, or Paul McCartney's search for sweetness and light, but at the moment I have to have stronger feelings about George Harrison's active efforts to do something about the misery in the world around him. How surprising that the most introspective of the Beatles should be the one who, in the long run, takes the most effective actions."

Away from its context as a song designed purely to bring attention to the Bengalis' cause, as Harrison himself described it, "Bangla Desh" has often been viewed by commentators as a rushed and underwhelming composition. Robert Rodriguez qualifies this opinion, however: "As a single, the song was possibly not the most commercial of records, but as a call to service, it could scarcely have been improved upon." "Bangla Desh"'s standing as rock music's first charity single is not overlooked, with Ian Inglis stating: "'Bangla Desh' serves as a model for the charity singles that would become commonplace in the decades ahead, although, in this instance, the power of Harrison's song lies not in its assembly of famous performers but in its literal and absolute commitment." On this point, Leng deems the song as having "as much raw energy as anything [Lennon's] Plastic Ono Band ever offered". In The Dawn of Indian Music in the West, Peter Lavezzoli writes: "Harrison's lyric and vocal were concise and powerful, a direct call for action in a specific crisis. As such, 'Bangla Desh' remains one of the most cogent social statements in music history."

In his interview for the 2005 reissue of Saul Swimmer's Concert for Bangladesh film, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledged Harrison and Shankar as "pioneers" in their efforts for the people of Bangladesh, and credited the song's opening verse for personalising the crisis by showing "the man behind the music". Thirty-three years before this, on 5 June 1972, UNICEF officially recognised Harrison and Shankar with its annual Child Is the Father of the Man award.

In 2004, "Bangla Desh" was played during the final episode of the BBC television series Himalaya with Michael Palin, in which Palin travels south from Bhutan to Bay of Bengal and reflects on Bangladesh's struggle for independence. Writing for Blender magazine in April that year, Paul Du Noyer described the song as a "fine 1971 single". In the 2005 "Beatles Solo" edition of NME Originals, Adrian Thrills rated "Bangla Desh" second among Harrison's "ten solo gems" (behind "What Is Life"), referring to it as a "jazz-blues-rock shuffle" that "set the template for Band Aid". Writing in The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles in 2009, Michael Frontani said that with his Bangladesh relief effort, Harrison "pioneered the whole idea of the charity album and single, as well as of the rock concert fundraiser". While bemoaning the song's omission from the 2009 Harrison compilation Let It Roll, Jon Cummings of popdose.com described "Bangla Desh" as "no great artistic achievement" within itself, but "a key moment ... in the evolution of pop-music activism".

The song is featured in Bruce Pollock's 2005 book The 7,500 Most Important Songs of 1944–2000. In 2010, AOL Radio listeners placed "Bangla Desh" at number 10 in a poll to decide the ten best post-Beatles Harrison songs.

Live version

Harrison played "Bangla Desh" as an encore at both of the Madison Square Garden shows on 1 August 1971, with the evening performance being selected for inclusion on the Concert for Bangladesh triple live album. After the familiar introduction to the song, the band "threw their full weight behind Harrison", Lavezzoli writes, "playing the darkest and heaviest music of the show". On release that December, Jon Landau of Rolling Stone identified the song as "the concert's single greatest performance by all concerned", and added that by the close of the show, the lyrics to Harrison's single were "no longer an expression of intent but of an accomplished mission – help has been given, people have been reached, an effort has been made and results will be felt".

In his album review for Melody Maker, Richard Williams wrote that the live version of "Bangla Desh" "roars and rages to a stunning close". Played at a faster tempo than the studio recording, it features what Spizer terms a "blistering" saxophone solo from Horn, and a vocal by Harrison that Leng describes as "astonishingly powerful" and "a pure act of zeal". As shown in the concert film, following his brief guitar solo towards the end of the song, Harrison repeats the line "Relieve the people of Bangla Desh" before exiting the stage to great applause, as the band plays on without him. In his book on the Beatles' first decade as solo artists, Rodriguez views this live performance as perhaps Harrison's "high water mark of public esteem".

Although he was reportedly eager to repeat the experience of these New York shows, Harrison never played "Bangla Desh" in concert after 1971 and he did not perform live again until his 1974 North American tour with Shankar. By that point, the Bangladesh Liberation War had long ended, with India's defeat of the Pakistani army in December 1971, but Bangladesh was now experiencing a devastating famine that would account for up to 1.5 million lives. During a concert in Los Angeles on 11 November, Harrison responded to requests for the song "Bangla Desh" with a suggestion that the audience instead chant "Krishna, Krishna, Krishna" and use the positive power of mantra to help the Bangladeshi population.

Cover versions

Harrison biographer Alan Clayson has written of the "triumph" of the Bangladesh concerts leading to a host of imitators and tribute acts replicating the shows' programme, among which was a French band's cover version of "Bangla Desh". Another example was the Tribe's Bangla Desh (1972), a full album of highlights from the concerts, including Harrison's "Bangla Desh", "My Sweet Lord" and "Here Comes the Sun". The previous year, Stu Phillips & the Hollyridge Strings released an easy listening version of "Bangla Desh" on their Beatles tribute album The George, John, Paul & Ringo Songbook (1971). Another 1971 cover version, re-released in 2002 on the compilation When They Was Fab – A Tribute to the Solo Beatles, was recorded by the Top of the Poppers.

Following Jim Horn's prominent contribution to the original Harrison recording, Italian saxophonist Fausto Papetti recorded the song for his 1972 album 14a Raccolta. Alternative band B.A.L.L. covered "Bangla Desh" on their 1988 album Bird, as part of their parody of early 1970s rock stars such as the former Beatles.

Personnel

The following musicians are believed to have played on the studio recording of "Bangla Desh".

* denotes unconfirmed credits.