Grey Cloudy Lies

Background

In his 1980 autobiography, I, Me, Mine, George Harrison admits to having been "shell-shocked" towards the end of his 1974 North American tour, the first tour there by a member of the Beatles since the band's visit in August 1966, and his only major tour as a solo artist. Harrison had been keen to present audiences with a new concert experience – one that blended Ravi Shankar's Music Festival from India orchestra with his own, jazz-funk inspired musical direction, while also promoting a Krishna-conscious spiritual message. Instead, the tour was a "whirlwind of pent-up Beatlemania", Harrison's musical biographer, Simon Leng, has written, referring to the nostalgia-driven expectations surrounding the venture, and a number of reviewers were scathing in their assessment of the concerts. Chief among these detractors was Rolling Stone magazine, which, amid what author Elliot Huntley terms the "tsunami of bile" unleashed on Harrison following the tour, used its review of his delayed Dark Horse album to attack him personally and as an artist. Writing in the 2002 Rolling Stone Press book Harrison, published two months after the ex-Beatle's death, Mikal Gilmore observed that Harrison felt "battered" as a result of this critical mauling, which, combined with the failure of his first marriage, led to a sustained period of depression.

In March 1975, a "drawn"-looking Harrison attended a party held by former bandmate Paul McCartney in Long Beach, California and told reporters that he had not written any new songs for six months, since completing Dark Horse. The following month, he completed some half-finished compositions for a new album, titled Extra Texture (Read All About It). One of these songs was "Grey Cloudy Lies", which Harrison had begun writing in 1973 on an upright piano in the hall of his Oxfordshire home, Friar Park.

Composition

Although in his autobiography he makes light of the song's significance, during a 1987 interview with Musician magazine, Harrison admitted to having been "in a real down place" throughout this period. In September 1975, during a track-by-track discussion of Extra Texture with BBC Radio 1's Paul Gambaccini, he described "Grey Cloudy Lies" as "one of those depressing, 4 o'clock in the morning sort of songs". Harrison biographers Leng, Dale Allison and Gary Tillery each view the composition as alarmingly direct in its depiction of the singer's despair.

Leng notes a similarity between the song's opening sequence of chords and those of Billy Preston's 1969 single "That's the Way God Planned It", produced by Harrison for the Beatles' Apple record label, yet "Grey Cloudy Lies" is "emotionally a million miles away from that stirring gospel mood". The first verse sets the tone for what Leng describes as "an uncomfortable few minutes":

Now, I thought to close my mouth
With a padlock on the night
Leave the battlefield behind me
Stay out the fight
Not lose my sight.

Harrison quoted these words in his interview with Gambaccini, to illustrate the point that "after talking for a lot, you know, sometimes it's nice to be quiet". The image of human life as a battlefield is an allegory commonly associated with the ancient Hindu text Bhagavad Gita and a theme found in much of Harrison's work during the first half of the 1970s.

Musically, author Ian Inglis suggests, the song's slowly descending melody "parallels [Harrison's] personal descent into an aimless and isolated existence". Common to a number of Harrison compositions, including "Who Can See It" and "Ding Dong, Ding Dong", its time signature shifts during the verses, implying missed beats within a bar – a rhythmic effect that particularly interested Harrison regarding "Grey Cloudy Lies".

Inglis notes Harrison's "skillful" use of words such as "padlock" and "fight" to "immediately conjure images of imprisonment that convey the repressive nature of his life". Another example is the word "pistol", in verse two:

Now, I only want to be
With no pistol at my brain
But at times it gets so lonely
Could go insane
Could lose my aim.

Interpretation of the "pistol at my brain" lyric varies among Harrison's biographers. While Leng and Inglis observe that the singer appears to have courted death and even contemplated suicide, Allison, a Christian theologian, attaches significant importance to the line, on an album that he identifies as "the anomaly" in Harrison's solo work, due to the absence of "positive theological statements" in any of the songs. Allison writes of "Grey Cloudy Lies": "This relentlessly despondent offering, which recalls a time when the singer put a pistol to his head, documents the dreadful temptation to commit suicide ... It is natural to guess that the absence of God from the lyrics of Extra Texture mirrors a perceived absence of God in George's personal life; and the emptiness was so intensely troubling that it fostered, at least momentarily, thoughts of taking his own life." Joshua Greene, another religious academic and a former ISKCON devotee, instead interprets the song as part of its parent album's "modest appeal for tolerance". "No longer an Arjuna," Greene writes of Harrison's deliberate "religious restraint" on Extra Texture, "all George wanted now was to leave the battlefield behind and simply live 'with no pistol at my brain'."

Gary Tillery cites the same line as an example of "Grey Cloudy Lies"' place as the "darkest" of the "downbeat tracks" found on most of the album. Tillery also highlights the hopelessness implicit in the song's final verse, where Harrison states he only wants to live "with no teardrops in my eyes", yet "at times there seems like no chance". The song title appears only at the end of this third verse, within the rhyming couplet "No clear blue skies / Grey cloudy lies".

Among other Harrison songs of the 1970s, Leng sees thematic parallels between this composition and two Dark Horse tracks that deal with the end of Harrison's marriage to Pattie Boyd: "So Sad" and "Bye Bye, Love". These three songs, Leng suggests, constitute a cycle of "sheer unhappiness" in the singer's life that was only alleviated by the positive presence of Olivia Arias, soon to become Harrison's second wife. Leng also compares "Grey Cloudy Lies" to "Stuck Inside a Cloud", which he terms the lyrical "blood brother" to this 1975 song, due to its "harrowing" description of the cancer that would claim Harrison's life before the song's release, on Brainwashed (2002).

Recording

Harrison recorded "Grey Cloudy Lies" in Los Angeles, while immersed in the city's music-business scene – and with it, author Robert Rodriguez notes, "LA's 1970s drug culture" – during the spring and summer of 1975. Harrison's role as owner of A&M-distributed Dark Horse Records saw him overseeing projects there by new signings Attitudes, Stairsteps and Henry McCullough, as well as socialising in circles that he admitted to finding depressing. Harrison's friend since the Beatles' Hamburg years, German bassist Klaus Voormann, has spoken of the abundance of drugs at the sessions, particularly cocaine. He notes of Harrison: "I didn't like his frame of mind when he was doing this album – I don't play on it too much." With regard to songs such as "Grey Cloudy Lies" and the similarly downbeat "World of Stone", Arias recalls that Harrison "was being very hard on himself at that time".

Harrison taped the basic track for "Grey Cloudy Lies" at A&M Studios in Hollywood on 24 April 1975. The line-up on the track was Harrison on electric guitar; David Foster on piano; Jesse Ed Davis on Leslie-effected guitar, played through a wah-wah pedal; Voormann on bass; and drummer Jim Keltner, another regular participant at Harrison recording sessions. In their book Eight Arms to Hold You, Chip Madinger and Mark Easter suggest that Foster may have added his piano part during the album's overdubbing phase, however, between 31 May and 6 June. According to author Bruce Spizer, Harrison was dissatisfied with Voormann's contribution, and so replaced it with a bass part he performed himself on Moog synthesizer. The song also features ARP synthesizer extensively, played by Harrison. Dated 23 June, the album's master-reel tracking sheet lists separate ARP horn, string and "growl" tracks on "Grey Cloudy Lies", in addition to handclaps.

The dominance of keyboards on the recording, particularly the then-ubiquitous ARP synthesizer, was typical of Harrison's choice of instrumentation on Extra Texture and contrasts with what Rodriguez terms "the standard guitar-drenched Harrison sound". Inglis comments on the song's "dramatic" introduction and a "top-heavy" production that anticipates the power ballad style adopted by Whitney Houston and others in the 1980s.

Release and reception

The song was released as the penultimate track on Extra Texture (Read All About It) in September 1975 in the United States and early October in Britain. Although the cover of Melody Maker carried a headline declaring "George Bounces Back!", reviewers bemoaned the album's preponderance of melancholic ballads such as "Grey Cloudy Lies". According to author Nicholas Schaffner, "even his disciples tended to find the music plodding and aimless", while NME critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler wrote of Extra Texture: "the needle of the listener's personal Ecstatograph points sullenly towards zero throughout." Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone noted the lack of religious references in the album's lyrics before adding: "But 'Grey Cloudy Lies' makes up in its cathectic repetition of Krishna homiletics for whatever the others have skipped ... Witless and ponderous as any previous hymn to the godhead, they drag Extra Texture down with them after its brief flurry of excitement."

Among the majority of Harrison biographers, "Grey Cloudy Lies" is received with a similar lack of favour. Simon Leng's comments: "Even though Leonard Cohen and, later, the Smiths made a living from songs about depression, the justification for recording a piece like this on what was ostensibly an entertainment product is questionable. This is one of the few Harrisongs that would have been better left in the can." Dale Allison writes: "A profoundly depressing meditation on despair and suicide … One has trouble imagining anyone enjoying it." Elliot Huntley considers the problem to be the musical arrangement rather than the composition itself, and laments how the Moog and ARP synthesizers "seem to soak the song". Writing for the music website Something Else!, Nick DeRiso opines that, with Extra Texture, Harrison "couldn't have strayed further from his religious moorings – or from the free-spirited uplift that made his initial post-Beatles projects such pleasant surprises", and he dismisses "Grey Cloudy Lies" as "one of [the album's] most wrist-slashingly awful songs".

Ian Inglis offers a more favourable assessment, describing it as one of Harrison's "simplest and most poignant" compositions, a song of "great charm, energy, and beauty" with lyrics that have "the status and structure of a poem". Inglis concludes: "Despite the inappropriate production, Harrison gives a memorable performance of a beautiful song, whose absolute honesty is reminiscent of the music of Leonard Cohen and Townes Van Zandt."

Reviewing the 2014 reissue of Extra Texture, for Paste magazine, Robert Ham views "the desperate 'Grey Cloudy Lies'" as a "[moment] when Harrison's focus returns", and a ballad that "cut[s] deep". Writing for vintagerock.com, Shawn Perry considers the track to be a highlight of "a creative and introspective album that's aged well", and "a song that, despite its solemn, down-trodden lyrics, resonates with a level of reflection that somehow makes you feel everything is going to be OK". In his review for Classic Rock, Paul Trynka similarly opines that this and other "confessional songs" on Extra Texture have "worn well". Trynka continues: "['Grey Cloudy Lies' is] a dark exploration of the depression into which he'd sunk in 1974, after being mocked for his spiritual homilies. Today, when pop stars swig Cristal and flash their pecs on Instagram, we can appreciate the irony of Harrison being attacked for preaching enlightenment."

Personnel