A Line in George Harrison’s ‘Badge’ Came From a Drunk Ringo Starr
A line in George Harrison‘s “Badge” came from a drunk Ringo Starr. He gave a few nonsensical lines to George’s humorous song, which he later gave to Eric Clapton.
George Harrison’s ‘Badge’ came about after a misunderstanding
In the late-1960s, George became friends with Eric Clapton. The Beatle asked Clapton to perform on his White Album hit, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and George wrote “Savoy Truffle” for Clapton.
Then, in 1968, George learned that Clapton’s band Cream was about to make their last album.
“Each of them had to come up with a song for that ‘Goodbye’ Cream album and Eric didn’t have his written,” George told Mitch Glazer at Crawdaddy in 1977 (George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters). George took it upon himself to help his friend write a song.
According to George’s 1980 memoir, I Me Mine, Clapton had the song’s melody before George started writing the lyrics.
“We were working across from each other and I was writing the lyrics down and we came to the middle part so I wrote ‘bridge,'” George continued to tell Crawdaddy. “Eric read it upside down and cracked up laughing. ‘What’s ‘badge’?’ he said.”
Clapton decided to name the song after his misconception. In I Me Mine, George wrote, “It’s funny, now he actually sings in concert at the end of the song, ‘Where is my badge?'”
Some of the lyrics in George’s ‘Badge’ came from a drunk Ringo Starr
While George wrote the lyrics for “Badge,” his fellow Beatle stumbled into the recording studio drunk. George told Crawdaddy that Ringo drunkenly gave the lyric, “I told you ’bout the swans, that they live in the park.”
In 1987, George further explained to Timothy White for Musician Magazine, “That whole song was quite silly. Ringo was sitting around drinking, out of his brain, saying anything.
“The part about ‘Our kid, now he’s married to Mabel,’ well, ‘our kid’ is a common Liverpool expression that usually means your younger brother. We were amusing ourselves.”
George used a pseudonym on the Cream album
The former Beatle added to White that his credit on Cream’s Goodbye is “L’Angelo Misterioso.”
“My ‘L’Angelo Misterioso’ credit must have been thought up by Eric,” George explained. “I just saw it on the back of the album when it came!”
George explained that since record companies got “funny” when artists played on each others’ records, they used pseudonyms.
“In those days, of course, if you played on anybody else’s album or even one track, EMI used to get funny about it, thinking, ‘Oh, the fabulous Beatles publishing catalog,’ and try claiming royalties on it. So if we did that we always had to make up names. Ravi Shankar used to put on ‘Hari Georgson’ or ‘Jai Raj Harisein.’ John preferred ‘George Harrisong.'”
Fortunately, George and other artists revealed they were behind those pseudonyms. Otherwise, we’d never know who did what.
