When the Beatles landed in New York in February 1964, it was the first time in the United States for three of them, but not George Harrison. While his bandmates vacationed in Europe in September 1963, 21-year-old George visited his older sister, Louise, at her home in Benton, Ill., where her Canadian husband worked as a mining engineer.
Though Benton was in rural southern Illinois, Harrison still had a chance to buy records he couldn’t get back home. One was an LP by James Ray, an R&B singer who had a hit a year earlier with “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody.” It contained another song by the same songwriter, Rudy Clark, a former mailman who had discovered the 5-foot-tall Ray performing as Little Jimmy Ray. “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You” failed to chart, and Ray was soon dead of a drug overdose at age 22, but Harrison liked and remembered the tune.
Years later, during a recording session for his 1987 comeback album “Cloud Nine,” drummer Jim Keltner started playing a pattern that keyboardist Gary Wright remarked sounded like the long-forgotten single. Harrison was floored that somebody else remembered the song and decided to record it himself.
This was the height of the MTV period, when video promotion budgets started to rival what was spent on films, which resulted in two different videos being shot for the song. The first shows Harrison with a backing band in a video-within-a-video, but it’s not on YouTube in embeddable form. The footage of the band without the Hollywood trappings is, though. They’re the musicians who actually played on the track — that’s Jeff Lynne, who also produced the song, on bass, with Jim Keltner, who unintentionally inspired Harrison’s cover, on drums. All three played together again a few months later in the Traveling Wilburys.
The second video, a take-off on the then-current film “Evil Dead II,” was the one that clicked with the MTV audience, helping propel Harrison’s cover to No. 1 on the Hot 100 — the last solo song by a former Beatle to reach the top of the charts, and the second Rudy Clark song to do so — the Rascals’ “Good Lovin'” was the first.
Here’s the version that inspired it all.
At the 2014 George Fest concert, Killers frontman Brendan Flowers took the vocals. That’s Harrison’s son Dhani on guitar.
