George Harrison's widow and son, Olivia and Dhani Harrison revealed that they are looking closely at the late-Beatle's outtakes. Over the years, to the chagrin of fans, the Harrison estate has barely released anything from George's supposed voluminous archival collection — with only 2002's posthumous Brainwashed set and 2012 Early Takes: Volume 1 collection dipping into the Friar Park vault.
Dhani Harrison, who's just resurrected his father's Dark Horse Records imprint, told Rolling Stone, “We have people digging through mountains of tapes, and they keep coming. Boxes and boxes of them.”
Olivia Harrison touched upon the upcoming 50th anniversary of George's first post-Beatles solo set, the massive All Things Must Pass, hinting about the outtakes, revealing, “A lot of it has been bootlegged, but we have better versions. We have all the 24-tracks of All Things Must Pass, and we found lots of different takes and talking in the studio.”
Dhani spoke about the unheard multi-track tapes of Harrison's only solo U.S. tour in 1974, explaining, “His voice is pretty tired, but in my opinion, it sounds great. It’s raspy, and it has grit to it. You can hear the fragility in all the songs. It’s a different take on a lot of his music.”
Olivia feels some of the footage shot at the shows and off stage would make for a fascinating documentary: “I think it would make a great tour movie. The backstage footage is amazing and hysterical. Things went on backstage that don’t happen now. Now everything is so cut and dried, the opposite of spontaneous.”
Olivia Harrison, who was with George for the duration of the North American tour, says that a live 1974 project would likely be a multimedia production: “There's a lot of footage and a lot of history around that 1974 tour. Y'know George filmed quite a lot, so I think that it needs a little more time to sort that out. Because there's this great footage, y'know he filmed backstage, he filmed in lots of cities, so many things happened on that tour, as well as a live album.”
George Harrison died of cancer on November 29th, 2001 at the age of 58.