George Harrison and Ravi Shankar's 1974 North American tour
| Tour by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar | |||||||
Tour programme
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| Location | United States, Canada | ||||||
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| Associated album | |||||||
| Start date | 2 November 1974 | ||||||
| End date | 20 December 1974 | ||||||
| Legs | 1 | ||||||
| No. of shows | 45 | ||||||
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George Harrison and Ravi Shankar's 1974 North American tour was a 45-show concert tour of the United States and Canada, undertaken by English musician George Harrison and Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar in November and December of 1974. It is often referred to as the Dark Horse Tour, since the concerts served as a launch for Harrison's record label Dark Horse Records, to which Shankar was one of the inaugural signings, and Harrison's concurrent single was the song "Dark Horse". The release of his delayed album, also titled Dark Horse, followed towards the end of the tour. The shows featured guest spots by Harrison's band members Billy Preston and Tom Scott.
The 1974 tour was the first in North America by a former member of the Beatles since the band's 1966 visit. Raising expectations further among fans and the media, it marked the first live performances by Harrison since his successful staging of the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh shows, which had also featured Shankar and Preston. Harrison had no wish to revisit his Beatles past, however, and he stated in the pre-tour press conference in Los Angeles: "it's definitely not going to be a Bangladesh Mark II, if that's what people are thinking." At the same press conference, in reply to questions about a rumoured Beatles reunion, he said that his former band "[weren't] that good", relative to musicians he had worked with since, and he dismissed the idea of ever being in a group with Paul McCartney again. According to author Peter Doggett, these remarks created "the same sense of shock" as John Lennon's 1970 lyric "I don't believe in Beatles" (from the song "God"). Harrison biographer Simon Leng writes that the ensuing tour represented "a whirlwind of pent-up Beatlemania" in North America, "where the group had a status way beyond that of mere icons."
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