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Eaton An Apple

April 29th, 2008

Way back in high school, in the November 23, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone, was a review of a record by a pair of brothers, Lon and Derrek Van Eaton. Click the thumbnail picture to see a scan from my original copy of the magazine. The LP was on the Beatles’ Apple label, and it was called, fittingly, Brother. The cover looked a bit weird, with the brothers bare-chested and embracing, but the review was a rave, it was on Apple, and George Harrison was involved, so I bought it. I enjoyed the record a lot, and being very much into church at the time I liked the religious theme that ran through many of the tracks, but I won’t pretend I listened to it as much as Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. The Van Eaton brothers had a follow-up record, but by then Apple Records as a recording studio was gone, so they were on a different label. I forget which one, because I was a totally broke college student and my record purchases were very few.

A brief account of the demise of Apple Records as anything but a logo and a legal entity (albeit a significant one, ably run by the late Neil Aspinall), is told in the memoir of recording engineer and producer Geoff Emerick, Here, There and Everywhere. Emerick also describes his involvement, or lack of it, with the recording of the Brother album.

One of George Harrison’s new signings was the Von [sic] Eaton brothers–Lon and Derrek… Harrison started out producing the brothers’ album, with me doing the engineering, but then he got fed up and frustrated, so he had his old friend Klaus Voorman take over as producer. I knew him from as far back as the Revolver days, when he’d come into the sessions to talk about the album cover he was designing. He and I just didn’t click, though, so I begged off from the project and turned the reins over to another engineer.

I’ll play a couple of tracks from the album. First, the song produced by George Harrison, “Sweet Music,” that the Rolling Stone review characterized as being similar to, and as good as, “My Sweet Lord.”

And this is “Sun Song,” produced by Klaus Voorman.

Filed under: Beatles

Tags: Apple Records, Beatles, Lon and Derrek Van Eaton