‘Crackerbox Palace’: George Harrison’s charming short directed by Monty Python’s Eric Idle
George Harrison’s 1976 hit ‘Crackerbox Palace’, the second single from his Thirty Three & 1/3 album, is one of those vaguely worded songs that could be just about anything. It’s a happy little tune that you could project just about any happy thoughts onto while you hum along.
In actual fact, the song was written about his visit to the Los Angeles home of the great Beatnik comic, Lord Buckley, after a chance meeting with Buckley’s former manager George Grief in France. Harrison was a big admirer of Buckley (as was Frank Zappa) and thought the name of his house would make a great song title. The song actually includes references to both George Greif (“I met a Mr Greif”) and to his Lordship (“know that the Lord is well and inside of you”).
Harrison had this knack for pulling the rug out from under rock’s usual grandiosity. While everyone else was churning out epics about ego, sex, and stadium-sized angst, George was writing a tune about the name of a dead comic’s house. But that’s Harrison all over, really. He knew the absurd was often more profound than the heavy-handed. ‘Crackerbox Palace’ feels tossed-off, casual even, but the offhand charm is what makes it stick.
“I was down at that MIDEM music publishing convention in France in 1975. And I was stuck at some boring dinner when I saw Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman,” Harrison said when discussing the track. “I went over to him and he was with this fella George Greif, who was himself a manager. We got talking and I said to Greif, ‘I don’t know if this is a compliment or an insult, but you remind me of Lord Buckley.’ He said, ‘I managed him for eighteen years!’”
“The world is a very serious and at times very sad place, but at the same time it’s such a joke. [laughs] So it’s all Crackerbox Palace.”
George Harrison
“I couldn’t believe it, so we spent a few hours talking and he said that Buckley lived in this little shack he called Crackerbox Palace,” Harrison continued. “I wrote that down on my cigarette packet and, again, like Devil’s Radio, it was a good phrase for a song. Near the end of the single there’s a line in it in direct relation to Lord Buckley: ‘I met a Mr. Greif/and he said/I welcome you to Crackerbox Palace/was not expecting you/let’s tap and tap at Crackerbox Palace/know that the Lord is well and inside of you.’ I made the raw input into a story about getting born and living in the world, but again, everybody thought I was taking about the other Lord.”
Monty Python member Eric Idle directed a promo film for ‘Crackerbox Palace’ that was shown on SNL (along with another for ‘This Song’) that featured Neil Innes in drag and in other weird costumes. Harrison appeared—as himself and as “Pirate Bob” his sea-shanty singing alter ego—on Idle and Innes’ BBC Rutland Weekend Television, on the show’s Christmas special.
In the charming ‘Crackerbox Palace’ short, you can spot Harrison’s future wife, Olivia Arias, in a flash as one of the women by the bed and director Idle—as well as one of his partners in Python, John Cleese—can be seen as one of the people in the chair. But what’s really wild about this clip is that you can see how George Harrison lived like royalty in his Friar Park mansion. Talk about a palace, the amazing house and the grounds are really quite a sight.
The final pull-out shot shows some of the incredible landscaping that was one of Harrison’s great passions. In 1978, when EMI Films abruptly pulled out of Life of Brian just four days before production was due to begin, Harrison would take out a second mortgage on Friar Park to finance the £3million film through his Handmade Films.
The whole thing plays like a wink from George: yes, I live in a castle, but it’s still a crackerbox palace.