Lord Sitar – Lord Sitar

Lord Sitar was the alias for renowned session musician and guitar virtuoso Big Jim Sullivan who, in 1966 and 1967, found himself in the enviable position of being the only established session guitarist in England to own a sitar. By 1967, that attribute had turned him into a valuable commodity, mostly because of the instrument's being popularized by George Harrison of the Beatles, and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones on various of their respective groups' recordings. Sullivan had already recorded a whole album of sitar-based music entitled Sitar Beat for Mercury Records (released in 1968) when someone at Regal Zonophone -- an imprint of EMI, which already owned the real article in raga rock in the form of George Harrison's Beatles recordings -- decided that they needed an album to cash in on the boom for the Hindustani instrument's ...