All Things Must Pass

Background

Music journalist John Harris has identified the start of George Harrison's "journey" to making All Things Must Pass as his visit to America in late 1968, following the acrimonious sessions for the Beatles' White Album. While in Woodstock in November, Harrison established a long-lasting friendship with Bob Dylan and experienced a creative equality among the Band that contrasted sharply with John Lennon and Paul McCartney's domination in the Beatles. Coinciding with this visit was a surge in Harrison's songwriting output, following his renewed interest in the guitar, after three years spent studying the Indian sitar. As well as being one of the few musicians to co-write songs with Dylan, Harrison had recently collaborated with Eric Clapton on "Badge", which became a hit single for Cream in the spring of 1969.

Once back in London, and with his compositions continually overlooked for inclusion on releases by the Beatles, Harrison found creative fulfilment in extracurricular projects that, in the words of his musical biographer, Simon Leng, served as an "emancipating force" from the restrictions imposed on him in the band. His activities during 1969 included producing Apple signings Billy Preston and Doris Troy, two American singer-songwriters whose soul and gospel roots proved as influential on All Things Must Pass as the music of the Band. He also recorded with artists such as Leon Russell and Jack Bruce, and accompanied Clapton on a short tour with Delaney Bramlett's soul revue, Delaney & Bonnie and Friends. In addition, Harrison identified his involvement with the Hare Krishna movement as providing "another piece of a jigsaw puzzle" that represented the spiritual journey he had begun in 1966. As well as embracing the Vaishnavist branch of Hinduism, Harrison produced two hit singles during 1969–70 by the UK-based devotees, credited as Radha Krishna Temple (London). In January 1970, Harrison invited American producer Phil Spector to participate in the recording of Lennon's Plastic Ono Band single "Instant Karma!" This association led to Spector being given the task of salvaging the Beatles' Get Back rehearsal tapes, released officially as the Let It Be album (1970), and later co-producing All Things Must Pass.

Harrison first discussed the possibility of making a solo album of his unused songs during the ill-tempered Get Back sessions, held at Twickenham Film Studios in January 1969. At Abbey Road Studios on 25 February, his 26th birthday, Harrison recorded demos of "All Things Must Pass" and two other compositions that had received little interest from Lennon and McCartney at Twickenham. With the inclusion of one of these songs – "Something" – and "Here Comes the Sun" on the Beatles' Abbey Road album in September 1969, music critics acknowledged that Harrison had bloomed into a songwriter to match Lennon and McCartney. Although he began talking publicly about recording his own album from the autumn of 1969, it was only after McCartney announced that he was leaving the Beatles, in April 1970, signalling the band's break-up, that Harrison committed to the idea. Despite having already made Wonderwall Music (1968), a mostly instrumental soundtrack album, and the experimental Electronic Sound (1969), Harrison considered All Things Must Pass to be his first solo album.

Main body

Spector first heard Harrison's stockpile of unreleased compositions early in 1970, when visiting his recently purchased home, Friar Park. "It was endless!" Spector later recalled of the recital, noting the quantity and quality of Harrison's material. Harrison had accumulated songs from as far back as 1966; both "Isn't It a Pity" and "Art of Dying" date from that year. He co-wrote at least two songs with Dylan while in Woodstock, one of which, "I'd Have You Anytime", appeared on All Things Must Pass. Harrison wrote "Let It Down" in late 1968 also.

He introduced the Band-inspired "All Things Must Pass", along with "Hear Me Lord" and "Let It Down", at the Beatles' Get Back rehearsals, only to have them rejected by Lennon and McCartney. The tense atmosphere at Twickenham fuelled another All Things Must Pass song, "Wah-Wah", which Harrison wrote in the wake of his temporary departure from the band on 10 January 1969. "Run of the Mill" followed soon afterwards, its lyrics focusing on the failure of friendships within the Beatles amid the business problems surrounding their Apple organisation. Harrison's musical activities outside the band during 1969 inspired other compositions on the album: "What Is Life" came to him while driving to a London session that spring for Preston's That's the Way God Planned It album; "Behind That Locked Door" was Harrison's message of encouragement to Dylan, written the night before the latter's comeback performance at the Isle of Wight Festival; and Harrison began "My Sweet Lord" as an exercise in writing a gospel song during Delaney & Bonnie's stopover in Copenhagen in December 1969.

"I Dig Love" resulted from Harrison's early experiments with slide guitar, a technique that Bramlett had introduced him to, in order to cover for guitarist Dave Mason's departure from the Friends line-up. Other songs on All Things Must Pass, all written during the first half of 1970, include "Awaiting on You All", which reflected Harrison's adoption of chanting through his involvement with the Hare Krishna movement; "Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll)", a tribute to the original owner of Friar Park; and "Beware of Darkness". The latter was another composition influenced by Harrison's association with the Radha Krishna Temple, and was written while some of the devotees were staying with him at Friar Park.

Shortly before beginning work on All Things Must Pass, Harrison attended a Dylan session in New York on 1 May 1970, during which he acquired a new song of Dylan's, "If Not for You". Harrison wrote "Apple Scruffs", which was one of a number of Dylan-influenced compositions on the album, towards the end of production on All Things Must Pass, as a tribute to the diehard fans who had kept a vigil outside the studios where he was working.

According to Leng, All Things Must Pass represents the completion of Harrison's "musical-philosophical circle", in which his 1966–68 immersion in Indian music found a Western equivalent in gospel music. While identifying hard rock, country and western, and Motown among the other genres on the album, Leng writes of the "plethora of new sounds and influences" that Harrison had absorbed through 1969 and now incorporated, including "Krishna chants, gospel ecstasy, Southern blues-rock [and] slide guitar". The melodies of "Isn't It a Pity" and "Beware of Darkness" have aspects of Indian classical music, and on "My Sweet Lord", Harrison combined the Hindu bhajan tradition with gospel. The recurrent lyrical themes on the album are Harrison's spiritual quest, as it would be throughout his solo career, and friendship, particularly the failure of relationships among the Beatles. Rob Mitchum of Pitchfork Media describes the album as "dark-tinged Krishna folk-rock".

Apple Jam

On the original LP's third disc, entitled Apple Jam, four of the five tracks – "Out of the Blue", "Plug Me In", "I Remember Jeep" and "Thanks for the Pepperoni" – are improvised instrumentals built around minimal chord changes, or in the case of "Out of the Blue", a single-chord riff. The title for "I Remember Jeep" originated from the name of Clapton's dog, Jeep, and "Thanks for the Pepperoni" came from a line on a Lenny Bruce comedy album. In a December 2000 interview with Billboard magazine, Harrison explained: "For the jams, I didn't want to just throw [them] in the cupboard, and yet at the same time it wasn't part of the record; that's why I put it on a separate label to go in the package as a kind of bonus."

The only vocal selection on Apple Jam is "It's Johnny's Birthday", sung to the tune of Cliff Richard's 1968 hit "Congratulations", and recorded as a gift from Harrison to Lennon to mark the latter's 30th birthday. Like all the "free" tracks on the bonus disc, "It's Johnny's Birthday" carried a Harrison songwriting credit on the original UK release of All Things Must Pass, while on the first US copies, the only songwriting information on the record's face labels was the standard inclusion of a performing rights organisation, BMI. In December 1970, "Congratulations" songwriters Bill Martin and Phil Coulter claimed for royalties, with the result that the composer's credit for Harrison's track was swiftly changed to acknowledge Martin and Coulter.

Demo tracks and outtakes

Aside from the seventeen compositions issued on discs one and two of the original album, Harrison recorded at least twenty other songs – either in demo form for Spector's benefit, just before recording got officially under way in late May, or as outtakes from the sessions. In a 1992 interview, Harrison commented on the volume of material: "I didn't have many tunes on Beatles records, so doing an album like All Things Must Pass was like going to the bathroom and letting it out." As well as "Wah-Wah", "Art of Dying" and others that would soon be developed in a band setting, Harrison's solo performance for Spector included the following songs, all of which remain unreleased:

Also from this performance were two tracks that Harrison returned to in later years. "Beautiful Girl" appeared on his 1976 album Thirty Three & 1/3, and the Dylan-written "I Don't Want to Do It" was Harrison's contribution to the soundtrack for Porky's Revenge! (1985).

During the main sessions for All Things Must Pass, Harrison taped or routined early versions of "You", "Try Some, Buy Some" and "When Every Song Is Sung". Harrison offered these three songs to Ronnie Spector in February 1971 for her proposed (and soon abandoned) solo album on Apple Records. After releasing his own versions of "Try Some, Buy Some" and "You" between 1973 and 1975, he offered "When Every Song Is Sung" (since retitled "I'll Still Love You") to former bandmate Ringo Starr for his 1976 album Ringo's Rotogravure. "Woman Don't You Cry for Me", written in December 1969 as his first slide-guitar composition, was another song that Harrison revisited on Thirty Three & 1/3. Harrison included "I Live for You" as the only all-new bonus track on the 2001 reissue of All Things Must Pass. "Down to the River" remained unused until he reworked it as "Rocking Chair in Hawaii" for his final studio album, the posthumously released Brainwashed (2002).

Harrison recorded the following compositions during the All Things Must Pass sessions but they have never received an official release:

Contributing musicians

The precise line-up of contributing musicians is open to conjecture. Due to the album's big sound and the many participants on the sessions, commentators have traditionally referred to the grand, orchestral nature of this line-up. In 2002, music critic Greg Kot described it as "a who's who of the decade's rock royalty", while Harris writes of the cast taking on "a Cecil B. De Mille aspect".

The musicians included Bobby Whitlock, Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, Bobby Keys, Jim Price and Dave Mason, all of whom had recently toured with Delaney & Bonnie. Along with Eric Clapton, there were also musicians whose link with Harrison went back some years, such as Ringo Starr and Billy Preston, and German bassist Klaus Voormann, formerly of Manfred Mann and a friend since the Beatles' years in Hamburg. Handling much of the keyboard work with Whitlock was Gary Wright, who went on to collaborate regularly with Harrison throughout the 1970s.

From within Apple's stable of musicians, Harrison recruited the band Badfinger, future Yes drummer Alan White, and Beatles assistant Mal Evans on percussion. Badfinger drummer Mike Gibbins' powerful tambourine work led to Spector giving him the nickname "Mr Tambourine Man", after the Dylan song, while bandmates Pete Ham, Tom Evans and Joey Molland provided rhythm acoustic-guitar parts that, in keeping with Spector's Wall of Sound principles, were to be "felt but not heard". Orchestral arranger John Barham also sat in on the sessions, occasionally contributing on harmonium and vibraphone. Other guests included Nashville pedal steel player Pete Drake, Procol Harum's Gary Brooker and a pre-Genesis Phil Collins. An uncredited Peter Frampton played acoustic guitar on the country tracks featuring Drake.

For contractual reasons, on UK pressings of All Things Must Pass, Clapton's participation on the first two discs of the album remained unacknowledged for many years, although he was listed among the musicians appearing on the Apple Jam disc in Britain. Harrison was unaware of Collins's contribution until putting together the 30th anniversary reissue of the album in 2000, at which point he offered Collins his belated thanks. Clapton's former bandmate in Cream and Blind Faith, Ginger Baker, participated in the session for "I Remember Jeep" only, according to the album's sleeve notes.

Simon Leng consulted Voormann, Barham, Molland and Delaney Bramlett for his chapter covering the making of All Things Must Pass and credits Tony Ashton as one of the keyboard players on both versions of "Isn't It a Pity". Unsubstantiated claims exist regarding possible guest appearances from John Lennon, Maurice Gibb and Pink Floyd's Richard Wright. In addition, for some years after the album's release, rumours claimed that the Band backed Harrison on the country-influenced "Behind That Locked Door".

Initial recording

The date for Harrison's run-through of songs for Spector, at Abbey Road Studios, is generally thought to have been 20 May 1970, the same day as the Let It Be film's world premiere, with recording sessions beginning on 26 May. With assistance from former Beatles engineers