All Things Must Pass
All Things Must Pass is the third studio album by the English rock musician George Harrison. Released as a triple album in November 1970, it was Harrison's first solo work after the break-up of the Beatles in April that year. It includes the hit singles "My Sweet Lord" and "What Is Life", as well as songs such as "Isn't It a Pity" and the title track that had been overlooked for inclusion on releases by the Beatles. The album reflects the influence of Harrison's musical activities with artists such as Bob Dylan, the Band, Delaney & Bonnie and Friends and Billy Preston during 1968–70, and his growth as an artist beyond his supporting role to former bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney. All Things Must Pass introduced Harrison's signature slide guitar sound and the spiritual themes present throughout his subsequent solo work. The original vinyl release consisted of two LPs of songs and a third disc of informal jams titled Apple Jam. Several commentators interpret Barry Feinstein's album cover photo, showing Harrison surrounded by four garden gnomes, as a statement on his independence from the Beatles.
This article is about the album. For the album's title song, see All Things Must Pass (song). For other uses, see All Things Must Pass (disambiguation).All Things Must Pass
27 November 1970
May–October 1970
106:00
Production began at London's EMI Studios in May 1970, with extensive overdubbing and mixing continuing through October. Among the large cast of backing musicians were Eric Clapton and members of Delaney & Bonnie's Friends band – three of whom formed Derek and the Dominos with Clapton during the recording – as well as Ringo Starr, Gary Wright, Billy Preston, Klaus Voormann, John Barham, Badfinger and Pete Drake. The sessions produced a double album's worth of extra material, most of which remains unissued.
All Things Must Pass was critically and commercially successful on release, with long stays at number one on charts worldwide. Co-producer Phil Spector employed his Wall of Sound production technique to notable effect; Ben Gerson of Rolling Stone described the sound as "Wagnerian, Brucknerian, the music of mountain tops and vast horizons".[2] Reflecting the widespread surprise at the assuredness of Harrison's post-Beatles debut, Melody Maker's Richard Williams likened the album to Greta Garbo's first role in a talking picture and declared: "Garbo talks! – Harrison is free!"[3] According to Colin Larkin, writing in the 2011 edition of his Encyclopedia of Popular Music, All Things Must Pass is "generally rated" as the best of all the former Beatles' solo albums.[4]
During the final year of his life, Harrison oversaw a successful reissue campaign to mark the 30th anniversary of the album's release. After this reissue, the Recording Industry Association of America certified the album six-times platinum. It has since been certified seven-times platinum, with at least 7 million albums sold. Among its appearances on critics' best-album lists, All Things Must Pass was ranked 79th on The Times' "The 100 Best Albums of All Time" in 1993, while Rolling Stone placed it 368th on the magazine's 2023 update of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2014, All Things Must Pass was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Artwork[edit]
Harrison commissioned Tom Wilkes to design a hinged box in which to house the three vinyl discs, rather than have them packaged in a triple gatefold cover.[91] Apple insider Tony Bramwell later recalled: "It was a bloody big thing ... You needed arms like an orang-utan to carry half a dozen."[144] The packaging caused some confusion among retailers, who, at that time, associated boxed albums with opera or classical works.[144]
The stark black-and-white cover photo was taken on the main lawn at Friar Park[73] by Wilkes' Camouflage Productions partner, Barry Feinstein.[91] Commentators interpret the photograph – showing Harrison seated in the centre of, and towering over, four comical-looking garden gnomes – as representing his removal from the Beatles' collective identity.[231][232] The gnomes had recently been delivered to Friar Park and placed on the lawn;[233] seeing the four figures there, and mindful of the message in the album's title, Feinstein immediately drew parallels with Harrison's former band.[144] Author and music journalist Mikal Gilmore has written that Lennon's initial negativity regarding All Things Must Pass was possibly because he was "irritated" by this cover photo;[200] Harrison biographer Elliot Huntley attributes Lennon's reaction to envy during a time when "everything [Harrison] touched turned to gold".[234][nb 20]
Apple included a poster with the album, showing Harrison in a darkened corridor of his home, standing in front of an iron-framed window.[238] Wilkes had designed a more adventurous poster, but according to Beatles author Bruce Spizer, Harrison was uncomfortable with the imagery.[239][nb 21] Some of the Feinstein photographs that Wilkes had incorporated into this original poster design appeared instead on the picture sleeves for the "My Sweet Lord" single and its follow-up, "What Is Life".[91]
Release[edit]
Impact[edit]
EMI and its US counterpart, Capitol Records, had originally scheduled the album for release in October 1970, and advance promotion began in September.[184] An "intangible buzz" had been "in the air for months" regarding Harrison's solo album, according to Alan Clayson, and "for reasons other than still-potent loyalty to the Fab Four".[240] Harrison's stature as an artist had grown over the past year through the acclaim afforded his songs on Abbey Road,[241][242] as well as the speculation caused by his and Dylan's joint recording session in New York.[243] Noting also Harrison's role in popularising new acts such as the Band and Delaney & Bonnie, and his association with Clapton and Cream, NME critic Bob Woffinden concluded in 1981: "All in all, Harrison's credibility was building to a peak."[241]
Critical reception[edit]
Contemporary reviews[edit]
All Things Must Pass received almost universal critical acclaim on release[275] – as much for the music and lyrical content as for the fact that, of all the former Beatles, it was the work of supposed junior partner George Harrison.[3][225][276] Harrison had usually contributed just two songs to a Beatles album;[277] in author Robert Rodriguez's description, critics' attention was now centred on "a major talent unleashed, one who'd been hidden in plain sight all those years" behind Lennon and McCartney. "That the Quiet Beatle was capable of such range", Rodriguez continues, "from the joyful 'What Is Life' to the meditative 'Isn't It a Pity' to the steamrolling 'Art of Dying' to the playful 'I Dig Love' – was revelatory."[278] Most reviewers tended to discount the third disc of studio jams, accepting that it was a "free" addition to justify the set's high retail price,[89][142] although Anthony DeCurtis recognises Apple Jam as further evidence of the album's "bracing air of creative liberation".[279][nb 27]
Ben Gerson of Rolling Stone deemed All Things Must Pass "both an intensely personal statement and a grandiose gesture, a triumph over artistic modesty"[2] and referenced the three-record set as an "extravaganza of piety and sacrifice and joy, whose sheer magnitude and ambition may dub it the War and Peace of rock 'n' roll".[281] Gerson also lauded the album's production as being "of classic Spectorian proportions, Wagnerian, Brucknerian, the music of mountain tops and vast horizons".[2][282] In the NME, Alan Smith referred to Harrison's songs as "music of the mind", adding: "they search and they wander, as if in the soft rhythms of a dream, and in the end he has set them to words which are often both profound and profoundly beautiful."[97] Billboard's reviewer hailed All Things Must Pass as "a masterful blend of rock and piety, technical brilliance and mystic mood, and relief from the tedium of everyday rock".[283]
Melody Maker's Richard Williams summed up the surprise many felt at Harrison's apparent transformation: All Things Must Pass, he said, provided "the rock equivalent of the shock felt by pre-war moviegoers when Garbo first opened her mouth in a talkie: Garbo talks! – Harrison is free!"[3] In another review, for The Times, Williams opined that, of all the Beatles' solo releases thus far, Harrison's album "makes far and away the best listening, perhaps because it is the one which most nearly continues the tradition they began eight years ago".[276][nb 28] William Bender of Time magazine described it as an "expressive, classically executed personal statement ... one of the outstanding rock albums in years", while Tom Zito of The Washington Post predicted that it would influence the discourse on "the [real] genius behind the Beatles".[286]
In The New York Times, Don Heckman deemed the album "a release that shouldn't be missed"[286] and outlined his "complex" reaction to being presented with a sequence of Harrison songs for the first time: "amazement at the range of Harrison's talents; fascination at the effects of Phil Spector's participation as the album's producer; curiosity about the many messages that waft through the Harrison songs".[287] John Gabree of High Fidelity described it as "the big album of the year" and a "unified yet tremendously varied" work. In response to rumours that the Beatles were due to reunite, Gabree said that, on the strength of the Harrison and Lennon solo albums, "I, for one, don't care if they ever do."[288]