Song Lyric of the Day (George Harrison, on Why “This Grey” Will Pass)

“Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
It's not always going to be this grey
All things must pass, all things must pass away.”—George Harrison, “All Things Must Pass,” from his All Things Must Pass LP (1970)

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the release of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. If “the quiet Beatle” wanted to be noticed, after half a dozen years of standing in the shadow of bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney, he couldn’t have picked a more spectacular way of doing so than with this, the world’s first triple album.

The size of this song package surprised everyone, but it shouldn’t have. Lennon and McCartney were such intense rivals that Harrison could get, at most, only two of his compositions onto a single Fab Four album.

In the couple of years before the release of All Things Must Pass, Harrison began to chafe at these creative constraints. Not only were most of his compositions rejected by Lennon and McCartney (ironically so, given that two of the Beatles' best later songs, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Something," were written by him), but the control-freak McCartney also limited Harrison's guitar contributions in the studio, leading “the quiet one” to quit the group for a short while. (By the time he rejoined, of course, the tensions between McCartney and Lennon that finally rent the Fab Four asunder had replaced the McCartney-Harrison faceoff as the principal focus of intragroup unease.)

Was all the material that Harrison mined for this epic work consistently good? Not anymore than another triple album a decade later, by an artist who loved one of his late Beatles songs (“Something”) so much that he covered it himself: Frank Sinatra, whose Trilogy was rightly judged by deejay Jonathan Schwartz as two-thirds amazing and one-third--well, never mind.

But in sheer ambition—something that late Sixties and Seventies rock ‘n’ roll certainly didn’t lack—nothing could top All Things Must Pass, and it was amply rewarded at the cash register. For the first half of the Seventies, you really couldn’t listen to any album-oriented rock programming without hearing one of its tracks--not merely the hits “My Sweet Lord” and “What Is Life”, but deeper cuts like “Apple Scruffs,” “Isn’t It a Pity,” “Awaiting on You All,” “Wah-Wah,” “If Not for You,” or the title track.

Heavily colored by Harrison’s belief in Hinduism (he’d persuaded the other Beatles to journey to India to meet the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi), the album cried out for otherworldly musical textures. He found these with the help of producer Phil Spector, whose career, before his association with the Beatles on the chaotic “Let It Be” sessions, earned from Tom Wolfe the moniker “The First Tycoon of Teen.” Spector’s style came to be called “the wall of sound,” but in size and the urge to overcome all limits, it might just as easily have been called “the galaxy of sound.” Now Harrison provided him themes commensurate with his Wagnerian aims.

It was inevitable, given the Beatles’ recent breakup, that the title tune would be read by some as an oblique commentary on the end of the great musical partnership of the Sixties. Harrison’s own religious beliefs provide an alternative reading: as acceptance of the universe born out of resignation over the transitory nature of human reality.

But it is also possible to see the song, like two others released that year--The Beatles’ “Let It Be” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”--as offers of emotional consolation, outgrowths of a time in which, for Harrison, McCartney and Paul Simon, turbulence with musical partners matched disruption in the larger world. All three songs feel like hymns.

Recent events in my life have led me to see “Let It Be” and “All Things Must Pass,” at some level, as also relating to mortality. McCartney, who lost his mother to cancer as a teenager (a point of emotional connection with Lennon, who also lost his mother in the same period), explicitly notes in "Let It Be" that in “times of trouble,” “Mother Mary comes to me.”

Several days ago, after not having heard “All Things Must Pass” in awhile, I listened to it again, with initial foreboding over whether it would depress me as a reminder of my own recent loss. I was surprised not only that this did not occur, but that I felt uplifted by the closing chords of the song.

Loss does come, Harrison reminds us, but it’s as inevitable as natural events. Death and even love (the singer’s wife Patti had plunged into an affair with friend Eric Clapton that would eventually doom their marriage) might appear, but the darkness of grief--“this grey“--will not linger for good.

Harrison was only in his late twenties when he wrote this, and from all accounts I’ve read, the sense of spiritual peace he expressed on this song and throughout the rest of this album--the bestselling solo work, incidentally, by any of the Beatles--served him in good stead three decades later, when he was dying of cancer.