Song Lyric of the Day (George Harrison, on Transient Existence—and Bands?)

“All things must pass

None of life's strings can last.”—George Harrison, “All Things Must Pass,” from his three-album All Things Must Pass (1970)

How on earth did “quiet Beatle” George Harrison make the loudest splash among his ex-bandmates as a solo artist in 1970?  Perhaps Phil Spector asked if he’d like to collaborate on an album, and hearing Harrison’s response—“Yeah, yeah, yeah!”—the producer, who habitually layered two more instruments on one already in the mix for his “Wall of Sound," interpreted each “Yeah” as worth a whole album.

My explanation, in case you haven’t figured it out already, is a stretch. But nobody would greet it with the kind of astonishment, even incredulity, that awaited Harrison’s All Things Must Pass upon its release in the U.S. 45 years ago today. Nobody could have guessed that the Beatles’ lead guitarist, even after a few recent songs with his old band like “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Something,” had that much material waiting to burst out.

Nobody, that is, except that part of the Beatles’ inner circle who knew that principal songwriters Paul McCartney and John Lennon (particularly the latter) had repeatedly rejected their bandmate’s work. (Both the title track of Harrison’s new work and “Isn’t It a Pity” had been recorded for Abbey Road, but left off the final release—a shame, really, since either could have replaced “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and strengthened an already great album into something more.)

I wrote a post on All Things Must Pass five years ago, but my fascination continues and more can still be said about the circumstances revolving around its release.

In the wake of the quartet’s acrimonious front-page dissolution early in the year, many fans interpreted the song as a commentary on the long and ending road for the group. But Harrison’s own explanation for the song’s evolution—that it grew out of a translation of a poem in the Tao Te Ching by Timothy Leary—makes more sense.

The year 1970 was marked by the release of a number of classic albums: James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon, Van Morrison’s Moondance, CSNY’s Déjà vu, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water—and that hardly even exhausts the list. But even among such distinguished company, All Things Must Pass stands out.

Of course, for a work that sprawling, a good part of it is uneven (notably the jam session recordings). But All Things Must Pass gave Harrison, one of rock ‘n’ roll’s great guitarists, his own voice at last, with an identity as the group’s spiritual seeker. He was also rewarded with success—topping the charts for seven weeks, sparked by the singles “My Sweet Lord” and “What Is Life?”—and notices that must have galled the competitive and highly territorial Lennon and McCartney, including the headline, “Maybe George Was Always the Most Talented After All.”

(On the “Pop Matters” blog, Sam Buntz offers an interesting post comparing All Things Must Pass and Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band as the best Beatles solo LPs.)

Far more has passed since 1970 than the Beatles, or even Harrison himself. So have the album cover as photographic art, the notion of an album itself serving as a Grand Artistic Statement, or even commercial free-form FM stations that mine “deep album cuts” that become as memorable a listening experience as singles.

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.