Each month we will be checkin what we feel
is an album that definitky may be worth revisiting. Sometimes
it is easy to forget how great some of these releases were. Many of
them went on to have signifigant influence on the music of
today. When going back and checking them out again you will
often find forgotten brilliance and just maybe it will give you
a new spark of inspiration for creating something awesome
on your own. (-: Thanks to
Wikapedia
Recorded
and released in 1970, the album was Harrison's first
solo work since the break-up of The Beatles in April
that year. The original vinyl release featured two LPs
of rock songs as well as Apple Jam, a third disc of informal
jams.Often credited as rock's first triple album, it
was in fact the first by a single act, the multi-artist
Woodstock live set having preceded it by six months.
In regards to the album's size, Harrison
stated: "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." The album was
critically acclaimed and, with long stays at number 1 in
both the US and the UK, commercially successful. It was
certified 6x platinum by the Recording Industry Association
of America in 2001.
Background
Harrison had been accumulating
the songs he recorded for the album as far back as 1966;
the composition of both "Art of Dying" and "Isn't
It a Pity" dates from that year. He picked up several
more songs in late 1968 while visiting Bob Dylan and The
Band in Woodstock, New York. Harrison and Dylan co-wrote "I'd
Have You Anytime" and "Nowhere to Go" (also
known as "When Everybody Comes to Town") at this
time, and Dylan showed him "I Don't Want to Do It".
All three songs were attempted at some point in the sessions
for All Things Must Pass, but only "I'd Have You Anytime" was
included in the album. |
|
The January 1969 Get Back sessions saw
early appearances of several other songs that would be considered
for All Things Must Pass, including the title track, "Hear Me Lord", "Isn't
It a Pity", "Let It Down" and "Window, Window",
but nothing came of them at the time. The tense atmosphere fuelled
another song, "Wah-Wah", which Harrison wrote in the
wake of his temporary departure from the band. He began writing "My
Sweet Lord" while touring with Delaney & Bonnie in late
1969, and would later utilize their backing group "Friends" as
an important part of the All Things Must Pass sound. He made
one last detour before beginning work on All Things Must Pass,
visiting Dylan while the latter was starting sessions for New
Morning in May 1970, learning "If Not for You" and
participating in a now-bootlegged session.
Production
Harrison recorded the album from
May to August 1970 at Abbey Road Studios, and then further
recorded and mixed it at Trident Studios from August to September
1970. Harrison enlisted the aid of Phil Spector to co-produce
the album, giving All Things Must Pass a heavy and reverb-oriented
sound, typical for a 1960s/1970s Spector production — a sound Harrison would subsequently
regret with the passage of time. In the electronic press kit
that accompanies the 30th Anniversary reissue, Harrison is asked
what he thinks of the album 30 years later; he replied: "Too
much echo."
In late May, just before recording got
under way, Harrison sat in a studio with Spector and ran through
15 songs on guitar, with occasional support from an unknown
bass player. These demos (eventually bootlegged as Beware of
ABKCO! due to an altered line in his performance of "Beware of Darkness") showed
him in the process of weighing up his material, as eight of the
songs would either be substantially reworked or not appear on
the finished album. Among these early outtakes, three have been
officially released in one form or another: "Everybody,
Nobody" was an early version of "Ballad of Sir Frankie
Crisp", "Beautiful Girl" would be finished for
1976's Thirty Three & 1/3, and "I Don't Want to Do It" would
wait fifteen years until being revisited for the soundtrack of
Porky's Revenge. Five other songs − "Cosmic Empire", "Mother
Divine", "Nowhere to Go", "Tell Me What Has
Happened With You" and "Window, Window" − have
not seen official release, along with other tracks such as "Gopala
Krishna" and "Dehradun" that likewise did not
make the final cut. Two demos of songs that did make the
album, "Beware of Darkness" and "Let It Down",
would eventually be released on the remastered All Things Must
Pass in 2001, the second of these tracks with recent overdubs
recorded by Harrison at Friar Park.
Precise line-up is still the subject of much
conjecture
Full discs of electric outtakes from
the recording sessions would also leak onto bootlegs in later
years, and two of those tracks were also included in the remaster.
Multiple takes of songs from the album appear on a bootleg three-disc
box set titled The Making of All Things Must Pass and on other
unofficial releases.
|
Musicians involved in the
recording were numerous and the precise line-up is still
the subject of much conjecture.
They included Eric Clapton,
Bobby Whitlock, Jim Gordon and Carl Radle, all of whom
had recently toured with Delaney & Bonnie and would morph into the short-lived
Derek and the Dominos during these sessions; German bassist
Klaus Voormann, a friend since The Beatles' Hamburg days;
future Yes drummer Alan White; Ringo Starr; all four members
of Badfinger; keyboard players Billy Preston, Gary Brooker
and Gary Wright; Nashville pedal steel player Pete Drake;
and the former Delaney & Bonnie (now Rolling Stones)
horn section of Bobby Keys and Jim Price.Orchestral arranger
John Barham also sat in on the sessions, occasionally contributing
on harmonium and vibraphone.
A young, pre-Genesis Phil
Collins played congas on "Art of Dying", but
was not credited on the original release (an oversight
that was fixed on the 2001 remaster). |
Bob Dylan, a close friend of Harrison,
co-wrote "I'd Have
You Anytime" with him, while Harrison covered Dylan's "If
Not For You", which would be released on Dylan's concurrent
album, New Morning. Alan White stated that John Lennon may have
played on "If Not For You". Maurice Gibb was also
present during the All Things Must Pass sessions, having been
a friend of Starr's, and is said to have played keyboards on "Isn't
It a Pity", although there is no definitive evidence as
to which version.In an 18 October 2009 BBC Radio 2 interview,
tape op John Leckie claimed that Richard Wright of Pink Floyd
contributed organ, but he receives no acknowledgment on the album
either.[citation needed] In addition to these unconfirmed participants,
author Simon Leng, having consulted the likes of Voormann and
Barham for his study of the making of All Things Must Pass, credits
Tony Ashton as one of the keyboard players on both versions of "Isn't
It a Pity".
Album artwork
Being the first boxed triple
album in popular music, the packaging for All Things Must Pass
became a talking point in its own right. Apple insider Tony
Bramwell later recalled: "It
was a bloody big thing ... You needed arms like an orang-utan
to carry half a dozen."
The stark black-and-white cover photo was
taken on the main lawn at Friar Park[28] by Barry Feinstein.
Its composition − Harrison
seated in the centre of, and towering over, four comical-looking
garden gnomes − is often thought to represent his removal
from The Beatles' collective identity, if not a degree of superiority
over it. Ever competitive, and noticeably negative
about his former bandmates' solo work around this time (especially
McCartney's), John Lennon is said to have taken particular
offence at the apparent message in Harrison's album cover
(notwithstanding his own declaration regarding The Beatles in
his concurrent song "God"). Lennon sniped that Harrison
looked like "an asthmatic Leon Russell" in the photo;biographer
Alan Clayson describes him as "a spaced-out Farmer
Giles". The inclusion of the gnomes was the photographer's
idea, in fact, but the symbolism was quite deliberate, according
to Feinsten: "What else could it be? ... it was over with
The Beatles, right? And that title − All Things Must Pass.
Very symbolic."
grandeur of liturgical music
More recently, Allmusic views All Things
Must Pass as "his
best ... a very moving work",while MusicHound describes
the set as "epic and audacious". Film-maker Martin
Scorsese has written of the "powerful sense of the ritualistic
on the album ... I remember feeling that it had the grandeur
of liturgical music, of the bells used in Tibetan Buddhist ceremonies."Rolling
Stone's Greg Kot describes this same grandeur as an "echo-laden
cathedral of rock in excelsis" where the "real stars" are
Harrison's songs in the same publication, Mikal Gilmore
calls the album "the finest solo work any ex-Beatle ever
produced".[ John Bergstrom of PopMatters describes All
Things Must Pass as "the sound of Harrison exhaling",
noting: "He was quite possibly the only Beatle who was completely
satisfied with the Beatles being gone." Bergstrom also
credits the album for heavily influencing the likes of ELO, My
Morning Jacket, Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear, as well as helping
bring about the dream pop phenomenon.
In 1999, All Things Must Pass appeared
at number 9 on The Guardian's "Alternative
Top 100 Albums" list, where the editor stated that the album
was the "best, mellowest and most sophisticated" of
The Beatles' solo efforts. In 2012, All Things Must Pass
was voted 433rd on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500
Greatest Albums of All Time".
|