For most of the 1960s, George Harrison was the most talented songwriter in the world with nowhere to put his songs. The Beatles’ albums had room for two, maybe three Harrison compositions; the rest went into a drawer. By 1970 the drawer was overflowing, the band was finished, and the “quiet Beatle” had something to prove. What he did with that backlog was audacious beyond precedent: a triple album — two LPs of songs plus a third disc of loose jams — co-produced with Phil Spector, played by half the rock aristocracy of London, and crowned with a prayer that became the biggest solo hit any ex-Beatle ever had.
“All Things Must Pass” was not just an album. It was a jailbreak.
The Backlog
The songs had been piling up for years. “All Things Must Pass” itself had been written in 1968 and demoed by the Beatles, then shelved. “Isn’t It a Pity” dated back to 1966 and had been offered up and passed over more than once. “Wah-Wah” was written in January 1969, on the afternoon Harrison walked out of the “Get Back” sessions at Twickenham — a blistering dismissal of the whole suffocating scene. “My Sweet Lord” had been sketched in December 1969 on a harmonium, slipped away from a press conference. “What Is Life,” “Beware of Darkness,” “Awaiting on You All,” “Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp” (about the eccentric Victorian who built Friar Park), “Apple Scruffs” (about the devoted fans who camped outside Apple’s offices) — a songwriter’s life, stockpiled.
Harrison knew what he had. In early 1970, frustrated as much as anything, he played his stockpile of demos for Phil Spector at Friar Park. Spector — fresh from his controversial rescue job on the Beatles’ “Get Back” tapes, soon to be released as “Let It Be” — heard a catalog, not an album. The two men agreed: this would be big. Three records big.
Thirty Songs in Two Days
The sessions began at EMI Studios in London on May 26, 1970 — just six weeks after the April announcement of the Beatles’ breakup. On the first day, Harrison ran through fifteen songs backed by Ringo Starr on drums and his old Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann on bass, starting with the title track. On the second day, he played fifteen more for Spector. Thirty demos in two days, including songs that would not make the album — “Cosmic Empire,” “Going Down to Golders Green,” “Dehra Dun,” “Sour Milk Sea,” “Mother Divine” — most of them unheard publicly until the 50th anniversary Super Deluxe Edition collected them in 2021.
It was the sound of a dam breaking. Harrison had spent a decade getting two songs per album. Now he was recording thirty in forty-eight hours, and he was just getting started.
Spector’s Wall of Sound
Spector brought his Wall of Sound and rebuilt it for rock: multiple pianos, layers of acoustic guitars, doubled drums, and John Barham’s sweeping orchestral arrangements. The sessions sprawled from May through October 1970 across EMI, Trident, and Apple studios, with Harrison co-producing and engineers Ken Scott and Phil McDonald riding herd on the chaos.
The sound was enormous — some would later say too enormous — and Harrison would spend years with mixed feelings about Spector’s heavy hand. But in 1970, the sheer scale was the point. After years of being mixed low in the Beatles, Harrison was going to be mixed like a cathedral. When the 50th anniversary remix arrived in 2021, executive-produced by his son Dhani and mixed by Paul Hicks, it fulfilled Harrison’s longtime wish to let the songs breathe a little more. The original, though, remains a monument: the biggest-sounding debut in rock history, because its maker had the biggest backlog.
The Cast of Thousands
The personnel list for “All Things Must Pass” reads like the guest book of rock royalty. Eric Clapton — uncredited for contractual reasons, but all over the record. Ringo Starr. Klaus Voormann. Billy Preston. Gary Wright. Dave Mason. Pete Drake, the Nashville pedal steel master. Bobby Whitlock, Carl Radle, and Jim Gordon — the Delaney & Bonnie crew. All four members of Badfinger on acoustic guitars and percussion. Gary Brooker of Procol Harum. Bobby Keys and Jim Price, the horn section. Future Yes drummer Alan White. A young, pre-Genesis Phil Collins on congas, uncredited. A young Peter Frampton on acoustic guitar, uncredited. John Barham on orchestral arrangements, harmonium, and vibraphone.
It was less a backing band than a coronation crowd — the musicians of London gathering to witness what the quiet one had been holding back. And the sessions were joyful in a way Beatles sessions had not been in years. Harrison was among friends, playing songs he loved, with nobody telling him to turn down.
The Band Born in the Sessions
Something historic happened in the middle of all that joy. Clapton, Whitlock, Radle, and Gordon — the core of the Delaney & Bonnie touring band — bonded during the “All Things Must Pass” sessions at Apple’s studio and decided to become a band of their own. They called themselves Derek and the Dominos. Harrison even supplied guitar overdubs to their Spector-produced debut single sides, “Tell the Truth” and “Roll It Over.” Within months, the Dominos would record “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” — with Whitlock co-writing several songs — and rock history would have one of its greatest one-album bands.
It is a delicious footnote: the most famous “supergroup” accident of the era was born as the backing band for the quiet Beatle’s solo debut. Harrison did not just set himself free with these sessions. He set Clapton free too.
The Songs in the Drawer
The hits get the glory, but the album’s soul is in the songs Harrison had been carrying longest. “Isn’t It a Pity” — written as far back as 1966, rejected by the Beatles more than once — finally got its seven minutes, appearing in two versions on the record, as if Harrison could not decide which shade of heartbreak he preferred. It became the double A-side of “My Sweet Lord” in America, which tells you everything about his confidence: he was pairing his biggest hit with a song his old band had not wanted.
“Beware of Darkness” is the album’s spiritual warning label, a hymn about the traps waiting for the newly famous. “Awaiting on You All” is its furious counterpart — Harrison railing against organized religion and the establishment with a garage band’s snarl. “Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp” is a music-hall tribute to the eccentric Victorian lawyer who built Friar Park, all wheezing harmonium and affection. And “Apple Scruffs” is a love letter to the fans who stood outside Apple’s Savile Row offices in all weather, the only people, Harrison implied, who had never asked him to be anyone but himself. Each one had waited years for its moment. Each one sounds like it was worth the wait.
Then and Now
On release, “All Things Must Pass” was greeted as an event — the reviews were rapturous, the sales enormous, and for a while Harrison was, by acclamation, the ex-Beatle who had won the breakup. Over the decades, the album’s reputation has only grown. It is routinely ranked among the greatest albums of all time, and the 2021 50th anniversary Super Deluxe Edition — with its revelatory demos and Paul Hicks’s luminous remix — introduced it to a generation that had only known the legend.
What the reissue made clear is how much of the album was Harrison alone: the demos, just his voice and guitar, are as compelling as the Spectorized epics. The wall of sound was the celebration. The songs were the substance. Fifty years on, “All Things Must Pass” sounds less like a debut than a deliverance — the record where a sideman became a statesman.
Gnomes on the Lawn
The packaging became a talking point in its own right. The stark black-and-white cover photograph was taken on the main lawn at Friar Park by the American photographer Barry Feinstein: Harrison seated on a stool, glum-looking, towering over four comical garden gnomes. Commentators have read it ever since as a statement on his independence — the ex-Beatle literally sitting apart from, and above, four little figures that could not help reminding everyone of his old band. Harrison never confirmed the reading, which only made it better.
It was rock’s first triple album by a single act — the multi-artist Woodstock live set had preceded it by six months — and the first boxed triple album in popular music. The third disc, “Apple Jam,” was a collection of informal studio jams, a shrug of an ending that said: we had so much music we did not know what to do with it all. After a decade of rationing, Harrison was wasting songs on purpose, and it felt glorious.
“My Sweet Lord” and “What Is Life”
The album’s initial single, “My Sweet Lord,” made Harrison the first ex-Beatle to have a solo number one in both Britain and America — four weeks at the top in the US, five in the UK. A prayer set to a pop melody, blending “hallelujah” with the Hare Krishna mantra, it was the least likely chart-topper imaginable and the most inevitable: the sound of a man finally singing exactly what he believed.
“What Is Life” followed as the second single in most territories — the B-side of “My Sweet Lord” in the UK, its own single in America with “Apple Scruffs” on the flip — and became a top-ten hit in the US and Canada, topping the charts in Australia and Switzerland. Harrison’s backing musicians on the track included Clapton and the entire Delaney & Bonnie Friends band, with Barham’s strings and Badfinger’s banks of acoustic guitars stacked high in Spector’s wall. Decades later, Olivia and Dhani Harrison held an online competition for filmmakers to create an official video for the song; the winner, Brandon Moore of Oakland, California, filmed dancers of the San Francisco Ballet interpreting the song’s joy in the streets and woods of the San Francisco Presidio. The song kept finding new ways to move.
The album itself topped the charts around the world and has been certified multi-platinum. For one shining moment, the quiet Beatle was the biggest solo artist on the planet — bigger than John, bigger than Paul. The drawer was empty. The point was made.
“All Things Must Pass” endures because it is the sound of liberation — not just Harrison’s, but the idea of liberation itself. Every songwriter who has ever been told there is no room for their songs, every sideman who has ever been told to turn down, can hear themselves in it. Harrison took a decade of rejection and turned it into three records, a prayer, a wall of sound, and four garden gnomes. He never made a bigger statement, because he never needed to. He had said it all, at last, at full volume. The quiet Beatle, it turned out, had been the loudest one all along — he was just waiting for his turn.
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