Essay: The Perfect Spring Album: George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass
Released in November of 1970, George Harrison’s triple album All Things Must Pass may seem, at first blush, like the perfect autumn listen: its title track is all about how good things can’t last forever (such as, say, being in the most successful rock band in history) and to accept the passing of even the most beautiful part of anything, be it a life or a day. That’s a decidedly end-of-the-year theme. With a deeper listen, however, I can’t help but think that All Things Must Pass is the perfect spring album, an absolute musical embodiment of new life, filled with exuberance combined with the reassuring message that everything’s unfolding as it should.
To say that All Things Must Pass is a loaded album is a grand understatement. As the first official solo effort by former Beatle Harrison, these twenty-three songs are filled with lyrics not only about Harrison’s then-burgeoning spirituality, but also many that try to reconcile his discontent with his enduring love for his former bandmates. “I don’t need no wah-wah,” he sings in, well, “Wah Wah,” a breakup anthem as fiercely independent as any Beyoncé ditty today. “I know how sweet life can be/if I keep myself free,” he asserts, a sharp and ballsy line from a man formerly known as The Quiet One. In “What Is Life,” he asks, “What is my life without your love? / Tell me, who am I without you by my side?” It’s highly likely that this was a question to God or to his wife, but many times on this album, when Harrison is singing about love, it strikes me as very possible that he’s singing not of romance, but of the deep love you can have with three great friends around whom you’ve built your life, your career, your identity.
By the time he began working on All Things, Harrison had spent months away from the Beatles, hanging out in Woodstock with the likes of Bob Dylan and the Band (whose influence can be heard throughout the album), and those guys took Harrison and his songwriting seriously. The man was ready to do his own thing, but Lennon and McCartney had rejected many of his songs, one of which being “Isn’t It A Pity” (which Harrison includes here, and which, ironically or cheekily enough, expands in its finale into choral echoes of the na-na-na-nas of “Hey Jude”).
Add on top of the album’s underlying fundamental meaning the fact that producer Phil Specter was so drunk for half of its production that at one point he actually fell and broke his arm, plus the fact that Harrison had to keep halting production to go visit his mother, who was dying of cancer, in Liverpool throughout the year. Oh, also, Harrison’s friend Eric Clapton, who was hanging around to work on the album with him, was at that time falling in love with Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, and developed a heroin addiction to deal with his guilt on the matter.
So when you listen to All Things Must Pass, with so many of its songs unfolding into these vast, choral fields of sound, you know its themes of transition and the struggle to accept it are legit in the deepest ways possible.
The Beatles were the greatest band in the world because they found a way to balance all of their members’ strengths, but when they broke up and each member created his own sound, the world saw what they were really made of: John, the serious one, was all brooding, philosophical tunes; McCartney was the cute one, with his almost unbearably catchy, upbeat “Silly Love Songs”; and, well, Ringo was the goofball (see “I’m The Greatest”).
But George was the ultimate middle child, quiet and deep. He had the best odds of creating the most balanced sound on his own, and he does it here. All Things Must Pass sounds like Harrison thinks he might not get another chance: he sweeps in all of his influences. But he was not going to be tied down to one genre; he couldn’t be forced to go all-the-way country with the slide guitar, or down-deep folk with his Dylan-esque harmonica, and he wouldn’t let the rock star in him be tempered even a bit by gospel choirs and Indian sitars; instead, he let them all in and created something utterly original and unequaled, even today.
But it’s in that slide guitar, which would become his signature instrument, that All Things presents itself as the ultimate spring album. This instrument, in Harrison’s hands, is the sound of ecstasy, slipping and sliding around like sunshine on the first seventy-degree day of the year. It sounds like a relief, all patience and aural caresses.
If you’re walking around someday in late March or April or even May, listening to All Things, its opening track “I’d Have You Anytime” will instantly give you those caresses. It is the sleepy, sweet awakening that guides you gently toward “My Sweet Lord.” You know that day in, like, late April when the air and the light feel so wonderful that you just want to run out and go enjoy the world? That’s track five, “What Is Life.” Harrison continues in this pattern of building, searching ballads followed by genre-bending rock songs straight through the entire collection, mimicking the sometimes tumultuous, often blissful nature of spring itself. By the time you reach the final four tracks, all instrumentals on the third disc called Apple Jam, these wordless and epic and vibrant songs are downright fecund.
Because, in the end, the breakup of the Fab Four was the best thing that could have happened to George Harrison. Throughout the bitter winter of the Beatles, as the best band in the world was crumbling to pieces, there was this thing buried beneath the cold, biding its time, just waiting to get out. Phil Specter said that when Harrison approached him with the idea for an album, he had “literally hundreds” of songs to show him, “and each one was better than the rest.” When he was given his chance, Harrison burst open with a triple album that was, and remains, at once profound, heartfelt, fun, and totally original. And what is spring, after all, but the assurance that beauty and growth and comfort are possible after a harsh, icy era? For this, in its sound and in its context, All Things Must Pass is the very definition of a blossoming.
