I’d Have You Anytime –

Apple Scruffs –

Isn’t A Pity –

Here’s yet another album on my all-time-favorites list that I’ve actually been waiting for the best date to talk about it.

All Things Must Pass (1970), by George Harrison. The album was originally released on this date exactly 47 years ago, marking Harrison’s first release after the breakup of the Beatles earlier that same year (but not his first solo work, that was earlier with Wonderwall in ’68).

The Beatles. What can be said about a band in a brief blog entry when there are countless volumes of books about their music and influence? The last time I featured an album from them (way back for LP 3), I introduced them as the band that “didn’t need any introduction.” While some people may not be closely familiar with everything they did, almost everyone can recognize at least a few bars from something in their extensive song library. So in an attempt to keep from repeating common knowledge (and for the sake of time), let’s skip right over the Beatles and focus on the album.

All Things Must Pass came out roughly 6 months after the Beatles final album Let It Be. It consists of a varied range of musical styles, a large list of guest musicians, and a long list of songs written by Harrison (with the exception of two tracks contributed by Bob Dylan). The album was largely made up of songs he had accumulated over the years, including a few tunes George originally wrote for the Beatles, but had ultimately been rejected. The two Dylan works were done while George visited at Dylan’s home in the states. Both tunes are an example of their close friendship they had formed (along with another song on the album “Behind That Locked Door”, which Harrison wrote for Dylan) and the beginning of a songwriting partnership that would eventually come to a peak with the Traveling Wilburys in the late 80s.

While we’re discussing it, let’s jump right into the first song I chose today. “I’d Have You Anytime” is one of the songs they wrote at Dylan’s secluded home outside Woodstock, NY, and both of them are listed as the co-songwriters. A rather unconventional album opener (especially at the time), it serves as a rather slow, calm opening that accurately displayed the more meek nature of “the quite Beatle”. The next tune, “Apple Scruffs”, arguably shows off even more of Dylan’s influence on George. With a folksy acoustic guitar part and a harmonica part played by Harrison, the song was meant as a thank you to the die-hard Beatles fans (often referred to as Apple Scruffs) that existed long after the first wave of “Beatlemania”.

Due to the length of the album I decided to select a third song as well from the record. All Things Must Pass is pretty much amazing front to back and features some very well known tunes (like “My Sweet Lord”, still one of my all-time favorite Harrison songs, period), but I wanted to stress just how good some of the lesser known stuff is. However, I couldn’t exclude the one tune that Harrison deemed important enough to feature twice on a single album (but I could still pull out my hipster card and select the less popular version >:D). The song “Isn’t It A Pity” is one of those powerful songs that just make you stop, listen, and think. Like a particularly famous Beatles song, it looks at life’s problems and exclaims how a little bit of love can go a long way. However, with this song, Harrison’s words are broken and downtrodden. The song doesn’t proclaim what love can achieve, but rather looks at the sorrow that is wrought by the absence of such a thing. The lyrics cry out “Isn’t it a pity” because we refuse to let love solve our problems.

One of my favorite albums, by one of my favorite artists, All Things Must Pass easily makes it onto my list of “The Best (according to my humble opinion)”. Another part of the album I didn’t really mention was the third disc, known as “Apple Jam”. It features five different jam sessions from the impressively long and diverse list of musicians that worked on the album. While definitely unrefined in the way that jams can become, it is still a lot of fun to listen to a group of individuals play just for the heck of playing.