Rock’s first triple album by a solo artist was born from rejection. For years, George Harrison had been stockpiling songs that never made the cut on Beatles records — among them “Isn’t It a Pity,” brushed aside during the Let It Be sessions. By the time the band splintered, he was sitting on a backlog so deep it demanded an unprecedented format. All Things Must Pass landed on November 27, 1970, not as a modest debut but as a sprawling declaration of independence stretched across six sides of vinyl on Apple Records.
The material spanned years of creative frustration. Some songs reached back to The Beatles’ 1968 trip to India, where Harrison wrote prolifically while studying transcendental meditation. Others, like “Art of Dying,” had been waiting since 1966. The title track itself emerged in 1969, inspired by Timothy Leary’s poem from The Psychedelic Experience. Harrison had simply accumulated more finished compositions than a single band — even his own — could absorb, and once the group dissolved, the dam finally broke.
Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound sessions
Phil Spector took the producer’s chair, bringing his signature Wall of Sound to Abbey Road and Trident Studios. The sessions ran from May through October 1970 and drew an informal army of players: Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, and pedal steel guitarist Pete Drake, whose weeping slides became a defining texture. Harrison himself handled acoustic and electric guitars, harmonica, and leaned heavily on slide guitar — an instrument that would become his lifelong voice.
The album opened with “I’d Have You Anytime,” co-written with Bob Dylan during a stay at Friar Park. Dylan’s presence rippled further through a cover of “If Not for You,” but the collaboration signaled something deeper — Harrison stepping into a community of peers rather than orbiting Lennon and McCartney. The third disc, titled Apple Jam, abandoned song structure entirely for loose, improvisational jams that captured the sessions’ unguarded energy.
The chart-topping single and its legal aftershock
“My Sweet Lord” became the first solo single by an ex-Beatle to hit number one on both sides of the Atlantic, driving the album to the top of the US and UK charts. Its blend of pop melody and Hindu devotional chanting was audacious for mainstream radio in 1970. But that crossover came with a legal aftershock: in 1976, a court ruled the song subconsciously copied The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine.” Harrison bought the rights to the contested song two years later, turning a courtroom loss into a quiet business move.
“Wah-Wah” channeled raw frustration into a wall of distorted guitars. Harrison wrote it immediately after walking out of Beatles rehearsals in January 1969, fed up with the tensions that had made the Get Back project excruciating. “What Is Life” landed as a single and cracked the US top 10, its Motown-influenced brass and galloping rhythm offering a counterweight to the album’s more meditative stretches. The range was staggering — spiritual yearning, bitter catharsis, and straightforward love songs coexisted without apology.
The garden gnome cover and a numbered sleeve
The cover photograph placed Harrison in the garden of his Friar Park estate, surrounded by four garden gnomes. It was an odd, faintly surreal image for an album of such magnitude, but it telegraphed something honest: this was a man retreating into his own world after the claustrophobia of Beatlemania. The original vinyl pressing carried a numbered stamp on the sleeve, a small marker that distinguished early copies from the millions that followed.
By the time Harrison performed several of the songs at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, the album had already shifted the perception of what a former Beatle could achieve alone. It earned a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year, went six-times platinum in the US with over six million copies sold, and landed on Rolling Stone’s list of the greatest albums of all time. The triple-album format, once a commercial gamble, became a benchmark.
The archival life of All Things Must Pass proved as long as its gestation. A remastered edition arrived in 2001 with bonus tracks, and a vinyl reissue cut from the original analog tapes followed in 2017. The 50th-anniversary set in 2021 expanded the world to 70 tracks, including 47 unreleased demos and outtakes, and promptly topped the Billboard Top Rock Albums chart. In 2014, the original master tapes sold at auction for $35,000.
Harrison dedicated the album “to everyone who waited.” That wait had been mostly his own — years of writing songs that had nowhere to go, watching them pile up while his bandmates’ material filled every Beatles album. When the gates finally opened, the flood was so immense it reshaped the physical format of rock stardom itself.
When the gates finally opened, the flood was so immense it reshaped the physical format of rock stardom itself.