George Harrison
REVIEWS
ALL THINGS MUST PASS, (1970)
Rating: 9
Best Songs- Let it down
Worst Song- Awaiting on you all
Written by Rob Eustace
George Harrison had little choice but to play second fiddle behind the famous Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership throughout his beatle years, this for George (and the rest of us) had positive and negative efforts. Negative in the sense that George for the most part was restricted to one, or if he was really lucky two cuts per album plus the odd 7" b-side of course. Positive in the sense that obviously only the cream of his compositions were brought to studio and slotting those odd tracks in amongst the fantastic body of work created by Lennon/McCartney maybe led us to believe he may be a better songwriter than he actually was. That said, his two songs on the final Abbey Road album "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" are arguably the strongest tracks on the album and have certainly been covered more times than any other track on that set. So is it then no great surprise that within of year of the Beatles demise that Harrison is the first of the group to have a UK No.1 single "My Sweet Lord" and release a triple album that surely ranks as the finest of any of the post-beatle solo releases.
George having been restricted to these one or two published releases per year obviously had been stocking up his cupboard with unreleased songs for many years, indeed many of the tracks on this album had been Beatle demos that have since seen the light of day on the "flogging a dead horse" Anthology series.
All Things Must Pass in reality must be judged as a double album with a bonus disc of pointless bluesy studio jams with Georges all star house guests, however don't let this deter you from the album as the rest of it is of the highest quality. All the tracks are Harrison originals with the exception of the mellow album opener "I'd Have You Anytime" which is co-written by Bob Dylan and "If Not For You" again a Dylan original which was covered reasonably successfully by Olivia Newton John around the same period.
The album retains a nice mixture of styles throughout, a country flavour not seen before on Harrison's Beatle work is evident on "Behind That Locked Door" and "If Not For You" and a string of beautiful ballads appear throughout the album "All Things Must Pass","My Sweet Lord", "I'd Have You Anytime" and "Isn't it a Pity" probably being the pick of the bunch. All the ballads feel as though they would have been suitable for Harrison's allotted space on the next beatle album, indeed all of the tracks easily stand shoulder to shoulder with anything that appeared on the McCartney and John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band albums, do I need to mention Sentimental Journey !!!.
Harrison gets a little heavier on several tracks with "Wah-Wah" and "Let it Down" being the strongest with the later incidentally displayed as a beautiful acoustic demo together with "Beware of Darkness" on the more recently released 30th Anniversary edition, well worth picking up in front of the original copies.
There's a little folk thrown in for good measure on "Apple Scruffs" and if fact the only real surprise is outside of the lyrics there's not really any of Georges Indian influences here which given the fact that a lot of these tracks were written through 67/68/69 you might expect the odd sitar here and there. There are two versions of "Isn't it a Pity" offered which is a little un-necessary but in reality outside of the dreary third album of jams this is the only filler present, Phil Spector co-produces and many of the tracks have a similar feel to his production work on Lennon's Imagine album.
George should (and hopefully was) proud of this set, he would never unfortunately scale these heights again, but then to his credit nor did Lennon or McCartney. Georges later albums quickly became tired and the lyrics grew very preachy, however I still regard all his 70's output much higher than most other reviewers.
This, for George, was never going to be an easy act to follow, but then given the fact that he'd probably had three or four years to write it maybe it deserved to be that way.
Nevertheless I still believe it remains the finest of all Beatle solo works, it gets a 9 (and not 10) because of the pointless extended guitar jams (which was best left to the Clapton, Page & Beck crowd) the rest however is top notch, miss it at your peril.
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