Does George Harrison masterpiece ‘All Things Must Pass’ warrant a triple album?
While the concept of a double album is often reserved simply for physical formats that require switching one record for another to be heard in full, there are still many albums that have been released in the streaming age that stretch on for way longer than your average LP. With mainstream artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé opting to release albums that exceed an hour in length on more than one occasion, younger audiences are more than accustomed to their favourites releasing enduring records.
Quite often, releases of this magnitude are seen as an artist’s most ambitious work, usually following a larger overarching concept or theme for the entirety of the album. Still, at the same time, these works can feel exhausting, with their overall density getting in the way of how enjoyable it is. Those that do follow a narrative are often easier to justify, but the albums that simply shoehorn as many songs as possible into the space of 80 minutes can get pretty tedious very quickly and will often have as many low points as they do highs.
So, if a double album has all the possibilities in the world of being a tedious slog, then what’s the point in releasing a triple album? Someone who clearly never asked this question was George Harrison, who in 1970 delivered his third studio album, All Things Must Pass – a 106-minute epic that stretched itself across six sides of vinyl upon its original release, making it one of the first of its kind.
As Harrison’s first solo album following the breakup of The Beatles, All Things Must Pass presented an opportunity for the guitarist to showcase what he was truly capable of as a songwriter. Having often been pushed to one side in favour of Lennon and McCartney’s songs, Harrison was only ever allocated two or three slots for his songs on the band’s albums, with a total of 22 songs in the band’s catalogue having been written by him alone. All Things Must Pass boasts 23 songs in itself, one more than he ever wrote for The Beatles.
Everything that was being turned away from being used on the final few Beatles records made its way onto the gargantuan release, and while there was little to nothing tying these songs together thematically, the flow from bluesier cuts such as ‘Wah-Wah’ into ballads like ‘Isn’t It A Pity’ doesn’t make the record feel disjointed in any way. While the third and final LP, also known as Apple Jam, consists of four improvised instrumental tracks and a birthday song for John Lennon, everything else heard on the previous two LPs is a showcase of Harrison’s understated brilliance and his versatility.
However, with the full album running at close to two hours, does it fall foul of the same issues that other triple albums such as The Clash’s Sandinista! and Joanna Newsom’s Have One On Me do in the sense that they could be significantly trimmed to half their length and only keep the highlights? In short, save for the inclusion of Apple Jam – no, it doesn’t.
There is a world where the order of the songs could be rearranged so that those from Apple Jam are evenly spread throughout the rest of the tracklist and aren’t left as an addendum to an otherwise flawless album, but that would disrupt the brilliance of the other 18 tracks on the album. With those alone, it’s still over an hour long, but it remarkably has less filler than The White Album – an album that only gave Harrison four songwriting credits while Paul McCartney ran riot with dross like ‘Rocky Raccoon’ and ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ and John Lennon allocated eight and a half masturbatory minutes to ‘Revolution 9’.
All Things Must Pass doesn’t warrant being a triple album but only falls short due to the final third of the record. If we’re to look at the rest of it as a double LP, it’s the finest work of any Beatle after the band’s breakup and the most complete compendium of what Harrison was capable of as a songwriter. If anything, it’s a statement to the rest of The Beatles and the world that this is what everyone was missing out on when they were limiting Harrison’s time in the spotlight.
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