The Beatles rejection, George Harrison’s gain: The acid poem that inspired ‘All Things Must Pass’
“A sunrise does not last all morning.” Hear that line, and instantly, the mind goes to George Harrison and the beautiful title track from his solo debut, All Things Must Pass. It’s so simple and so effective in getting across the message that everything is fleeting and that nothing can stay forever. It’s a poem in one line, but Harrison didn’t write it.
After the Beatles split, all four members went off into their solo projects. The first record put out by each was a point being proved. Each one set out trying to make a statement that they didn’t need the others, that they were better than the band they’d just left and that the end of the Beatles was only the beginning for them. But it felt like none of them had as much skin in the game as George Harrison.
Dubbed the ‘Quiet Beatle’, Harrison himself saw it more as if he was the ‘Ignored Beatle’. “At that point in time, Paul couldn’t see beyond himself,” Harrison told Guitar World in 2001 about the final years of the band, “He was on a roll, but… in his mind, everything that was going on around him was just there to accompany him. He wasn’t sensitive to stepping on other people’s egos or feelings.”
But while McCartney was zoned in on his own output, he failed to realise that Harrison was making his best work right next to him. The list of Harrison’s songs that the Beatles rejected is baffling. Somehow in the daze of those final days, the band were stubborn to tracks like ‘Wah-Wah’, ‘Let It Down’ and, most shockingly, ‘All Things Must Pass’.
No doubt, when Harrison later released it in 1970, the rest of the group kicked themselves. Unleashed in its full glory, undiluted by any of the ways the Beatles may have changed his vision, the track stands as a stunning ballad with a beautiful message that perfectly suits Harrison’s attitude toward spirituality, gratitude and the world around him.
But he can’t take sole credit for the words. The message of the lyrics was handed to him by Timothy Leary, an American poet and psychologist who was a hero to the counterculture and “the most dangerous man in America” to the institution. In the mid to late 1960s, just as the Beatles were diving deep into the world of drugs and free-thinking, Harrison picked up a copy of his book Psychedelic Prayers after the Tao Te Ching and essentially found the words to the song right there.
Also titled ‘All Things Must Pass’, Leary’s poem begins, “All things pass, A sunrise does not last all morning, All things pass, A cloudburst does not last all day.” Clearing away the clutter of the repetitions, Harrison translated it into his own opening verse, borrowing these images from Leary and using his title as his own central lyric and chorus.
In Leary’s form, the poem’s position as an acid trip approach to spirituality makes sense. It feels exactly like the deep thoughts plucked from a mind that has turned off, tuned in and dropped out, as Leary wrote, floating down the lazy river of spirituality with an approach that says everything is temporary, so you may as well live in the now. But when Harrison pairs it with a more swelling instrument, inspired partly by The Band, he seems to transform it into something grander. Saved from being too psychedelic or too reflective of its origins and era, there is a timeless quality to the way Harrison orchestrated it, ironically allowing the song about impermanence to live on forever as one of his most defining and beloved songs, and one of the Beatles’ biggest mistakes for letting it go.
‘All Things Must Pass’ by Timothy Leary:
“All things pass
A sunrise does not last all morning
All things pass
A cloudburst does not last all day
All things pass
Nor a sunset all night
All things pass
What always changes
Earth . . . sky . . . thunder . . .
mountain . . . water . . .
wind . . . fire . . . lake . . .
These change
And if these do not last
Do man’s visions last?
Do man’s illusions?
Take things as they come
All things pass”.
