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January 20, 2001
New York, NY -- "Thirty years is a hell of a long time, but it just flies by," says George Harrison, whose sprawling 1970 album, All Things Must Pass, will be reissued on January 23rd. The timing, Harrison acknowledges, couldn't be better. "It's like Beatlemania is happening again," he says, during a break in recording a guitar solo for a track on Bill Wyman's next record. After finishing up with Wyman, the guitarist will go back to working on his own in-progress album, his first since 1987's Cloud Nine.
Harrison's 1970 solo album has always been considered his most sterling post-Beatles effort, the lovely fragility of his voice offset by Phil Spector's lush arrangements and a backing band that included Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Traffic's Dave Mason, Procol Harum's Gary Brooker and a teenage Phil Collins. The first record by an ex-Beatle to top Billboard magazine's albums chart, All Things Must Pass was Harrison's declaration of creative and spiritual independence from his former group. Intimidated by the songwriting power struggles between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Harrison only offered one or two songs to most Beatles albums, and by the time the band split, he had accumulated a wealth of material. "It was like having diarrhea and not being allowed to go to the toilet," he jokes. "I think a lot of people were surprised to see, 'Oh, he writes songs, too.'"
The new version of All Things Must Pass includes Harrison-penned liner notes, as well as four previously unreleased tracks and a new version of the album's chart-topping single, "My Sweet Lord." The reissue kicks off Harrison's plan to "revitalize the entire catalog and get it back on the shelves"; he plans to release a new album this spring, and over the next year he hopes to re-release other albums from his back catalog. "I don't listen to anything, and I don't read the papers, and I don't watch TV, and I don't go to concerts," he says. "And so my music, it doesn't matter if I did it twenty years ago or if I did it tomorrow. It doesn't go with trends. My trousers don't get wider and tighter every six months. My music just stays what it is, and that's the way I like it."
Written by JENNY ELISCU
for RollingStone.com News |
