GEORGE HARRISON’S ALL THINGS MUST PASS, GOES UBER-DELUXE (WITH GNOMES)
“My dad was not a fan of reverb.” DHANI HARRISON
BACK IN JANUARY 2001, only 10 months before his death, George Harrison expressed his ongoing dissatisfaction with the “big production” of
All Things Must Pass in the linernotes for the album’s 30th anniversary reissue: “It was difficult to resist remixing every track,” he noted. Now, for the upcoming 50th anniversary motherlode edition of his already expansive 1970 album (pandemic-delayed and due in August), some tasteful retrofitting has been applied.
“My dad was not a fan of reverb,” Dhani Harrison tells MOJO, on the phone from his family’s Friar Park estate in Henley-onThames, explaining that the new, from-theground-up mixes of the landmark triple album involved painstaking audio restoration and a foregrounding of his father’s vocals, somewhat stripping back Phil Spector’s layers of effects. “It’s like restoring a painting,” Harrison adds. “We’re so careful. Every stage has been A/B’ed [comparing the new and earlier versions] along with the original. When you hear it, it’s just mindblowing.”
The new Super Deluxe All Things Must comprises 70 tracks over five CDs or eight LPs, reclaiming the solo acoustic demos from the hands of the bootleggers. Dhani recalls his dad having a significant conversation with Bob Dylan regarding outtake curation: “I remember him talking back in the ’90s to Bob and saying, ‘You’ve just got to release all your bootlegs. Make it sound great and own it. Take it back.’ We wanted to make it so good that there’s no way you could ever want to bootleg these ever again.”
From the 30 included demos (26 previously unreleased), Dhani singles out the whimsical groover Cosmic Empire, along with the mantra-like Dehra Dun, while other highlights include a different version of Sour Milk Sea from the Esher sketch for Album and a Sun Records-style slapback rocker titled Going Down To Golders Green.
Harrison and engineer Paul Hicks (also responsible for recent sonic restorations for The Beatles, the Lennon estate and The Rolling Stones) together mixed a staggering 110 tracks, before making the final selection. Of what Dhani calls the preliminary “small band” versions of ATMP songs (featuring Ringo on drums and Klaus Voormann on bass), he admits that the mixing of an alternate I’d Have You Anytime was an affecting moment.
“It broke my heart,” he says. “I just started sobbing. Paul looked at me and said, ‘OK, so we’re doing it then.’ There was no question as to whether or not this was the right way to go because it’s just so powerful. Ultimately, everything had to be emotional.”
Meanwhile, an Über Deluxe Edition of the album, limited to 3,000, will be housed in a wooden crate along with Rudraksha prayer beads, a seven-inch-tall figurine of George and ¹/¹²th-scale laser-scanned gnomes as featured on the original cover, and a bookmark cut from a pine tree on the Harrison estate.
“You actually get a piece of Friar Park history,” Dhani enthuses of the crate edition, modelled on a Victorian ale chest. “I wanted it to be like a time capsule. It looks like it’s lasted 100 years and will last another 100 years.”
All Things Must Pass 50th Anniversary Edition will be available in various formats via Capitol/UMe on August 6.