Album Artwork
Being the first boxed triple album in popular music, the packaging for All Things Must Pass became a talking point in its own right. Apple insider Tony Bramwell later recalled: "It was a bloody big thing ... You needed arms like an orang-utan to carry half a dozen."
The stark black-and-white cover photo was taken on the main lawn at Friar Park by Barry Feinstein. Its composition − Harrison seated in the centre of, and towering over, four comical-looking garden gnomes − is often thought to represent his removal from The Beatles' collective identity, if not a degree of superiority over it. Ever competitive, and noticeably negative about his former bandmates' solo work around this time (especially McCartney's), John Lennon is said to have taken particular offence at the apparent message in Harrison's album cover (notwithstanding his own declaration regarding The Beatles in his concurrent song "God"). Lennon sniped that Harrison looked like "an asthmatic Leon Russell" in the photo; biographer Alan Clayson describes him as "a spaced-out Farmer Giles". The inclusion of the gnomes was the photographer's idea, in fact, but the symbolism was quite deliberate, according to Feinsten: "What else could it be? ... it was over with The Beatles, right? And that title − All Things Must Pass. Very symbolic."
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Famous quotes containing the word album:
“What a long strange trip it’s been.”
—Robert Hunter, U.S. rock lyricist. “Truckin’,” on the Grateful Dead album American Beauty (1971)