"He left this world as he lived in it, conscious of God, fearless of death, and at peace, surrounded by family and friends," the Harrison family said in a statement. "He often said, `Everything else can wait but the search for God cannot wait,' and `love one another.' "
Before his death, George had lung cancer, for which he had undergone an operation in May 2001, but by July of the same year, it was reported he was undergoing treatment for a brain tumour.
George Harrison was especially fond of All Things Must Pass, the 1970 triple-LP set he released months after the group had officially imploded.
“It was a really nice experience making that album — because I was really a bit paranoid, musically,” Harrison said a few years later. “I remember having those people in the studio and thinking, ‘God, these songs are so fruity!’ I’d play it to them and they’d say, ‘Wow, yeah! Great song!’ And I’d say, ‘Really? Do you really like it?’ I realized that it was OK.”
In 1970, the year the Beatles officially called it quits, divorce was on the American mind. One year earlier, California then-Governor Ronald Reagan had signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law, freeing couples from the burden of having to produce evidence in order to legalize their separation.(pitchfork)
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And then there was George, who exhaled deeply, stretched, and flourished. “I had such a lot of songs mounting up that I really wanted to do, but I only got my quota of one or two tunes per album,” he said mildly on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971, referring to the increasingly tense time, from The White Album through the troubled Let It Be and Abbey Road, when each of the three main songwriters in the band had grown so attached to their individual visions that they began to see others in the room as obstacles.
“Over the last year or so, we worked something out which was still a joke, really,” he told Howard Smith a year before. “Three songs for me; three songs for Paul; three songs for John, and two for Ringo!” The last official Beatles recording sessions, for the album Let It Be, were on January 3rd and 4th of 1970; John was not even present, vacationing with Yoko Ono in Denmark. Fittingly for a band that had become so consumed by conflict, the last Beatles song committed to tape was “I, Me, Mine”; even more fittingly, it was a George Harrison song.
Given his own studio, his own canvas, and his own space, Harrison did what no other solo Beatle did: He changed the terms of what an album could be. Rock historians mark All Things Must Pass as the first “true” triple album in rock history, meaning three LPs of original, unreleased material; the Woodstock concert LP, released six months before, is its only only spoiler antecedent.
It was also massively popular, despite its hefty retail tag; All Things Must Pass spent seven weeks at No. 1, and its’ lead single, “My Sweet Lord,” occupied the same slot on the singles chart, marking the first time a solo Beatle had occupied both spots. The success was sweet vindication for Harrison; his triumph was so resounding that his former partners could not pretend to ignore it.
“Every time I turn on the radio, it’s ‘Oh my lord,’” John Lennon joked dryly to Rolling Stone. Rumors have it that John and Paul reacted with chagrin at hearing the bounty of material spilling forth on the album, finally grasping the depth of talent they had been slow to recognize.
Their solo albums would be considered successes to various degrees, in their own ways, but only George had the wind of true surprise at his back. Besides John, George was the only Beatle unafraid of writing from anger or negativity
