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The 50th anniversary edition of All Things Must Pass finally hit the streets recently, about a year late. If you have $999.98 to spare, you can pick up the “Uber Deluxe Box Set,” which in addition to 5 CDs, a Blu-ray, and 8 LPs, includes:
- Several books, including “a 96-page scrapbook with handwritten lyrics, diary entries, studio notes, tape box images, a comprehensive track-by-track and more”; “a second 44-page book chronicling the making of All Things Must Pass through extensive archival interviews with notes”; and “a copy of Paramahansa Yogananda’s ‘Light from the Great Ones’”
- “A wooden bookmark made from a felled oak tree (Quercus Robur) in George’s Friar Park”
- “1/6 scale replica figurines of Harrison and the gnomes featured on the iconic album cover”
- “Rudraksha beads contained in individual custom-made boxes”
- A wooden crate to hold it all
I won’t be shelling out for that, or for any physical version of this. It would be great to have the liner notes, but there’s no more room in the house for Beatles-related material, and on the whole I’m mostly interested in the music. There are a bunch of new and alternate tracks, so by way of making myself pay attention, I’m going to post a few entries about some of the noteworthy ones.
The first thing that grabbed my ear was the demo version of “Awaiting on You All.” This one has apparently been in circulation for awhile but I never heard it before. I must say, it is quite groovy.
It sounds like just George, Ringo, and Klaus messing around in the studio. I like the album version, with its crunching Wall of Sound (TM), quite a lot — and there’s a nifty remix of same on the new release, too — but the pre-Spector iteration has a definite charm of its own. And you can hear the words a lot better (somehow I had missed the line “the Pope owns fifty one percent of General Motors” before this). I kind of want to go listen to this sitting in my garden surrounded by replica gnomes, but honestly I’d prefer full-sized ones. My birthday is in October.
I got you covered on the Rudraksha beads minus the boxes.