George Harrison – Isn’t It A Pity

Abbey Road, Spector, a song the Beatles set aside

In November 1970 George Harrison put Isn’t It A Pity near the centre of All Things Must Pass. It runs about seven minutes and describes how people bruise each other without noticing. He had written it years earlier, during the Beatles years, and watched it get sidelined. After the split he went into Abbey Road and Trident with Phil Spector and a room of friends: Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Klaus Voormann, Billy Preston, Bobby Whitlock and more of that loose Apple circle. Written in the Beatles years and then set aside, the song finally had space on the album that November. The same Abbey Road and Trident sessions with Spector brought those players in.

Spector’s Wall of Sound stays quiet at first, then builds. Acoustic guitars hold a slow pulse. Slide guitar lines move without hurry. Choir and brass come in later, not as a sudden fanfare. Version 1 on the album stretches past seven minutes. Version 2 closes the set with a different arrangement. Harrison finally gives the song the room the Beatles never did. The slow build is there again in the long Version 1. Version 2 still closes the record, with another arrangement of the same song. The Beatles had not given it that length.

The lyric is plain, close to speech, and the arrangement keeps adding layers so the song does not thin out. Harrison had waited through the Beatles years. On this album he spends that wait on a slow song, not on a sharp reply to the band.

He had waited for the room, and this is the take he used. Covers and live readings kept returning to that slow climb across later decades.