Most artists get to release their best early song once. George Harrison released “Isn’t It a Pity” twice on the same album — a seven-minute epic that closes side one of All Things Must Pass, and a slower, stranger reprise buried on side four — and even that was not the end of it. Issued as a double A-side with “My Sweet Lord” in November 1970, it topped the charts in North America, with Canadian listeners preferring Harrison’s side of the record outright. By then the song was nearly five years old. Harrison had written it in 1966, and the Beatles had turned it down, by his own rueful count, again and again.
That long rejection is the first thing to understand about “Isn’t It a Pity,” because the song is about the failure to give and receive love — and for years its author’s bandmates could not find room for it. What the Beatles heard as surplus, the world of 1970 heard as the emotional centrepiece of Harrison’s solo debut: an anthemic, slow-building lament that Phil Spector wrapped in the biggest sound of his career, and that Harrison’s slide guitar threads with light all the way down its long, chanting fade.
Written in 1966, Rejected Again and Again
Precisely when Harrison first presented the song is a matter of duelling witnesses, which itself tells you how long it circulated unclaimed. EMI engineer Geoff Emerick recalled Harrison offering it for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn placed its first presentation a year earlier still, during the Revolver sessions in 1966. Harrison also hoped to record it for the White Album in 1968. Each time, it fell victim to the arithmetic of Beatle albums: two principal writers, forty minutes of vinyl, and a third songwriter whose allotment was a song or two per record.
The rejections followed the song into the band’s final sessions. During the Get Back rehearsals in January 1969, tape captured Harrison reminding John Lennon that Lennon had vetoed “Isn’t It a Pity” three years before — and Harrison, in the same period, even considered offering the song to Frank Sinatra. Paul McCartney, looking back in 2011, conceded the pressure of the old system — the albums were forty minutes long, he and Lennon were writing prolifically, Ringo needed a track — and concluded that what Harrison achieved inside the Beatles was “phenomenal,” best left at that.
What, exactly, had they been declining? In I, Me, Mine, Harrison explained: “‘Isn’t It a Pity’ is about whenever a relationship hits a down point.” His point was karmic and carefully non-judgmental — the recognition that if he felt someone had let him down, there was a good chance he was letting someone else down. The lyric turns that thought into a round of gentle, devastating questions: “How we break each other’s hearts and cause each other pain / How we take each other’s love without thinking any more / Forgetting to give back.” Thirty years on, Harrison told Billboard‘s Timothy White that the song was “just an observation of how society and myself were or are. We take each other for granted – and forget to give back. That was really all it was about.” Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers, writing in 1973, heard Harrison’s three lifelong song types — love song, rock song and hymn — fused in a single track, and named it the key song of the album.
Two Versions, One Album
Harrison returned to the song in late May 1970, assembling the huge floating cast of the All Things Must Pass sessions in London. Unusually, he recorded “Isn’t It a Pity” twice, and both versions were intended for release from the outset. The famous one came first: the basic track was taped at EMI Studios — Abbey Road — on 2 June 1970, co-produced with Spector, with John Barham’s orchestral arrangement added from late August. Dissatisfied, Harrison recorded it again weeks later, almost by accident, after one of the backing musicians began playing the song during another session. That second performance — “Isn’t It a Pity (Version Two),” slower and more spectral, with Eric Clapton’s lead guitar fills, Tony Ashton’s phased piano and Barham’s woodwinds drifting through a Leslie speaker — sits near the end of side four, bookending the album against its twin: the epic at the close of side one, the ghost of it near the close of side four.
Version One is the fullest expression of Spector’s Wall of Sound on the whole album — indeed, it features the largest line-up of musicians on the record. Layers of keyboards (Billy Preston, Gary Wright — who always remembered this as his first Harrison session — and Bobby Whitlock on a phase-shifted harmonium), a choir of acoustic guitars played by Harrison and three members of Badfinger, Ringo Starr and Klaus Voormann in the rhythm section, strings, brass, timpani and a male choir. Barham, who was staying at Harrison’s home, Friar Park, built his scores from melodies Harrison sang or played to him, and his suspended orchestration is the song’s dark water through which Harrison’s new slide guitar keeps surfacing — a technique Harrison debuted on this album, part Indian sarod, part Western blues, singing where the lyric has run out of words.
The architecture is patient to the point of daring. For the first minute there is almost no rhythm section at all, just layered keyboards and guitars over a two-note pedal point; the band enters at the second verse, and from about two and a half minutes in, one circular chord sequence carries the remaining four and a half minutes, building through brass and timpani to a coda in which the chant of “What a pity” is answered by massed “na-na-na” voices — an unmistakable nod to “Hey Jude,” whose closing refrain the fade deliberately echoes. At 7:10, the song runs exactly one second shorter than “Hey Jude” itself, a coincidence nobody involved can have minded. Where McCartney’s song had offered consolation, Harrison’s offers a mirror: same anthem shape, sadder news.
The Other Side of “My Sweet Lord”
The pity song nearly led the album into the world. The original plan was to release “Isn’t It a Pity” as the lead single in October 1970. At Apple’s New York office, Allan Steckler, stunned by the quality of Harrison’s tapes, picked out three potential hits — “Isn’t It a Pity,” “My Sweet Lord” and “What Is Life” — but Spector insisted “My Sweet Lord” was the obvious choice and pressed Harrison and manager Allen Klein until they agreed. The compromise was inspired: on 23 November 1970, four days before the album’s American release, Apple issued the two songs as a double A-side (Apple 2995), the picture sleeve carrying the same Barry Feinstein photograph of Harrison on both faces, differing only in the title printed beneath his name.
The single was a phenomenon. In America, Billboard listed both sides together at No. 1 on the Hot 100 for four weeks from 26 December. In Canada they listed the sides the other way round — “Isn’t It a Pity” was the preferred side when the single topped the RPM 100 for five weeks, into mid-January 1971. Only Cash Box, charting the sides separately, gave the game away with a No. 46 peak for the pity song on its own — a reminder that, officially indivisible, the two sides of that record were quietly competing all along. Together with the single, the triple album spent seven weeks at No. 1 in the United States, and the “quiet Beatle” found himself, to the industry’s audible astonishment, out front of Lennon and McCartney.
The Pity That Outlived the Band
Reviewers reached for the biggest comparisons they had. Billboard called the single a “powerhouse two-sided winner”; Cash Box judged “Isn’t It a Pity” the more impressive side, “a giant-sized chant in the ‘Hey Jude’ manner.” The NME‘s Alan Smith predicted it was a ballad that “will stand out from the album with the passing of the years.” Time has ruled in his favour. AllMusic’s Matthew Greenwald calls the song “deeply moving and powerful”; Chip Madinger and Mark Easter, in their history of the solo Beatles’ recordings, write that if any Harrison song can be called “majestic,” this is the one. Simon Leng regards it as the pivotal song of All Things Must Pass — its very essence, the place where the album’s gospel ecstasy and its grief over failed human relationships meet. Peter Doggett hears in it a “remarkably non-judgemental commentary on the disintegration of the Beatles’ spirit.”
Harrison clearly agreed with the verdict. Promoting the album’s 30th-anniversary reissue in 2001, he named “Isn’t It a Pity” among his three favourite tracks on it. He had performed it throughout his final tour — the December 1991 Japanese dates with Clapton, preserved on Live in Japan — and keyboardist Chuck Leavell remembered it as the moment each night when he would look out and see audiences visibly moved by the song’s long crescendo. At the Concert for George in November 2002, Clapton and Preston performed it together in Harrison’s memory. Others kept finding their way to it: Matt Monro rushed out a single in 1971, Nina Simone stretched it to eleven minutes on her Vietnam-haunted album Emergency Ward! in 1972, and Chris Martin has said that Coldplay’s “The Scientist” began with him trying to play “Isn’t It a Pity” at a piano. Tom Petty simply called it “a masterpiece.”
There is one last irony in the song’s paperwork. When EMI and Capitol assembled The Best of George Harrison in 1976, ignoring the track listing Harrison himself had proposed, “Isn’t It a Pity” was left off — rejected, one final time, by a committee. It took until 2009, when it closed his career-spanning compilation Let It Roll, for the song to take its official place at the end of his story, exactly where it had always belonged. A song about everything we fail to give each other, written by the Beatle his bandmates kept failing to make room for: it waited out the Beatles, the seventies, and its own composer. Isn’t it a pity it had to wait at all — and isn’t it a wonder how completely it was worth it.