Recording: Out Of The Blue by George Harrison

Studio Three, EMI Studios, Abbey Road
Producers: George Harrison, Phil Spector
Engineers: Phil McDonald, John Leckie

Thursday 2 July 1970 was the 20th recording session for George Harrison’s third solo album All Things Must Pass.

The only recording made on this day was a 20-minute jam which was later edited and released as ‘Out Of The Blue’ on the Apple Jam disc. It was listed as ‘Jam 3’ on the tape box.

Upon its release in 1970, ‘Out Of The Blue’ opened the third vinyl disc of All Things Must Pass, titled Apple Jam. For the album’s January 2001 reissue, Harrison resequenced the tracks so that the album closed with ‘Out Of The Blue’, as he had originally intended.

For the jams, I didn’t want to just throw ’em in the cupboard, and yet at the same time it wasn’t part of the record; that’s why I put it on a separate label to go in the package as a kind of bonus … We used to do that ourselves you know, the Fabs, back in the early days. So you’d have a break, somebody’d go to the toilet, they have a cigarette, and next minute you’d break into a jam session, and the engineer taped it on a two-track. When we were mixing the album and getting toward the end of it, I listened to that stuff, and I thought, ‘It’s got some fire in it,’ particularly Eric. He plays some hot stuff on there!