The album followed the two concerts of the same name, held on 1 August 1971 at New York's Madison Square Garden, featuring Harrison, Bob Dylan, Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, Leon Russell and Eric Clapton.

The box set's packaging included a 64-page book containing photos from the concerts; the album cover, designed by Tom Wilkes, consisted of an image of a malnourished child sitting beside an empty food bowl.

[5] While in Los Angeles in June 1971, and after being made aware of the gravity of the situation in what was then known as East Pakistan by friend and musician Ravi Shankar,[6] George Harrison set about organising two fundraising concerts at Madison Square Garden, New York, to aid the war-ravaged and disaster-stricken country.

[9][10] The recent success of his All Things Must Pass triple album[11][12] allowed Harrison to headline the all-star UNICEF benefit concerts, backed by a 24-piece[13] band of musicians and singers, on Sunday, 1 August 1971.

[21] The media lavished praise on Harrison as an ambassador for rock altruism;[22][23] Rolling Stone magazine hailed the event as proof that "the Utopian spirit of the Sixties was still flickering".

[35] Before the Western portion of the concerts, there were the traditionally hard-to-record Indian string instruments[36] of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan to amplify, together with Alla Rakha's tabla and the drone-enhancing tambura, played by Kamala Chakravarty[37] – each offering natural musical tones so easily lost in the "cavernous Garden".

[43] Although this estimate would turn out to be highly optimistic,[26] the following year, in an effort to foil concert bootleggers, Elvis Presley succeeded in delivering a live album just eight days after his own, much-publicised Madison Square Garden shows.

[52] Post-production on the Madison Square Garden recordings was minimal, the known examples being Harrison's double-tracked lead vocal on the bridges of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", and a composite edit of his opening song, "Wah-Wah", which was assembled from both the shows.

[57] As with Shankar's pre-"Bangla Dhun" address, Harrison's band introductions, with Russell and Voormann breaking into "Yellow Submarine" when Starr's name is mentioned,[58] and his other on-stage dialogue would become as integral to the legacy of the event as the music itself.

[66] It was a position from which EMI chairman Bhaskar Menon refused to budge, while Harrison was equally adamant that, since all the artists were providing their services for free and Apple was supplying the album packaging at no charge, the record company "must give up something" also.

[68] There he attended the re-opening of Apple Studio on 30 September[69] and produced new signing Lon & Derrek Van Eaton's debut single,[70] as well as enduring a fruitless meeting with the British Treasury's financial secretary – the latter activity in an attempt to have the government waive its standard purchase tax, and so keep the album affordable to record-buyers.

[65] Harrison was on the program to promote the Raga documentary with Shankar,[76] but after making a surprise guest performance with Gary Wright's new band Wonderwheel, he launched into a complaint about his US record company's interference and threatened to take the whole album package to Columbia.

[45][73][nb 5] In January 1972, Melody Maker's Richard Williams remarked in his Concert for Bangladesh album review: "Between them, Capitol and CBS have proved that, when it comes to awareness and enlightenment, the business is still several years behind the musicians.

[94][95] Along with Alan Pariser, both Wilkes and Feinstein had taken stills photographs at Madison Square Garden, at the soundcheck on 31 July and during the concerts the next day, the results filling the 64-page full-colour booklet accompanying the original album.

[96] Having created the provocative, headline-filled picture sleeve for Harrison's "Bangla Desh" single earlier in the year,[97] Wilkes was keen to capture "real human compassion" in this cover and poster image.

[98] The record's liner note essay accused the West Pakistanis of undertaking "a deliberate reign of terror" that represented "undoubtedly the greatest atrocity since Hitler's extermination of the Jews".

[72] The prices drew some criticism,[53] from Harrison for one,[67] even if it was accepted that the proceeds were going to those in desperate need[104] – or, as Beatles Forever author Nicholas Schaffner wrote in 1977, to "a nation still viewed as the worst pocket of misery on earth".

The government also advised its embassies and other foreign diplomatic offices that the album contained "hostile propaganda against Pakistan" and that they should pressure their local contacts to stop the music being played on the radio.

In addition to praising the structure and pacing of the live records, he admired Harrison for continuing his post-Beatles "optimism-with‐energy attitude", which Heckman recognised as an effective counter to the Nixon-inspired apathy permeating rock music at the time.

[122][nb 9] Having attended the concerts in August, Ed Kelleher of Circus magazine wrote that the live album not only conveyed the "magic ... the sheer joy" of the event, but the music "practically jumps right out into your life".

He put it together; and he pulled it off ..."[126] Landau lauded the pacing and professionalism of the entire show, and recognised the highpoint as the album-closing "Bangla Desh", the lyrics of which were no longer "an expression of intent but of an accomplished mission".

He admired many of the performances but detected an "aloofness" in Shankar's sincerity and bemoaned that Dylan's outdated repertoire surpassed some of the more recent pop selections by Harrison and Preston, and that the lavish LP booklet "must have cost money which could have been channelled elsewhere".

[130][nb 10] The NME's Roy Carr and Tony Tyler deemed the concerts "probably the greatest indoor rock 'n' roll event ever held", adding that Dylan's five-song set "easily justified" the album's price tag.

[147] While the technical imperfections of the concert recordings were overlooked in 1972 – or even applauded for their adding to the "honesty" of the moment, in the case of Starr forgetting the lyrics to "It Don't Come Easy"[127] – reviewers of the first CD-format album remarked on the relatively poor sound quality.

[148] Paul Du Noyer of Blender wrote that some of the performances are unpolished yet "the occasion still crackles with drama", and he named "Wah-Wah", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" as the standout songs.

[151] Leng similarly bemoans Russell's "consciously extreme hollerin'", and finds his delivery pales beside the "unaffected naïveté" of Preston and particularly the "knife-edge emotions" of Harrison and Shankar, which only Dylan can match.

[153] Among reviews of the 2005 reissue, Mojo described the remastered sound as "sumptuous"[140] while AllMusic's Richard Ginell wrote: "Hands down, this epochal concert ... was the crowning event of George Harrison's public life, a gesture of great goodwill that captured the moment in history and, not incidentally, produced some rousing music as a permanent legacy.

"[145] Dan Ouellette of Billboard considered that "The star-studded package holds up well as a live greatest-hits collection", before concluding: "But the revelation is the exhilarating concert lift-off, the improv-laced eastern Indian classical tune 'Bangla Dhun,' featuring sitar master Ravi Shankar.

"[144] In his entry for the album in the book 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, Tom Moon recognises the concerts as "the first large-scale example of rock activism", saying that Harrison and his fellow performers provided the blueprint for celebrities to employ their fame for charitable causes.

He views Dylan's set as "spellbinding" and a final reprise of the singer's "mythic voice-of-a-generation image", and concludes of the album: "seldom before or since has rock music sounded so honest, so caring – and so capable of making us smile and cry at the same time.