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Abbey Road

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Abbey Road
Album cover
LP by The Beatles
Released September 26 1969 (UK)
October 1 1969 (US)
Recorded Abbey Road April 20 - August 18 1969
Genre Rock
Length 44 min 9 s
Label Apple (UK) PCS 7088
Apple (US) SO 383
Producer George Martin
Professional reviews
Q 5/5 Nov '00
AMG 5/5 link
The Beatles Chronology
Yellow Submarine
(1969) 		Abbey Road
(1969) 		Let It Be
(1970)
The Beatles American Chronology
Yellow Submarine
(1969) 		Abbey Road
(1969) 		Hey Jude
(1970)

Abbey Road is the last-recorded, penultimately-released, and, some music critics say, greatest album written by The Beatles; it was released on September 26, 1969 in the UK and (October 1, 1969 in the US). It was produced and orchestrated by George Martin, for Apple Records.

Genesis of the album

After the near-disastrous sessions for the Get Back album (later retitled Let It Be for release), Paul McCartney suggested to producer George Martin that The Beatles get together and make an album "just like the old days...just like we used to", free of the conflict that began with sessions for The Beatles (aka the White Album). Martin responded, "only if you allow me to". The final result was this album. The two album sides were quite different in character, if not to please McCartney and John Lennon individually; side one (to please Lennon) was a collection of singles, while side two (to please McCartney) contained one long medley of short compositions that segued together.

The album's highlights

The album is especially notable for George Harrison's songs "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun", which fully established him with the public as being capable of writing songs comparable to those of to McCartney and Lennon. "Sun", in fact, was based on an earlier composition Harrison and Eric Clapton wrote for Clapton's group Cream, Badge ("Sun"'s bridge was based on the bridge for "Badge"). Other highlights of Abbey Road are Lennon's rock anthem "Come Together", McCartney's "Oh, Darling" (whose screaming almost cost McCartney his voice) and "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" (about a hammer-wielding murderer), "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" (conceived by Lennon and Yoko Ono), and Ringo Starr's ditty "Octopus' Garden".

The final medley

But at the heart of the album was a sixteen-minute medley, consisting of several short songs, both finished and unfinished, tagged together by McCartney. Most of these songs were written (and originally recorded in demo form) during sessions for The Beatles (aka the White Album) and Let It Be. McCartney's "You Never Give Me Your Money" (based loosely on The Beatles' financial problems with Apple) leads off the long suite, followed by three Lennon compositions, "Sun King" (which, along with "Because" from earlier on the album, showcases Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison's overdubbed harmonies), "Mean Mr. Mustard" (written during The Beatles' ill-fated trip to India), and "Polythene Pam", followed by four McCartney songs, "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window" (written after a fan came into Paul's residence virtually through the bathroom window), "Golden Slumbers" (based on Thomas Dekker's 19th century poem), "Carry That Weight" (one of the few songs to feature harmony vocals from all four Beatles), and the ironic and fitting climax, "The End", featuring the first and only Starr drum solo to make it to tape (in its original album form), as well as alternating blistering lead guitar solos from Lennon, McCartney and Harrison (an alternate version with Harrison's lead guitar solo played against Starr's drum solo appears on Volume 3 of The Beatles Anthology CD).

The song "Her Majesty", tacked on the end, was originally part of the side two medley. McCartney did not like the way the medley sounded with "Her Majesty" included, so he had the medley re-edited to remove it. However, engineer Geoff Emerick had been instructed never to throw out anything the Beatles created, so he placed it at the end of the medley after 20 seconds of silence. The Beatles liked this seemingly random effect and left it on the album. On most copies of the LP jacket, "Her Majesty" is not listed. It is, however, on the record label. If you listen closely, you can hear the last note of "Mean Mr. Mustard" at the start, because "Her Majesty" was supposed to follow it in the medley.

The famous photo

"At some point the album was going to be titled Everest, after the brand of cigarettes I used to smoke," recalls Geoff Emerick. The idea included a cover photo of The Beatles in the Himalayas, but by the time the group had to take the photo, they decided to call it Abbey Road and take the photo outside the studio during a coffee break from recording. That cover photograph has since become one of the most famous and most imitated album covers in recording history. The cover also supposedly contains clues adding to the "Paul Is Dead" phenomenon: Paul is barefoot, out of step with the others, and holds a cigarette, and the car license plate "281F" supposedly referred to the fact that McCartney would be 28 years old if he was still alive. (While the "I" in "28IF" is actually a "1," it is hard to tell on the cover. As an aside, Paul was only 27 at the time of Abbey Road's release.) The man standing on the sidewalk in the background is Paul Cole, an American tourist who was unaware that he was being photographed until he saw the album cover months later.

One imitation cover came with a unique tribute. Booker T. & the M.G.'s, famed soul combo, covered most of the songs on the Abbey Road in their 1969 album McLemore Avenue, named after the street address of the Stax records studio. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers have also imitated the album cover, on their Abbey Road EP, with the band appearing nude, apart from strategically-placed socks. And McCartney revisited the famous album cover for his live album Paul Is Live.

The photo has also made the particular zebra crossing at Abbey Road a popular tourist site, and each day visitors can be seen posing in the popular position, in spite of the fact that the road is still in normal use.

The covers

One month after Abbey Road's release, George Benson recorded a cover version of the album called The Other Side of Abbey Road. In 1998, Phil Collins covered the medley "Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End" for the George Martin/Beatles tribute album In My Life. Aerosmith has a particularly famous cover of "Come Together", recorded for the film version of The Beatles' earlier album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. And finally, the Legendary Pink Dots covered a tiny snippet of "Here Comes the Sun" in the song "I Love You In Your Tragic Beauty".

Accolades

In November 2003, Abbey Road was named the thirteenth best album of the rock era by a Rolling Stone poll of critics, journalists, and others in the industry.

Also in 2003, the TV channel VH1 named Abbey Road the 8th greatest album of all time.

Track listing

  1. "Come Together" (Lennon-McCartney)
  2. "Something" (Harrison)
  3. "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" (Lennon-McCartney)
  4. "Oh! Darling" (Lennon-McCartney)
  5. "Octopus's Garden" (Starkey)
  6. "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" (Lennon-McCartney)
  7. "Here Comes the Sun" (Harrison)
  8. "Because" (Lennon-McCartney)
  9. "You Never Give Me Your Money" (Lennon-McCartney)
  10. "Sun King" (Lennon-McCartney)
  11. "Mean Mr. Mustard" (Lennon-McCartney)
  12. "Polythene Pam" (Lennon-McCartney)
  13. "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" (Lennon-McCartney)
  14. "Golden Slumbers" (Lennon-McCartney)
  15. "Carry That Weight" (Lennon-McCartney)
  16. "The End" (Lennon-McCartney)
  17. "Her Majesty" (Lennon-McCartney)
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