Having travelled to London on multiple occasions since school days, and also having been associated with the record label behind the Beatles, EMI, the one pending piece on my bucket list was visiting the holy grail for fans: Abbey Road. The wish was finally fulfilled in March 2020 – just days before the world shut down due to the pandemic – when I crossed the road that featured on the Beatles’ album cover. It was no doubt a challenge attempting to take the perfect photo because drivers – like most around the world – remained impatient, crossing Abbey Road certainly felt like a deep emotional connect with one of the greatest acts in musical history.
As part of recording history, ‘Abbey Road’ was the Beatles’ 11th studio album. Released on September 26, 1969 – 55 years ago – it was the band’s last effort at attempting to record music together as the quartet argued about their musical direction and their finances, having being severely bitten by Apple Corps which was turning into a business disaster. They could also arrive at a unanimous decision on the production of their previous album, ‘Let It Be’, which finally saw its release occurring on May 8, 1970. In all this, John Lennon was coping with a heroin addiction, leading to a massive dip in his creativity, both in song quality and in the quantum of compositions, along with an effort of redeeming his health through cold turkey, which failed miserably.
Photo: www.thebeatles.com
But Lennon had his moments of silent lucidity, resulting in the brilliance of the opening track of Abbey Road with ‘Come Together’ with its iconic bass lines, courtesy Paul McCartney, who also noticed its obvious similarity to Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ and, in turn, recommended the tempo be slowed to prevent any obvious resemblance. Nevertheless, publisher Big Seven Music took the matter to court in late 1969, resulting in the copyright infringement claim eventually being settled out of court in 1973.
However, nothing changed the fact that the album contained some of George Harrison’s greatest moments as a composer with the poignancy of ‘Something’, which his wife then, Pattie Boyd, claimed was written about her, though it also had much to do with a song from James Taylor’s self-titled debut that contained a song called ‘Something In The Way She Moves,’ which, coincidentally, was released on the Beatles’ Apple Records. ‘Here Comes The Sun’ was another, written by Harrison at Eric Clapton’s home, on Clapton’s guitar and, much like several songs on the album, had little or no inputs from Lennon as he dealt with his ongoing health issues.
The underlying theme of McCartney’s eccentricities of becoming a default band leader along with Lennon’s cynicism, ironically combined to create sounds that were certainly precedent setting. For instance, commencing with Ringo Starr’s drum solo, McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison each traded guitar solos on ‘The End’. The depth of counter melodies within ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ and the guitar-backed ‘She Came in Through the Window’ provided ideas for a stylistic shift in popular music. Abbey Road also contained more enduring Beatles songs, lending a new emotional maturity to their catalogue with tracks such as ‘Because’, inspired by Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’, which may arguably be the best showcase for the group’s harmonies, the result of their vocals being double-tracked twice.
Then there was the trembling guitar sound similar to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’ that became ‘Sun King’ – which was originally named ‘Here Comes The Sun King’ until it was shortened after Harrison submitted ‘Here Comes The Sun’ – containing Lennon’s gibberish that appeared to combine elements of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Also included were the sharp pair of other Lennon fragments, ‘Mean Mr. Mustard’ – “a bit of crap that I wrote in India” is how Lennon described it – and ‘Polythene Pam’. As good as these individual moments were, what made Abbey Road a classic was how the album was so much greater than the sum of its parts.
Photo: www.thebeatles.com
Technology lent its own personality into Abbey Road too, thanks in no small part to assistant engineer Alan Parsons introducing a new musical innovation – the Moog synthesizer – that made its appearance on the album. There was also an instance when second engineer John Kurlander described how he moved Her Majesty from the medley (on Side B) to the end of the master tape – as he did not want to get fired for deleting a Beatles song – and the band loved it as the final, hidden track (in the original pressings). Mixing engineer Geoff Emerick explained how the sound of the album changed during the recording by the usage of a solid-state transistor mixing desk at EMI’s Abbey Road Studio, becoming the only Beatles album to be recorded in that manner.
Nevertheless, Lennon was completely disenchanted with at least part of Abbey Road. “I liked the A-side,” he said in interviews following the album’s release, “(but) never liked that sort of pop opera on the other side”, further adding: “I think it’s junk!”. And, in an obviously veiled reference to McCartney’s initiative of having part of Side B recorded as a medley, Lennon was more vicious when he went on to say: “None of the songs had anything to do with each other…no thread at all; only the fact that we stuck them together.”
For all that, the cover image of the album remains as iconic as the recording itself, influencing several other bands in utilising a similar themed album cover: Booker T. & The M.G.’s McLemore Avenue (1970), Red Hot Chili Peppers’ The Abbey Road E.P. (1988), and even hip-hop artist Kanye West’s Late Orchestration (2006). In fact, McCartney, who appeared on the original album cover, parodied it on this 1993 album, Paul Is Live. But the most intriguing trivia was, no doubt, came when Kolkata Police launched a traffic safety awareness advertisement against jaywalking in 2013 by using the Abbey Road album cover of the Beatles walking across a zebra crossing along with a caption that read: “If they can, why can’t you?”!
The Kolkata Police’s Abbey Road poster.
Within seven months of the release of Abbey Road, the Beatles no longer existed formally. However, nothing changes the fact that, irrespective of Lennon’s opinion, as far as band swan songs are concerned, Abbey Road is, for many fans, one of the greatest albums ever recorded, building a musical foundation for popular music forever!
Parag Kamani is a rock and pop music aficionado.
