The Beatles, "Abbey Road"
Don goes fab for the fourth
Don’s Pitch:
The Beatles officially disbanded in 1970, a few months before I was born, but no other artist has more impacted my lifetime’s love of music.
My earliest musical memory was hearing the Fab Four in my parents’ living room as a toddler. I was fascinated by how their voices and instruments were separated into different speakers, and awed by their harmonies when everything came together. As soon as I met The Beatles, I was in.
When I began my own music collection, my parents suggested I should listen to The Beatles’ records in order of release. This way I could appreciate the enormous leaps in songwriting, sound, and sophistication that occurred in their remarkably condensed 7-year recording career from 1963-1969. It was mind-blowing then, and now.
So it’s impossible for me to pick my favorite Beatles album. I’ve selected Abbey Road this week, not because it’s my favorite - far from it - but because it represents the culmination of their track record. Even though it was released before Let It Be, it captures their final recording sessions.
Though imperfect, Abbey Road features so much of what is great about The Beatles.
John Lennon’s irony; how he sings, “one thing I can tell you is you got to be free” in a song called “Come Together,” foreshadowing that he’d privately tell the band he was out just six days before its release.
George Harrison’s emergence as a brilliant songwriter on par with Lennon-McCartney, with two of his greatest compositions, “Something” and “Here Comes The Sun.”
Ringo Starr’s token, silly novelty song, “Octopus’ Garden,” only this time written himself, kick-starting a legitimate solo career in its own right.
Paul McCartney as earnest, creative and controlling as ever. While he penned the album’s only mistake (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”), his stature as perhaps rock and roll’s greatest singer is on display during the fierce “Oh! Darling!” and fragile “Golden Slumbers.” It was his idea to combine several fragments into the Side 2 Medley — a masterstroke.
But The Beatles always were greater than the sum of their parts. Take the stunning Lennon/McCartney/Harrison harmonies on Lennon’s “Because.” They were, and still are, rock and roll’s most magical band. No one comes close to their impact and influence.
Of course, they knew this, and had an uncanny ability to rise to every occasion, even their final recording session. Their last tune, “The End,” featured Ringo’s first-and-only drum solo as a Beatle, as well as McCartney, Harrison, and Lennon trading guitar solos three times, each getting his own turn, yet blending perfectly.
“The End” culminates in an absolutely perfect epitaph:
And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to
The love you make
When The Beatles released Abbey Road, the cover - itself perhaps the most iconic in rock history - didn’t even need to include the band’s name. It was just four lads from Liverpool leaving the studio, crossing into their future, having conquered London and the world. They were unmistakably, indelibly, the greatest.
Abbey Road was their mic drop.
Mitch’s Response:
Contrary to popular belief, it gives me no pleasure to shit on The Beatles. They were my first favorite band and the soundtrack to my one glorious year in the cub scouts. John Lennon’s death was traumatic and I’ll never, ever forget that day. They’re the most important band in rock history and their run from A Hard Day’s Night through Revolver is unimpeachable. They absolutely deserve all of the attention, respect and praise they garner.
But the problem of getting too big to fail is that people generously overlook your failures, and act like everything you create is genius. It seems like as a society we’ve lost our ability to objectively assess The Beatles and say the sometimes ugly truth, like:
Abbey Road is a thoroughly mediocre album at best.
Side A is a disaster, only somewhat saved by George’s masterpiece, "Something”. Lennon’s two contributions (“Come Together”, “I Want You”) are depressing dirges better fit for the Plastic Oh-No Band. “Oh! Darling” is an unpleasant throwback screamer that would have been better sung by John. “Maxwell” and “Octopus” are both deeply embarrassing songs and reminders that The Beatles could always give The Wiggles a run for their money.
The pattern repeats on Side B with one great Harrison song (“Here Comes the Sun”) covering up for a bunch of trimmings and leftovers from John & Paul that George Martin cleverly turned into a barely palatable sandwich. I believe my friends from Philly call that “scrapple”. There are only three good parts to the odds and sods medley - the first half of “You Never Give Me Your Money”, “Golden Slumbers”, and Ringo’s drum solo on “The End”. That’s it. Apple scruffs, indeed.
By the time Abbey Road came along The Beatles were clearly running on empty and only the emergence of George Harrison prevented their swan song from being a complete turkey.
Pitch Failed
CJ’s Response
I’m not a Beatles fan. Not because I’m a contrarian or trying to make a statement. I truly just don’t care for the music. Oh, there are a few Beatles songs that I really like. For example, I always dug “Helter Skelter” because it was so consciously different than anything else they did. And I have a soft spot for “She’s Leaving Home”. Although I wonder if that’s more a product of being the father of an adult daughter. In general, though, I find The Beatles mild, frequently dull and a lot less clever than they think they are.
Abbey Road is an album that offers a lot to chew on for Beatles lovers and critics alike. There are legendary cuts like “Something”, “Here Comes the Sun” and, okay, I’ll listen to an argument for “Because.” Then, there are the disasters of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “I Want You” which neatly encapsulate my two biggest complaints about the lads from Liverpool.
The abundance of songs that sound like they were written for traveling carnivals or as the soundtracks to Monty Python sketches. Put the calliope away, boys.
The Beatles sing the blues. Or, rather, the Beatles should never sing the blues. “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” is another prime example.
Some songs like “Octopus’s Garden” and “Mean Mr. Mustard” are too silly to even comment on. And, depending on your point of view, the “Golden Slumbers” suite is either a beautiful lullaby or four minutes of bad poetry.
Look, I don’t begrudge the Beatles their place in music history. I just wish people obsessed the same way about bands like the Kinks, who, as contemporaries of the Beatles, were far more creative and took more chances.
And when I say obsess, I mean that Abbey Road has been re-issued at least three times now. Why? So you can hear Paul order an extra pickle with his lunch?
Pitch Failed
Ken’s Response:
I vividly remember the morning of December 9th, 1980; my friend’s mom was driving us to school and she clearly hadn’t been watching Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football the night before. I don’t remember what radio station we were listening to, but the moment “Jealous Guy” ended and the DJ came on to tell us all that a man named John Lennon had been shot and killed the night before is burned into my memory. My friend’s mom immediately starting bawling and pounding on the steering wheel; she was beyond devastated. And me, I wondered how a musician...ANY musician could inspire that kind of reaction. That sent my mom and me to the record store to get every Beatles album I could get my hands on, and a few years later I would start buying books about them. Over the next 20 years, I studied them every chance I got.
The shining beacon on this record is George. Between “Something” and “Here Comes The Sun”, the Dark Horse gives us two of the best compositions of his entire career and they carry the album. Outside of that, the “Golden Slumbers Medley” (“Golden Slumbers”, “Carry That Weight”, “The End”) is beautiful but seems hurried. On another album, the whole medley may not have made the cut.
It’s the clunkers here that really bring the album down. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is simply dumb, and “Octopus’s Garden” is a children’s song that’s cute at first, and devolves into a loathsome and skipable track. The trio of “Sun King”, “Mean Mr. Mustard”, and “Polythene Pam” are disjointed thoughts poorly set to psychedelic instrumentation, and “Her Majesty” is a sub-60 second novelty.
I would have been much happier this week discussing Rubber Soul (as close to a perfect album as there has ever been), Revolver, Help!, Beatles for Sale or A Hard Day’s Night.
But, I undeniably love this band. I love the good, the bad and everything in between. So while I don’t get “Come Together”, and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is too long and repetitive, they’re still the greatest band in the history of modern music.
Pitch Successful
Don’s pitch was not successful (really?) and The Beatles’ Abbey Road has been exiled from the Newbury St. Collection.
And in the end
the comments you leave
are equal to
the good vibes you receive
Please join us next week as CJ finally, finally takes us up to the Great White North with RUSH’s eighth studio album, 1981’s Moving Pictures.
Crickets!
(Fun fact, did you know John Lennon named the band The Beatles as an homage to one of their inspirations, Buddy Holly, whose band was the The Crickets. They spelled it with an "a" as pun. I'm sure our readers are enthralled by this factoid.)
Abbey Road has always struck me as one of those albums that people say they like in order to "go along to get along." The cover is iconic, and that's cool, but after that there's not much to love.
Outside of "Here Comes the Sun," (and maybe "Something"), it's objectively not their best, and subjectively kinda terrible. Over the decades talking about the record in anything less than glowing terms has become heresy, but I'm willing to bet this is less of a hot take than people would admit.