#4 - The Beatles: Abbey Road

What more could you want?

Maybe Abbey Road gets better the more you think about its context. Few bands get to record their final album knowing it will be their last. The most important band in pop music history was determined to end their tenure together in 1969, but wasn't going to let it go with the rather unfortunate, then-abandoned Get Back sessions, which became Let It Be. There may not have been complete certainty at the time, but looking back, it seems so inevitable, and it's hard not to sense they know what's up. You could analyze the implications all day, but you know that's not what we do here. What I what to know is, how does a band on its last legs get the motivation to make something this goddamned good? They must all have been eying solo careers at this point, why not keep your best stuff for yourself? I guess because when you have the personnel of the Beatles and the crew at Abbey Road, you want to make the most of it. But if you just pick up this album with four nameless guys crossing a street, what does it all mean to you? I'll never know.

I always come back to "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." It's a marvel this song even exists. I alternate between thinking it's terrible and hilarious. I think it was Paul's determination to get this song out into the world that tore the band apart. Why fight for it? You wrote "Yesterday" for hell's sake, and more importantly, "Eleanor Rigby," "For No One," "Hey Jude" and "I Saw Her Standing There." So why obsess over a song about a guy going around killing people with a hammer? Is the lyrical gag that amusing? Is the contrast between the sprightly singalong tune and the darkly-humorous subject matter that entertaining? Why push it instead of recording, like, "Teddy Boy" or something? And yet, even if I think this is the dorkiest song the Beatles recorded, why doesn't that stop it from being incredibly cool?

Because by this point, of course, the Beatles were done stumbling around in the dark. They'd been through the wars. They weathered the miserable conditions of Get Back (there I go again mythologizing) and emerged even more competent and capable than ever before. If they were going to do something as bizarre as "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" they were going to do it like pros. And bizarre sums it up well, because Abbey Road may be the strangest of all the Beatles' albums. Revolver was very upfront about its experimental quality. Sgt. Pepper reveled in turning the past into a kaleidoscope. The White Album proved you could be both stripped down and overblown. Abbey Road is fucking insidious. It's not strange until you think how strange it is, both the songs in and of themselves, and the way they match up, and yet it seems so pure, so natural.

I could individually write an essay about each of them and it's going to be difficult not to. Consider "Come Together," which beckons you into the album, slithering in and making that bass fucking earn its pay. Is it funk? Soul? Jazz? This was the Beatles had done to rock music by the end of the 60's, made it overlap with everything. They had done with experimentation and set to work making those experiments pay off. The lyrics don't mean a goddamned thing but they sure as fuck feel like they do, and not for the last time on the album. And that solo splits you in two. And subtly, so subtly you don't even notice it, but on this album Ringo proves why he drummed for the best band.

The first side contains three excellent love songs of different but overlapping flavours. There is "Something," that lovely, vaguely sweet in just the right way ode to that special someone. Even loving songs like "Taxman" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and respecting "Don't Bother Me" and "Blue Jay Way" more than typical Beatle reviewers, I might not have thought George was capable of his contributions to this album. They don't strive to be spiritual, and yet they are, because "Something" raises its awe at the beauty of its subject to a form of praise and worship always striven for in songwriting yet rarely achieved. Oddly enough, it doesn't feel like Lennon or McCartney could have written it. It was something about being comparatively unstudied about his own songwriting that enabled George to finally unleash this burst of creativity at the tail end of the group's career.

"Oh! Darling" is just a song that works. If Paul's rawness isn't as raw as John's (on say, "Don't Let Me Down") it's still powerful enough to do this song right, and goes along with subtly thundering drums, bluesy swaggering piano, guitars that stab in outrage, and that bedrock bass. I think, strangely, part of the point of Abbey Road (if one feels confident making such statements or taking them seriously) is to show that Paul can write something like "Oh! Darling" and something like "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and set them next to tracks like "Come Together" and "Something" and go "See? Same four guys, same band." Even Ringo gets in on the action with "Octopus's Garden," one of the stronger whole-band efforts, with its bitchin' George Harrison solo and cute harmonies. George said it was unintentionally spiritual, and I must say I agree. It's actually a great piece of songwriting not because it's a charming little song about an octopus, but because the octopus's garden seems to stand in for whatever that place is we'd like to escape to when shit just piles too high for us to bear, as must have been the case for the Beatles in '69. That's the point of escapism, of metaphor, of narrative, of music, to stand in for saying exactly what you're talking about.

Bringing us to the end of the side is "I Want You (She's So Heavy,)" one of the most interesting exercises in the piece, which understandably has its detractors. Lennon explained it that, when you're drowning, you don't call out "Excuse me sir I would really appreciate it if you would lend me some assistance!" You fuckin' yell help! So this is a beautiful study in minimalism, while also exploding it out to... maximalism? The song is nearly 8 minutes of the same-ish riff and contains like twelve different words. It's impressively direct and hypnotic, bordering on obsessive. John was, of course, well past the point of being hung up on ordinary lyrics or conventional structure. But as repetitive as it is, it manages to modify itself very connivingly, with its burst of organs and limber bass. Then for the last three minutes it creates this darkening, plummeting descent, this never-ending sinking feeling in the listener, this inescapable dread from being obsessed. Do yourself a favour and don't watch the progress bar while the song winds out. Don't wait for it. Just let yourself get absorbed. This is a great song for night driving. As the wind begins to kick up a storm, the "swell out" lasts and lasts and lasts, holding you, pulling you, dragging you down, further and further until... click.

It ends at this perfectly wrong spot. I've only ever listened to it on LP once, and it's a shock. Truth be told, it might even be better on CD because it leads, after a fair gap, to the beautiful, excellent, "Here Comes The Sun." This is the track that makes the album for me, really, although "Something" gets more love, being a more conventional love ballad. The first thing you hear after that jarring, disturbing cut is the angelic opening of George Harrison's song. Just that opening lyric, "Here comes the sun / And I say / It's all right" executes a damn-near-perfect symbol for waiting for troubles to pass, anticipation of that time when things will be better. I've often thought, with this song as the center of my theory, that the album was in a way a concept album about the end of the Beatles, but we need not impose meaning to enjoy it. The instrumentation of this song is also impeccable, using the "Badge" riff (lifted from a song by that name by Cream, which Harrison helped Clapton write.) In fact, arpeggio riffs like this one (am I doing this right?) permeate this album, in places like "I Want You" and "Because," as well as subtly beneath "Oh! Darling" and later callbacks to "Here Comes The Sun." The album is sneakily clever in the way it revisits itself, and the arpeggios sound, to me, like this aura of inevitability and inescapability, a self-sustaining cycle of sorts.

The song is beauty distilled in pop form with its rising harmonium and handclaps. "Sun, sun, sun, here it comes!" Fuck yes. After this, the eerily cool "Because" provides a sort of breather moment. It's not one of my favourite songs on the album, but you've gotta dig the simple yet clever turns of phrase that comprise its lyrics, its transcendent harmonies and its Beethoven-in-reverse structure (the song, famously, is based off the Moonlight Sonata, and indeed feels bathed in darkness.) But there are those lighter-than-air harmonies, and in fact the Beatles reportedly sing together more on this album than any other, which is intriguing in light of what I've already said about knowing it to be their final album going in.

A twinkling of piano keys announces the intro to "You Never Give Me Your Money" and thus the "Abbey Road Medley" that sends the album and the group into its final sprint to the finish line. After a bar, the guitar sits down next to it and hums sympathetically along. Then that mournful opening line that would be welcome in any lounge, cafe, concert hall, any venue at all: "You never give me your money / You only give me your funny papers / And in the middle of negotiations, you break down." The Beatles were no strangers to self-mythologization (well, deliberate or not, it happened) and this song frames the business deals that tore the group apart as a lover's spat. The song is multifaceted, it morphs from a ballad to a boogie-woogie tune (a la "Lady Madonna") to a more modern rock tempo during the "One sweet dream" segment. This is not unlike the great "Happiness is a Warm Gun" from the White Album, which moves through phases rather than through verses and choruses, a format McCartney later used to great effect on "Band On The Run." But this tune probably unites its pieces better than any of those, and serves as a preview of the seven or eight tracks to come, how anything is possible and the future looks bright. The lyric "One sweet dream / Pick up your bags and get in the limousine / Soon we'll be away from here / Step on the gas and wipe that tear away" is an excellent way of looking at moving on with one's life. Oddly, it sits as the first piece of the "Medley," comprised of mostly under-two-minute tracks that bleed from one to the next, despite being the third longest individual track on the album.

The ensuing tracks, unlike "You Never..." are wonderfully single-minded sketches, a process of "clearing out the attic" for the greatest pop songwriters of their generation. There's no reason a song like "Sun King" or "Mean Mr. Mustard" should be expect to sit in the midst of an album and speak for itself, and yet, grouped together and promoted as one, the fragments become something no individual song could ever be. There's an impressive everythingness about the medley that befits a band like the Beatles.

So there's "Sun King" with its gloomy, bluesy, guitars, singalong nonsense phrases and chirping crickets buzzing around. The album becomes less about making a statement than deciding how to state. "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam" are delightful Lennon-flavoured character sketches (and Paul edges one in with "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window") both of which feel nearly complete unto themselves despite consisting of about one verse, no chorus, and in "Pam's" case, a pretty wicked solo. There's that moment (at the beginning of the "...Bathroom Window" track) where the guitar is readying itself to transition to the new song and one of the guys (John I think) says "Aw, look out!" that feels like a neat switch-off between the John song and the Paul one. The two didn't write together anymore, but they weren't isolated, they still had to play together. The songs practically feel like responses to one another, a sort of "Oh yeah? Top this!" of dashed-off half-songs. They're all great.

The medley is traditionally broken up in two pieces after "...Bathroom Window." he second half begins with the lullaby "Golden Slumbers," with its deliberately over-wrought vocals. There's something really touching about the lyric "Once there was a way to get back home" in this context. As I say, I often see the album as being "about itself," (I think it's indisputable, but how important or pervasive it is is up for debate.) It's about not going back, and of course "Carry That Weight" (with its callback to "You Never Give Me Your Money") is about moving forward, and about the burden of the past. It serves as the "Eleven O'Clock Number," rousing the audience back to attention. And then in one last frenetic burst of energy, spirit, camaraderie and love comes "The End," which ends fittingly with that exchange of solos (including a hot-damn drum solo from Ringo.) Somehow, without the aid of more than five lines of lyrics, the group manages to sum up with their instruments exactly who they were and what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it. It ends with a sweet flourishing bit of fanfare, a gloosy farewell photograph from four of the best musicians ever known.

Psych! It ends with Paul McCartney noodling on his guitar about how he wants to bang the Queen. "Her Majesty" is a clever accident, like the feedback that they left stuck on the beginning of "I Feel Fine" or the "Fuck!" in "Hey Jude." This weird, deliberate undoing of their own grand finale is so delightfully self-deprecatingly Beatley.

And so it goes. The Beatles were smart enough to know what few realize, that all great things must end, you might as well write your own. The four boys who had formed the band a decade earlier had grown into four very different men, to paraphrase John. Even by this point they had traveled out in their own directions, and this album was the last possible chance for them to harness it together, to bind themselves in unison and work on something that could be great. I'm not saying it's objectively the greatest Beatles album, but it gives me that unique thrill as a Beatles fan to know they ended without fucking up. That you could seize control of your own narrative, offer something so unlike what you've already done and yet so comfortably within your element... I don't know, it's enviable. The songs are excellent, even "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" in its way, and even if not, by the end of "The End" you feel like you've traveled so far from it that it doesn't matter. It feels complete, like a true journey of sorts. It elicits far more varied responses from me, and far more personal than those invoked by Sgt. Pepper or the White Album or Revolver or Rubber Soul, even if the songs on those albums are mostly just as good or better.

All in all, for all the pomp and circumstance, it feels exceptionally natural. Unlike Let It Be, recorded earlier that year, Abbey Road isn't a forced attempt to get "back to basics." Here they indulge their own interests. Having started experimenting over the past four years, they now see those experiments through to the end, taking each of their vantage points as far as they could before it was time to break away. This is where the Beatles ends and John, Paul, George and Ringo begin. Despite obviously being the work of four different sets of hands, this is the culmination of the Beatles as a band, and it's as great as anything they'd done.

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