Weighing Heavy On His Mind

"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was the first song on Abbey Road to be started and the last song to be completed.  The Beatles commenced it under peculiar circumstances; it was started on February 22, 1969, three weeks after the end of the Get Back / Let It Be sessions at Apple Studios in Savile Row. By that February, the Apple Studios facility was being rebuilt (it would close in 1975), and EMI Studios at Abbey Road were booked solid, so "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was begun at Trident Studios (defunct since 1981).  The first session on this song was overseen by Glyn Johns and augmented by Billy Preston on keyboards, just as the Get Back / Let It Be sessions had been.  Though left off Let It Be, the Beatles would include "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" on Abbey Road.  It was one of a handful of songs recorded between February and May of 1969, before the group got serious about making one more album with George Martin, so it seems ironic that a recording that began somewhat haphazardly and at the start of a quite random period for the group (the Beatles stumbled through the late winter and spring of 1969 with little rhyme or reason) would become a cornerstone of an album known for its professionalism and polish.

"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was such a complex recording, yet the song - the longest song the Beatles ever recorded (note to wiseacres - "Revolution 9" is a sound collage, not a song!) - is actually quite simple.  After helping to re-invent songwriting with literary songs such as "Norwegian Wood," "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds," John Lennon was now offering a song comprised of lyrics with only fifteen words, with a pronoun-laden title that recalled songs from the Beatles' earlier career more than anything from their later years.  But after having married Yoko Ono, John was going in a different direction, writing words that were more direct and raw to express himself.  And "I Want You (She's So Heavy) was a perfect expression of his feelings for Yoko.

John, who would take this style to the extreme on his first solo album, would explain it this way to Rolling Stone. "When you're drowning," he said, "you don't say, 'I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me.' You just scream."  And here he was screaming how much and how badly he wanted Yoko, and how heavily she weighed on his life.  Unlike with John Hartford, nothing rested gentle on John Lennon's mind.

The gritty, metallic rock and roll music of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was another move by John to get back to basics, as it's dominated by John's and George Harrison's biting guitars and Paul McCartney's elliptical bass, with a low-keyed by steamy guitar solo part of the way through, all carried by Ringo Starr's understated drums.  John lets the tension build through the song leading up to one of his most vivid, larynx-tearing vocal shouts - "Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"- in a fashion not heard since the old days of Please Please Me and With the Beatles and a couple of Larry Williams covers. 

But the song really gets cooking when the Beatles go into the instrumental coda.  We hear John sing, "She's so . . . " and we wait for him to finish his thought.  He never does.  Not only the music get heavier - one critic said that "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" "pre-dated Black Sabbath's creation of doom rock by several months" - but it gets dirtier and denser as what sounds like a gale-force wind comes in and envelops the repetitive riff, as if to suggest, like the rainbow murals of artist and hippie nun Corita Kent do, turbulent emotional complexity.  The sound is actually white noise, not unlike the sound from a radio tuned to a frequency unavailable in the immediate area.  White noise has long been a problem in recording sound, kept out as much as possible by recording engineers, yet here John Lennon, with the use of George's Moog synthesizer, generated white noise on purpose and turned it into music.  When Abbey Road was remastered for compact disc in the 1980s, though, that same white noise on "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" would be a problem because of the higher range of digital sound.

And so it goes on and on and on and on . . . lulling the listener into a hypnotic state . . . and suddenly, nothing, which likely caused many a Beatles fan to jerk forward in shock.  The abrupt volume slash at mid-bar was meant to do just that, as well as to give "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" an ending as powerful as the music itself.  According to tape operator Alan Parsons, who was present at the mix-and-running-order session for Abbey Road, John was listening to the master of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" during the session, deciding where and how to end the song, when in a burst of inspiration, he pointed to the tape and told Geoff Emerick, "There! Cut the tape there!"  And so Emerick did.  A simple act, but one that was revolutionary - there likely wasn't a song or an LP side before this in the history of recorded music that ended so definitively.  The element of surprise fades with repeated listenings and also when heard on the sideless compact disc version, as "Here Comes the Sun," which began side two on the original vinyl release, begins almost immediately. But it's still a powerful ending.

Emerick's simple act also underscored the gravity of the Abbey Road mix-and-running-order session that finalized the LP, which took place fifty years ago today.  Though there would be additional Beatles recording sessions in 1970 to finalize Let It Be, this session on August 20, 1969 marked the last time all four Beatles were present in the studio from which they began their careers and changed popular music forever.