'Abbey Road' Trivia

On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the British release of the Beatles' Abbey Road album (its American release anniversary date is October 1) , here are some things you may not have known about this monumental LP:

The final vocal track of "Oh! Darling," the only song I haven't brought up yet, was recorded after Paul McCartney screamed himself hoarse for days to perfect the vocal style he wanted.  He was going after a Little Richard sound, lamenting that he could have generated it quickly back in the Beatles' early days.  "I wanted it to sound like I'd been performing it on stage all week," Paul later said of the song.

"Oh! Darling," a Get Back / Let It Be reject, was a song John Lennon was convinced he could have sung better.

Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees, who had a huge hit in Britain in 1970 with "Saved By the Bell" when he was estranged from his brothers, would later cover "Oh! Darling" solo, with a ballad arrangement, for the ill-fated 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie.  It was released as a single, and its chart success in the U.S. was one of the few good things about that film, as it reached number fifteen on the Billboard singles chart.  (By contrast, "Saved by the Bell" only reached number 87 in the U.S.)

A fellow Beatle - likely Paul - can be heard shouting approval for John's scream at 4:32 into "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" in the background.  Many fans mistakenly believe it's an engineer telling John to lower his voice.

The final master of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was timed at eight minutes, four seconds before Geoff Emerick snipped off the end of the tape at John's request, hence the track on the record is missing the last twenty seconds.

A bridge verse of "Something," present on George Harrison's February 1969 demo of the song (which is available on Anthology 3), was dropped later.

Despite covers from artists like Frank Sinatra and Joe Cocker, George's favorite cover of "Something" was from Ray Charles.  Billy Preston - who was Charles' organist before working with the Beatles as a side man - played organ on the original Beatles recording.

What do Joe Cocker's self-titled second album and Ray Stevens' Everything Is Beautiful LP have in common?  Both albums contain covers of "Something" and "She Came In the Bathroom Window."  Ray Stevens recorded "She Came In the Bathroom Window?" Trust me, I'm not making that up.

John wrote "Mean Mr. Mustard" in India after reading a newspaper article about a miser who concealed his money to keep people from forcing him to spend it.  He denied that the line about Mr. Mustard keeping a ten-shilling note up his nose had anything to do with cocaine.  John left the song unfinished because he thought it was a "piece of garbage."

The lyric "Mean Mr. Mustard sleeps in the park, shaves in the dark" inspired country songwriters Debbie Hupp and Bob Morrison to write the line "Like a rhyme with no reason in an unfinished song, there was no harmony" in Kenny Rogers' 1979 hit song "You Decorated My Life."  (Okay, I made that one up! :-D ) 

Mean Mr Mustard's sister's name was originally Shirley, as evidenced from the May 1968 Esher demo of the song, but John changed it to Pam when he realized he could make a perfect segue into "Polythene Pam," which follows "Mean Mr. Mustard" in the Abbey Road medley.  He said he made the change "to make it sound like it had something to do with it."  I know what you're thinking - "Surely you can't be serious!"  I am serious.  And don't call me Shirley!

"Polythene Pam" was inspired by a woman John met in Jersey (the island in the English Channel, not the U.S. state of New Jersey) who was a hanger-on of British beat poet Royston Ellis.  The girl liked to dress in polythene, although John thought up the part about jack boots and kilts.  "Perverted sex in a polythene bag. Just looking for something to write about," John later said.

Though the lyrics of Paul's "Golden Slumbers" may have been a variation of a Thomas Dekker poem, the music was Paul's own. Dekker's words had in fact been set to music before, and Paul found the sheet music for the song in his stepsister's piano.  But since Paul couldn't remember the original melody and can't read music, he decided to set his spin of Dekker's words to his own tune.

John wanted straight rock and roll for Abbey Road, but Paul and George Martin wanted to make a conceptual work mirroring Sgt. Pepper, which John was dead-set against.  So side one was meant to please John, while side two was meant to please Paul.

During the Abbey Road sessions, Paul recorded the demo for "Come and Get It," the song he wrote for the Apple band Badfinger to record.  Badfinger (below) did the song exactly the way Paul taped it, and it became the theme song for the Peter Sellers movie The Magic Christian, co-starring Ringo Starr.  When people heard "Come and Get It" in 1970, many of them thought it was a new Beatles single.  Of course it was a hit.  (Paul's original demo is on Anthology 3.)

Abbey Road was the first number-one album of the seventies in America, appearing at the top of the Billboard charts at the beginning of January 1970.

Alas, by then, the Beatles were unraveling, with only a few sessions and a couple of record releases left to them. :-(