The Whole Kitchen Sink

The Beatles' Abbey Road album marked a major leap forward for rock in terms of production and craftsmanship, and nowhere was that more apparent than in the eight-song medley the dominates side two.  It's as if the Beatles, knowing this LP would be their last hurrah, meant to save all of their best tricks for last and present all of them in a spellbinding finish, much like fireworks displays where numerous firecrackers are lit simultaneously and light up the sky for a grand finale.  But the genesis of the medley was actually more mundane than that.  John Lennon and Paul McCartney had all of these underdone and unfinished songs on file, and Paul proposed the idea of weaving these songs together to fill out Abbey Road so as not to let them go to waste.  A couple of these songs are actually in a complete state, and some of them would be covered outside the medley context - Joe Cocker's masterful remake of "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" being one such example.

Producer George Martin (above, with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr during the Abbey Road sessions) provided the impetus for the medley, hoping to get John and Paul to think more seriously about music and take a more professional, conceptual approach to sound.  John, of course, couldn't be bothered with such a grandiose idea (he famously hated the medley), but he did contribute some of his lyrical doodles and he also added some of the heaviest guitar playing the Beatles got on disc.

"You Never Give Me Your Money," the opening song in the medley, sets the stage for what's to come by illustrating Paul's frustrations with Apple and with business manger Allen Klein and his desire to get away with his wife Linda.  The song itself is a series of fragments that starts out as a piano ballad, goes to a heavy blues arrangement, and then concludes with an exhilarating expression of freedom - "Soon we'll be away from here, step on the gas and wipe that tear away"  before fading into a series of interludes from John, in which he shows off his inventiveness and his word play before handing the baton back to Paul.

John's "Sun King" provides a soft landing for the urgency of "You Never Give Me Your Money" with the gentle. reverberating electric guitar symbolizing the dawn of a new day.  The Beatles' harmony vocals welcoming the Sun King are warm and full, drifting into a nonsense verse of pseudo-Spanish and pseudo-Italian words that set up the listener for a sprightlier excursion in the form of "Mean Mr. Mustard," about an unsavory fellow with weird habits, but then followed by the intense, gritty rock of "Polythene Pam," presumably Mr. Mustard's sister, a very kinky girl and the kind you don't take home to Mother - and whom the protagonist of Rick James' "Super Freak" could never have held a candle to.  The trio of Lennon songs are a four-and-a-half-minute tour of John's mind, showing the quirkiness he brought to the Beatles as they were preparing for their final curtain call.  (Nicholas Schaffner once suggested that Mr. Mustard and his sister Pam could have been characters in Lennon's books "In His Own Write" and "A Spaniard In the Works.")  John then leaves it to Paul to bring it all home.

The bright pop of "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" - inspired by an overzealous female fan who broke into Paul's house - gives way to Paul's tender lullaby "Golden Slumbers," a set of regretful lyrics reworked from a poem by the seventeenth-century English dramatist Thomas Dekker.  Paul's pensive piano and vocals, backed by George Martin's string arrangements, find Paul, older and wiser than his days as a young rock and roll musician, looking for a way to get back home and find peace after seven tumultuous years as a Beatle.  That weariness is accentuated in "Carry That Weight," a majestically arranged expression of the pressure Paul and the other Beatles were feeling in late 1969, and one that brings everything back full circle with a musical reprise of "You Never Give Me Your Money" that adds a new lyric to that song's melody about breaking down in the middle of the celebrations - the celebrations of the Beatles.

Finally, "The End" has all four Beatles showing off their instrumental chops as John, Paul and George Harrison duel each other with their heavy guitar solos, with Ringo Starr playing a drum solo - for only the second time in his career - to clear a path for his bandmates to let 'er rip.  After that, all that's left is for Paul to go out with a symphonic flourish with this parting word of wisdom - "And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make . . ."  It was a simple way to sum up the medley and the Beatles' mutual partnership.

Except that it didn't.  After nearly fifteen seconds of silence, a chunky rock chord bursts out of nowhere to introduce "Her Majesty," a 23-second ditty that lightly makes fun of Queen Elizabeth II as an object of desire.  The song was originally placed in the medley in between "Mean Mr Mustard" and "Polythene Pam," but Paul didn't think it fit, so he had it taken out.  Engineer John Kurlander, who was told never to destroy a Beatles outtake, tacked it onto the lead-out tape at the end of the medley so it wouldn't get thrown out, and when Paul heard it after the fourteen-second gap of silence that followed "The End," he liked the surprise effect so much, he decided to keep it on - and not list it on Abbey Road's back cover with the rest of the tracks to surprise the fans.  (Compact disc re-issues list the song on the back cover.)  

"Her Majesty" was edited out rather haphazardly, but it was only supposed to a rough mix that was to be fixed later. The crashing chord that begins the song as actually the closing chord of "Mean Mr. Mustard," and the final chord of "Her Majesty" was buried in the opening of "Polythene Pam."  So the song is cut off at the end, leaving abrupt silence at the end of side two of Abbey Road  just as the end of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" does at the end of side one.  In the case of "Her Majesty," it was a perfect way to conclude the last album the Beatles would ever record together. They bowed out the way they came in back in 1962 - unexpectedly and without warning.

That's one hell of a fireworks show. :-)