Early 1970

I just marked the fiftieth anniversary of the recording of the last song the Beatles (minus John Lennon) would record together before the breakup, George Harrison's "I Me Mine."  At that point, the group was still technically together, and there are some indications that the breakup of the group almost didn't happen.  As the seventies began, Paul McCartney was desperately trying to keep the group together, and Ringo Starr, faced with the prospect of a solo career when he had only written two Beatles songs and could barely sing, would, as he later admitted in his song "Early 1970," much rather "see all three" when he went into town to make records.

The fate of the Beatles hung in the balance in the weeks and months following the release of Abbey Road.  Apple business manager Allen Klein had negotiated a new contract that was favorable to the group with Capitol Records in the U.S. to carry the Apple label.  John had been planning a music festival for the summer of 1970 in Toronto to promote his Year One After Peace concept, an idea to commence a pacifist period for human history as the 198th decade of the Christian calendar was a year away from beginning (on January 1, 1971, but John preferred to make 1970 Year One).  It was rumored that the festival would feature the Beatles themselves, Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and practically everyone else - "the biggest music festival in history," Lennon promised.  Lennon had chosen Toronto because of its proximity to the U.S., where he couldn't get in, and because of a successful appearance with Eric Clapton, bassist Klaus Voorman, and future Yes drummer Alan White under the Plastic Ono Band name at a music festival in September 1969.

Meanwhile, Paul was trying to get the other Beatles interested in resuming concert tours, as the Rolling Stones were doing with their 1969 arena tour of America.  At a pivotal meeting of the group on September 20, 1969, he even made the novel suggestion of renting an ocean liner and having the Beatles perform as the house band on a cruise.

"Well, I think you're daft!"  John exclaimed.  Then he dropped the big one.  "I wasn't going to tell you until we signed the [Capitol] contract, but I want out.  I want a divorce."  John's outburst didn't mean the end of the Beatles - not yet - but he agreed to act like it was business as usual until they signed the new record contract when Klein and Paul, in a rare moment of solidarity (the two couldn't stand each other), convinced John to reconsider, or at least not say anything publicly yet.

On another occasion, John and George confronted Paul and demanded that he agree to their idea for recording Beatles albums going forward. John said he was getting tired of Paul calling all of the shots in the studio and arranging "pre-packaged productions" tailored to Paul's own talents.  Henceforth, John and George said each of the three of them should have four songs per LP, with Ringo getting to add one or two songs if he wanted to.  The plan was a form of what Americans would recognize as "affirmative action," but Paul's response was hardly affirmative or action. Instead, he complained that such a quota system was regimentation more suitable to the military than to a rock and roll band; John and George insisted that this the only way to ensure that everyone got a fair share of time on a Beatles album.

Soon, however, circumstances began to emerge that would put the band's future in grave doubt and ultimately prevent them from ever returning to the recording studio except for work needed to complete Let It Be.  In the fall of 1969, John had come up with a new song that he offered to the group as a new Beatles single; he had contributed only one Beatles single since July 1967.  Paul wasn't sold on the tune - "Cold Turkey," a song about getting off heroin and the pain involved - so John put it out as a Plastic Ono Band single, having played it at the Toronto concert.  It was the first song credited to John Lennon alone, thus ending the twelve-year Lennon-McCartney songwriting collaboration, but the single, released in October 1969, was not a big hit.

At about that time, Paul dropped out of sight for awhile, which led to the rumors that he was dead.  He had, in fact, repaired to his farmhouse in Scotland to plot his course for what would come next.  When he returned to London in December, at the same time John and George were playing at a benefit for UNICEF at the Lyceum Ballroom, he began work on a solo record in his home studio.  With the group on ice, Paul wanted to stay active musically, but he had to find his way as a solo artist after having been part of the Beatles for so long.

Events then moved quickly.  With the Let It Be album - still at this point to be called Get Back - in limbo, Allen Klein and Capitol patched together an LP of ten single tracks that hadn't appeared on a Capitol-issued Beatles album before to provide fresh product for American record stores; the LP's title, The Beatles Again, which would be released in late February 1970, was soon changed to Hey Jude.  Meanwhile, Beatles Monthly,  the group's fan magazine, folded after its December 1969 issue (though it would resume publication in 1976 and would continue for nearly 27 years).  This last issue would fault the Beatles for letting the music be taken over by business and lamented how they were no longer the handsome young lads they used to be, all of them having grown uncultivated beards by then.  The group's seventh and final Christmas disc for their official fan club was also a disappointment, dominated by John Lennon and Yoko Ono's irreverent but irrelevant ramblings and showing no joy or cheer whatsoever.

When Paul George, and Ringo completed their recording sessions for Let It Be on the first weekend of 1970, having taped "I Me Mine" on Saturday, January 3 and overdubs for "Let It Be" on Sunday, January 4, there was still a modicum of hope that the Beatles would stay together, at least outside the confines of the group. But John had already lost interest in the Year One festival he'd been planning and had pulled the plug on it when business issues and logistical concerns - the latter prompted by the Rolling Stones' disaster at Altamont - intervened.  More work was still needed to complete Let It Be.  Paul was reportedly unsure at this time if his break from the group was temporary or permanent.  

To be continued . . .

'Abbey Road': The Release

The Beatles' Abbey Road was released in the United Kingdom fifty years ago this past Thursday (September 26) and released in the United States fifty years ago today.  Here's yet another outtake from the cover photo session.  (The police van may be gone, but, as you can see, Paul Cole is still there!) 

The Beatles' last album, though the penultimate release, was issued with little fanfare by Apple, and with good reason - the band was done.  The group spent little if any time promoting it, and after the generous packaging of Sgt. Pepper, the Magical Mystery Tour EP or LP (depending on which country you live in), and the White Album, there was no lyric sheet, no picture book or poster, and no cardboard cutouts - none of that stuff.  Without even their name on the front cover, the music was expected to do the selling.

It did.  Abbey Road spent seventeen out of eighteen consecutive weeks at number one on the British LP chart (displaced temporarily for that eighteenth week by the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed), and it spent eleven weeks at number one on the Billboard Top Two Hundred LP chart. in the United States, being certified by the National Association of Recording Merchandisers as the best-selling album of 1969 - and it was only out for the final three months of the year.  Ironically, it was Allen Klein who would report, two months after Paul McCartney announced the Beatles' split, that it was the best-selling Beatles album in America ever, with five million copies sold. Seven million more would be sold by 2001, and even though it would lose its status as the Beatles' American bestseller to the White Album, it remains extraordinarily popular.

It was popular with musicians, who would use the LP's high-gloss production and its complex arrangements as a template for their own records.  Seventies classic rock was born here - whether it was raw blues-rock from Bad Company and Humble Pie, the bright melodies of Elton John, or the moody, pensive art rock of Yes, it would be hard to find any rock music that played on mainstream radio during the Me Decade that was not inspired by Abbey Road.  Interestingly, some of what the Beatles did on Abbey Road was influenced by contemporaries that, in turn, influenced those same contemporaries; for example, the Beatles tired to copy the guitar musings of Fleetwood Mac, which at the time was a blues band led by Peter Green, on "Sun King;" half a decade and change later, a different Fleetwood Mac with a different lineup would be making the sort of bright pop-rock that characterized Abbey Road.

The influence of Abbey Road wouldn't last forever, though; punk bands such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash closed the curtain on the era the Beatles initiated just before their own end.  But echoes of Abbey Road still reverberate for any band that simply doesn't want to be the most popular band, but also the best band.

The reviews upon Abbey Road's release were as positive as the public's reaction. Writing in Melody Maker, Chris Welch declared that "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism . . .. While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive."  Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times called it "refreshingly terse and unpretentious," and Rolling Stone's John Mendelsohn said it was "breathtakingly recorded" and was enthusiastic about the medley, calling the joining of various fragments a "uniformly wonderful suite" that proved the the Beatles had "far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying."

Critical judgment on Abbey Road was not uniform, though, with a few critics finding the music too slick and artificial, and some of them thought it was quite boring.  The most interesting critique of Abbey Road, though, came from then-Family lead singer Roger Chapman.  Offering his opinion on Abbey Road and other record releases of the time for Melody Maker, he said he was largely unimpressed by the Beatles' LP, finding their music derivative and lacking in personality.  "In the past the Beatles have been able to borrow things and put themselves into it," Chapman said.  "This is a bit too obvious though."  He called "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" "an inferior version of 'When I’m Sixty-Four'" and said  that "Octopus’s Garden" would have been "a complete washout" from any other band.  But what seemed incredibly prophetic was Chapman's final kiss-off:

Ever since their last LP they have been making records as if it is something they have to do because they are the Beatles. Maybe the whole thing has got beyond them. If this album had been by anybody else it would have been a complete washout. The Beatles have been a major influence on the whole music scene, but I don’t see them being an influence anymore.

And just like that, the Beatles bowed out in the nick of time.  It took another musician to see that the Beatles' time was almost up.  But Abbey Road was a nice parting gift.

And it's the gift that keeps on giving, thanks to the new Super Deluxe Edition of the LP, which features:

• A new stereo mix of the album, produced by George Martin's son Giles Martin
• Two compact discs of demos and outtakes
• a CD with a Dolby Atmos mix of the album plus a 5.1 surround of the whole album plus a high-resolution stereo mix of the whole album
• a book - another super-cool book!

And soon you'll be able to hear it on YouTube.  No book, though.

That's the end.

*

Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl,
But she doesn't have a lot to say.
Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl
But she changes from day to day.
I want to tell her that I love her a lot,
But I gotta get a bellyful of wine.
Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl,
Someday I'm going to make her mine, oh yeah,
Someday I'm going to make her mine.

'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. :-(

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. :-)           

Because It's Good

That's why the Beatles recorded a song John Lennon wrote to a backward chord sequence for Abbey Road.

"Because" came out in a flash of inspiration and was written in a flash.  John was at home with Yoko while she was playing the piano.  And not show tunes or avant-garde pieces - classical music, specifically "Moonlight Sonata" by Ludwig van Beethoven (below).  Yoko, you understand, is a more talented musician than you think; she's actually a classically trained pianist.  (She just can't sing.)

John thought that the melody was intriguing, and he thought he'd like to write a song with a melody like "Moonlight Sonata," but rather than just write lyrics to a familiar classical tune, he asked Yoko to play the chords in reverse order to see how it sounded.  The moody melody that emerged led John to write simple, philosophical lyrics that, like "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", didn't waste time with verbosity.  The message of "Because" was clear - the world is amazing, love is old and new, and love is all.  (And love is you.)

The Web site Culture Sonar has also noted how the words of "Because" are typical Lennon wordplay.  The world turns, so John sings about how it turns him on, and the wind blows, so he sings about how it blows his mind.  The sky is blue, and being blue, John sings, makes him cry.  Even with his simplest lyrics, John knew how to come up with something clever and witty.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney recorded a basic rhythm track with John on guitar and Paul on bass, with George Martin playing the distinctive electric harpsichord that characterizes the song.  But George Harrison contributed the instrument that makes "Because" majestic - his Moog synthesizer, which you already know about.  He created some wonderfully monumental riffs in the bridge, and he accents the melody in the coda with a light-touch solo like a pastry chef delicately frosts a cake.  Ringo Starr also played on "Because," but his contribution was not recorded.  He tapped on a drum to keep the others in rhythm and on time.  "Ringo was our drum machine," Martin later said.

The fullness of "Because" comes through on the vocals, John, Paul and George harmonizing like in the old days and sounding much like how Crosby, Stills and Nash were sounding with their own three-part harmonies on their 1969 debut album.  But the three Beatles had their vocals triple-tracked, hence the harmonies on "Because" - recorded in Abbey Road Studios' cavernous Studio One - were nine-part harmonies.  Hey, nine was John's lucky number! :-) 

Excepting "I Me Mine," which Paul, George and Ringo recorded in January 1970 to complete Let It Be, "Because" was the last song the Beatles began in Abbey Road Studios.  By the time they were done with it on August 5, 1969, all that was left to do was finish for Abbey Road other songs already begun.  It was a fine way to bring the album toward its conclusion, with such a stately and solid performance that was the closest to classical rock that anyone ever came. Even the art rock bands of the 1970s couldn't surpass it.

Beethoven would have been proud. :-)        

Here Comes Something

Although fans regard George Harrison's White Album songs as his best work in the Beatles, his Abbey Road songs are undoubtedly his most popular work with the group.

The first of these songs, "Something," was actually written during the White Album sessions.  George did a run-through of "Something" while the studio was being set up to record his song "Piggies," and co-producer Chris Thomas liked "Something" so much that he suggested to George that the Beatles record that instead, ensuring him that it was worthy of release.  A nonchalant George said that maybe he'd give it to Jackie Lomax, the singer he'd discovered for Apple, for a single. 

Apple had even made a bigger discovery in the form of American singer-songwriter James Taylor, who was signed by Apple A&R man Peter Asher (brother of Jane, partner of Gordon), and George had a good reason not to want to give "Something" to him.  Because one of James Taylor's songs inspired it!

Taylor recorded a song for his Apple album called "Something In the Way She Moves," and George was moved to write a similar song.  Both songs start with the same lyric - the title of the Taylor song - but apart from the sentiment of having a woman by one's side, the resemblance between the two songs ends there.  "Something In the Way She Moves" has an entirely different set of verses and a different chorus, and as recorded in 1968, it's a brittle, sparse song that opens with a harpsichord.  (Most listeners are more familiar with the more relaxed, re-recorded version that appeared on Taylor's 1976 greatest-hits compilation, his first album having been out of print throughout the seventies for legal reasons.)  "Something," the George Harrison song, was recorded by the Beatles as a lush power ballad, anchored by Paul McCartney's bass and Ringo Starr's tumbling drums, with an understated guitar solo and a similar low-keyed piano line from John Lennon backed by a string arrangement from George Martin.  Despite taking a line from James Taylor - who left Apple with Peter Asher, his manager and producer, after Asher was fired by Allen Klein from the label - George said he was trying to write a soulful ballad in the style of Ray Charles, and the feel is indeed far more soulful than the more folkish leanings of Taylor's song.

Little did George know that the song would define his time with the Beatles forever.  The group hadn't planned a single to accompany Abbey Road, and so when Allen Klein decided that a corresponding single was needed, he instigated the release of "Something" as a 45.  It was released as a single in the United States on October 6, 1969, five days after the American release of Abbey Road, and it was released as a single in Great Britain on October 31 of that year - more than a month after Abbey Road's September 26 British release.  Thus, "Something" is the only Beatles single in either country issued from an already issued album.  But it was also the first and only Beatles single written by George, which was long overdue.  George was surprisingly as nonchalant about such a milestone as he'd been about the song itself.  "They blessed me with a couple of B-sides," he said at the time, "but this is the first time I've had an A-side.  Big deal!"

It was indeed.  It was a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and while it only made number four in Britain - understandable, since record buyers in Britain usually bought singles and albums, while Americans tended to buy either singles or albums - it hit number one in the U.S., meaning that even casual record buyers who didn't invest much in LPs wanted this song in their collections.  In fact, "Something" became the Beatles' third bestselling single in America, after "Hey Jude" and "I Want To Hold Your Hand." Frank Sinatra (below, in 1969) called "Something" "the greatest love song in fifty years, and he recorded it and performed it in concert.  He once told his audience that the song was indicative of Lennon and McCartney's songwriting genius . . . inadvertently yet perfectly summing up George's role in the Beatles. :-D

The crediting error notwithstanding, one must wonder what song from 1919 that Sinatra - who released an album of Rod McKuen songs in 1969 - must have been thinking of, and why Lennon and McCartney couldn't match it.  As for George's attitude toward John and Paul for being dismissive of his work, he told them, "Maybe now I just don't care whether you like 'em or not, I just do 'em."

And what he did was not just admired by Sinatra but by Joe Cocker, who was the first artiste to record "Something" - before the Beatles! - for his second album, though it came out after Abbey Road.  George in fact played guitar on Cocker's recording.  (For the record, Jackie Lomax never recorded "Something," as George once envisioned.)  Other cover versions came from James Brown, Shirley Bassey, and, I kid you not, Ray Stevens.

But that wasn't all.

"Here Comes the Sun" was George's other contribution to Abbey Road, written in the spring of 1969 when he chose to spend the day in Eric Clapton's garden rather than go to a business meeting at Apple.  It was the first really warm day since the end of winter, and George found bright optimism in the change of seasons.  Clapton's garden inspired a song that felt as warm and inviting as the sun itself, with a light folk melody anchored by time signatures inspired by Indian music.  The Beatles' recording - for which John was absent - centered around George's inviting acoustic guitar line, augmented by the enveloping comfort of the sound his Moog synthesizer.  It's the sound of renewal, the sonic equivalent of a bright ray of light piercing the fading winter clouds.  The Moog, together with George Martin's score, is a potent symbol of spring having spring again.

Not too many songs encapsulate the mere pleasure of sitting in a garden, though Stephen Stills' Manassas song "Johnny's Garden" (inspired by a garden on an English estate he'd bought, Johnny being the gardener) is right up there with "Here Comes the Sun."  The Beatles' original recording of this song could have easily been released as a single in Britain and America as a follow-up to "Something."  It never was (though it appeared as the B-side to "Oh! Darling," another Abbey Road track, in Japan), but the song would find success on singles charts in the form of covers.  Steve Harley and his group Cockney Rebel released their version of "Here Comes the Sun" as a single in 1976, and that record went to number ten in Britain.  In America, though, Richie Havens' 1971 version of "Here Comes the Sun," which made it up to number sixteen on the Billboard singles chart, is the definitive cover.  Here is a clip of Havens performing the song on the German pop show "Beat-Club" in 1971.

As Beatles author Chris Ingham noted, George's song struck a chord with many black American performers who, having come out of the civil rights struggle, expected better times to come, which is why Nina Simone covered "Here Comes the Sun" a year after Havens did; they saw the song as a metaphor for their optimism.  As for this version, Ingham wrote, "This elated, upbeat campfire arrangement for acoustic guitar, pedal steel and bongos captures the Woodstock vibe Havens was famous for."

Maybe if John Lennon and Paul McCartney had taken George as seriously as Frank Sinatra, Joe Cocker, Nina Simone, and Richie Havens all did, the Beatles might have stayed together into the 1970s and made some fine records matching if not exceeding Abbey Road.  But in the fall of 1969, it was already too late for that.

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.

I'd Like To Be Under the Sea

Having finally completed and contributed "Don't Pass Me By" to the Beatles' White Album, Ringo Starr needed a break from the group, which was part of the reason he walked out of the White Album sessions and stayed away for ten days.  In that time, he took his family to Sardinia for what Americans call a vacation and what the Brits call a holiday.  The break proved to be beneficial for Ringo, as it not only allowed him to recharge himself and recommit himself to the Beatles, but it also allowed him to further his nascent songwriting abilities. 

Ringo and his family were staying on a boat owned by his good friend Peter Sellers, where he first tasted calamari - squid - and found it somewhat rubbery. The captain of the boat regaled Ringo about some of the local marine life around the island, including the octopus - which turned out to be a delicacy in Sardinia.  He told Ringo that octopuses like to collect stones and shells and arrange them in patterns on the sea floor, as if they were in a garden. Ringo, who was frustrated with the escalating tension in the Beatles, thought of how he'd like to just jump into the sea and relax in an octopus's garden.  And so a new song, which debuted on Abbey Road, emerged from our hero.   

"Octopus's Garden" instantly recalled "Yellow Submarine," that other Beatles song about going under the surface of the ocean to find peace - which was sung by Ringo as well.  But there are a couple of differences.  First, Ringo takes us under the sea without a vehicle, which is an important distinction.  The black American poet and activist Amiri Baraka famously despised "Yellow Submarine" because he heard it as a metaphor for white people isolating themselves from the problems of the outside world.  (If there is a milestone marking the point where white music and black music began to be as segregated from each other as it was before Elvis Presley and Little Richard, this may be it.)  Unlike "Yellow Submarine," which is about going undersea in a hermetically sealed craft, "Octopus's Garden" envisions the joy of swimming in the ocean and being at one with nature, communing with the aquatic life below rather than being separated from it.   

The other thing about "Octopus's Garden" is that it's not a psychedelically inspired song like "Yellow Submarine."  Here, Ringo employs a country and western vibe, producing a sound faintly foretelling the country-rock sound that would dominate the Los Angeles music scene and American radio in the early seventies.  For a nice touch, he added the sound of bubbles being blown in the instrumental bridge.  If there's anything psychedelic about this song, it's not intentional.  George Harrison, who loved the line "We would be warm below the storm," said that "Octopus's Garden" ought out spiritual fulfillment in he same manner of his own songs.  "It's like this level is a storm," George said, "and if you get sort of deep in your consciousness, it's very peaceful. So Ringo's writing his cosmic songs without noticing."

Ringo brought "Octopus's Garden" to the Get Back sessions in January 1969, and a clip from the Let It Be documentary shows Ringo, George and producer George Martin working on the song for possible inclusion on what became the Let It Be album.  (It didn't, of course, and Let It Be is one of only two Beatles albums on which Ringo does not have a lead vocal.)  The Beatles began recording it in April 1969, with Chris Thomas and the group co-producing, for indeterminate future use, as Abbey Road hadn't been begun with any seriousness just yet.  The song would be completed that July.

The genius of Octopus's Garden is that, like "Yellow Submarine," it was conceived as a children's song, except that, while "Yellow Submarine" has elements of a drunken Salvation Army band tune, Ringo makes it clear that his song is pointedly meant to comfort children, as "Octopus's Garden" presents the octopus not as a scary sea monster but as a welcoming creature.  The friendly octopus will let you in his garden where every boy and girl, regardless of race, creed, or color, know they're safe, swimming around the coral and resting their heads on the ocean floor.

Small wonder that Ringo turned his song into a 2014 children's book, an illustration from which by Ben Cort is shown above.

The song has been very good to Ringo over the years, being selected for generations of grammar-school choral groups to sing, being used in a Muppets segment on "Sesame Street" to teach kids about the number eight, and appearing on the set list of many an All-Starr Band show.  Even if Ringo had never written another song again (fortunately, in his solo career, he did - "It Don't Come Easy" may be his best song ever and one of the best hit singles of 1971), he assured a place for himself as a songwriter in his own right with this unforgettable tune.

The 'Abbey Road' LP Cover

It was fifty years ago today that the Beatles had a relatively quick photo session for the cover of Abbey Road, the last album they would ever record.

The Beatles had six pictures taken of them walking across the crosswalk in front or EMI Studios at the southeastern terminus of what is now London's most famous street by photographer Iain Macmillan.  Linda McCartney took a few additional photos of the Beatles waiting to cross the street on either side, and she even took a few pictures of them sitting on the front steps of the studio.  A police officer helped out with the crosswalk photos by holding up traffic in the meantime.  Paul McCartney later looked at the six proofs of the crosswalk photos and selected the one he thought best for the cover - the photo above.

By naming their final LP Abbey Road, the Beatles brought instantaneous fame to the street that EMI Studios - now Abbey Road Studios - fronted.  Tourists still visit it after fifty years, many getting pictures of themselves crossing that same zebra crosswalk, many of them barefoot, as Paul McCartney appeared on the cover (more on that later).  The studio itself became a mecca for fans of classic rock, and not just Beatles fans; Pink Floyd, the Beatles of seventies progressive rock, recorded The Dark Side Of the Moon and Wish You Were Here at this facility, and early EMI artists from Gerry and the Pacemakers to the Hollies also worked here.  As the crown-jewel facility of EMI, which calls itself "the greatest recording organization in the world" (though Sony/Columbia might beg to differ), Abbey Road is clearly the greatest recording studio in the world.  Unlike Motown's original Hitsville U.S.A. studio in Detroit, which is now a museum, Abbey Road still functions as a recording studio; it's not open to the public.  That hasn't stopped the tourists from coming to Abbey Road Studios to pay homage to the Beatles, even as recording artists have worked there to do the same.

The cover itself was as revolutionary - and as widely parodied - as the cover of Beatles' own Sgt. Pepper album.  While it wasn't the first such sleeve, the front cover of Abbey Road is notable for not having any text identifying the title or artist.  Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan had already put out albums with such sleeves - Electric Ladyland and Nashville Skyline - as had the Band with their debut, Music From Big Pink (reissues of that album included both the title and artist on the front cover).  The Rolling Stones' self-titled debut LP - another album with a textless front sleeve (the American edition had blurbs all over it) - goes back farther, to 1964.  But Abbey Road opened the floodgates for more such album covers, including King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, the Rolling Stones' It's Only Rock and Roll, Styx's Pieces of Eight, just about every seventies release from Pink Floyd (including the two aforementioned titles in this blog), most albums from Björk, America's Hideaway (produced by George Martin), and also the 1970 debut solo albums of John Lennon and Paul McCartney themselves.  Plus literally hundreds of others.  The Beatles didn't need to identify themselves in print on a front album cover, as Abbey Road art director John Kosh realized - they were the four most recognizable faces in music history.

A couple of onlookers got into some of Paul's wife's photographs, like the one above showing the Beatles beginning to cross the street.  A few pedestrians - actually some decorators doing some work in the recording studio - got into the chosen photo for the cover, visible just above Paul's head.  The gentleman on the sidewalk (or "pavement," as the Brits call it) next to the police van on the right side of the picture, though, is the most famous onlooker in the photo.  Paul Cole was an American tourist waiting for his wife while she was inside one of the buildings across the street from the recording studio - a small museum Cole had no interest in seeing.  So, as he stood there, Cole started chatting with the policeman in the police van parked along the street, when he suddenly noticed these four guys walking back and forth across the street.  Cole remembered being struck by their odd appearance, especially their styles of dress, and he thought they were acting weird because he didn't notice Macmillan photographing them.  He didn't realize who they were because he paid no attention to popular music, preferring the classics.  (Imagine today a classic-rock fan seeing a rapper in the middle of a photo session and not knowing who he is.)

Later that fall, Cole's wife, an organist, bought a copy of Abbey Road to learn how to play one of the Beatles' songs from the then-new album for a wedding.  Upon seeing the album cover, Cole was surprised to find himself in the picture.  "I did a double-take and said, 'Hey, that’s me!'," he later remembered, joking that it took him some convincing to get his children to notice that it was him.

And it wasn't the only picture Cole appeared in.  He got into an outtake, as seen below (to the right of George Harrison's head).

Soon after the American release of Abbey Road in October 1969, certain fans in the U.S. interpreted the front-cover photo as a message that Paul McCartney was, in fact, dead, and that the street crossing is in fact Paul's funeral procession.  John Lennon, dressed in white, is the preacher; Ringo Starr, all in black, is the pallbearer; and George Harrison, all in denim, is the gravedigger.  Paul is the corpse, as indicated by his bare feet (a sign of morning in Sicily) and closed eyes.  The license plate on the Volkswagen Beetle spells out his age -  28 IF Paul had lived. (He was 27 then.)  Paul, in fact, had kicked off his shoes (in the outtake above, he is wearing them, a pair of sandals), which he was known to do in the studio as well.  He said he was going barefoot in the style of British pop singer Sandie Shaw, a performer unknown to Americans, and he did so because it was a hot day.  The license plate on the Volkswagen, which belonged to a tenant of a nearby apartment house, actually reads LMW 281F - that's a non-serifed numeral one, not a letter I.  The F stands for the year of the VW's registration - 1968, and any Volkswagen enthusiast (like myself) will tell you that that is a 1968 Beetle.  You can see it for yourself at the Volkswagen museum in Wolfsburg, Germany.

See?

Ironically, Macmillan tried to have the Volkswagen moved because he feared it would spoil the shot.

For the record, the car parked ahead of the Beetle on the left side of the street is a 1967 Triumph Herald station wagon.  To the best of my knowledge, the Herald was never exported to the United States, but it's just as recognizable in Britain as the Beetle is everywhere.  The '67 Herald in the photo is currently owned by American comedian Jeff Dunham. 

The cover of Abbey Road actually is symbolic . . . symbolic of how the Beatles, once uniformly coiffed and dressed so as to look like a single unit, were now  four different men who were ready to go their own separate ways.  George is the only Beatle not wearing a suit; John is the only one with his hands in his pockets; Ringo is the only one wearing black shoes; and Paul is the only one who's clean-shaven, and he's putting his right foot forward instead of his left as the others are doing.  However, they still depict themselves as a single unit, a point symbolized by the fact that their legs are all in perfect V formations, which Macmillan said made it the perfect shot.  For the moment, they are still one group.  But what may be even more symbolic is the fact that the Beatles are shown walking away from the studio . . . and while it was their penultimate release, Abbey Road was in fact their last album.

The cover of Abbey Road and the legend surrounding it all came together (no pun intended) by happenstance, but at one point it almost didn't happen at all.  At one point, the album was to be called Everest, after a brand of cigarettes that recording engineer Geoff Emerick, who returned to work with the Beatles for Abbey Road, used to smoke.  The brand, named for Mount Everest, had a picture of the world's tallest mountain on the pack. 

Calling the album Everest was Paul McCartney's idea; he liked the idea of giving the album a title that would say that the music was as monumental and gargantuan as Mount Everest itself.  And the Beatles were seriously considering going to the foothills of Mount Everest for a photo session for the cover.  Ultimately, though, the Beatles nixed the idea, mainly because they thought it was in bad taste to name a record after a cigarette brand (the fact that George Harrison died in 2001 from smoking too much only reminded us that not naming their 1969 album Everest was the right call), and it was too expensive to go to Nepal just for a photo session.  It was so much easier for the Beatles to go outside, have their picture taken there, call the LP Abbey Road, and leave it at that.

I mentioned that the photo session for Abbey Road took place at Abbey Road's southeastern end.  Ever wonder what the other end of Abbey Road - the northwestern end - looks like?

Here's your answer. :-)  

Here Come Old Flat Top

Wen the Beatles began recording Abbey Road in earnest in July of 1969, John Lennon mostly kept to himself and didn't contribute much at first, as he and Yoko had been in a car accident when they were on vacation with their respective children (John's son Julian and Yoko's daughter Kyoko, both six years old then), and both were still recovering. (Yoko was still bedridden, so John had Yoko, bed and all, moved into the studio, much to the shock of EMI staff.) But by late July, John (below, during the recording of Abbey Road) went full tilt boogie with a new song that hit the senses with as much force as John's insatiable appetite for old-fashioned guitar rock, and it makes sense that it was selected to open Abbey Road.

"Come Together" is a steamy, dirty song about sex, drugs and rock and roll - and John Lennon's obsession with all three.  It's a cheeky self-portrait in which John winks and nods as he describes himself as a cokeheaded holy roller who's "one spinal cracker," whose sexual prowess is so great that when he "hold you in his armchair, you can feel his disease."  He's Bag Productions, he's the walrus, he's Yoko's man, he's all of that.  And his fantastically bad grammar, topped with with a guitar and piano arrangement that goes for the burn, is the icing on the cake.  

The song started out as something entirely different.  Acid guru Timothy Leary had asked Lennon to write a song for his planned candidacy for governor of California against Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan in 1970.  John tried, staring with the phrase "Come together," but he couldn't think of anything else to say about Leary's politics or positions that could get people to vote for him, and so, as a campaign song, "Come Together" never got off the ground.  Neither did Leary's campaign for governor of California; he was later arrested for marijuana possession, ending his bid for the governorship of California, so the song never became a campaign tune.  (For the record, Reagan was re-elected governor in 1970 handily over Democratic candidate Jesse Unruh, making Reagan a Republican presidential prospect for 1976 at the earliest.)

So, "Come Together" could have been the first of several anti-Reagan songs that Lennon would have undoubtedly written had he lived to see the Gipper's Presidency.  But the phrase "Come together" was not wasted, as it had another meaning.  Let's just say that it involves two lovers having the same experience simultaneously in the heat of the moment.  (Which is why Walter Mondale would likely not have asked Lennon in 1984, had Lennon lived, to write a song for his effort to make Reagan a one-term President like Leary wanted to make him an one-term California governor - though, by 1984, Mondale's fellow Minnesotan Prince was writing stuff that made "Come Together" sound tame by comparison.)

There was just one thing; "Come Together" wasn't a totally original song.  John had based the opening line - "Here come old flat top, he come grooving up slowly" from a lyric from Chuck Berry's fast-car song "You Can't Catch Me."  (The original lyric - "Here comes a flat top, he was movin' up with me" - refers to a motorist in a low, flat-roofed car trying to pass the narrator's car on the New Jersey Turnpike.)  John and Paul McCartney changed the melody and modified the bass line so it wouldn't sound like the original Berry song.  (Berry - below, with Lennon in 1972 on "The Mike Douglas Show" - may not have minded, but his publisher did, and it led to an ugly episode of suits and countersuits that Lennon ultimately came out of victorious.)

The result was a mean, guttural vibe that Ringo Starr's drums add extra bite to as the song creeps along like a pickpocket in a back alley.  The final touch on "Come Together" was John's repetitive whisper "Shoot me!" As on "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," the reference is not about firearms, and in this case it's a reference to a narcotic firing in the arm.  It makes "Come Together" sound more unsettled than it already is without going over the edge.

Not surprisingly. "Come Together" led to even harder-edged covers.  One of the best known remakes of the song came from Aerosmith, who recorded "Come Together" in 1978 for - shhh!  - the universally and deservedly loathed Sgt. Pepper movie.  Aerosmith's cover takes the Beatles' tough rock into heavy-metal territory, and Steven Tyler's over-the-top vocals are priceless.  When he sings the opening lyric,  he slurs it to the point where he sounds like he's singing "Yeah, come on, flat jaw, he come oozing out soda." More recently, Texas blues-rock guitarist Gary Clark Jr., with help from Dutch producer Tom Holkenborg, recorded a cover of "Come Together" for the 2017 comic-book superhero movie Justice League.  Clark's cover brings the Beatles' music back to the roots of rock and roll in a devastatingly fresh twenty-first-century sound - proof that, if you want to make rock and roll go forward, you have to go to back to its beginnings.

Welcome To the Machine

Ask twenty people which popular music group or solo performer of the past fifty years was the most innovative artiste after the Beatles broke up, and you're likely to get as many different answers.  Which makes sense, since the various forms of pop that the Beatles brought together have become fragmented ever since they split - not unlike American politics, in fact.  But most people will undoubtedly agree that the most important player in pop since the Beatles is not a who but a what - the synthesizer, which Beatles author Mark Lewisohn said revolutionized music as much as the Beatles themselves had done.  As fate would have it, the synthesizer's rise coincided with the Beatles' last hurrah; the Abbey Road sessions would make productive use of this strange, new electronic apparatus, which proved to be as much a machine as an instrument. 

Some of the earliest synthesizers were developed by one Robert Moog, an American inventor with a fascination for electronics who had learned to play the piano as a boy.  They were quite large and relied on a lot of wiring.  Coincidentally, the NASA space program in the United States would facilitate the development of microchips that would make synthesizers more accessible.  But in 1969, the year of Apollo 11, the synthesizer was very much an exclusive, expensive item.   

The Beatles didn't see anything particularly scary in the synthesizer.  To them, it was just another instrument, and it furthered their own interest in electronic music. George Harrison, who got a two-tiered-keyboard Moog for himself, even released a whole album of synthesizer experiments, Electronic Sound, in 1969 after Bernie Krause of the experimental-music duo Beaver and Krause introduced George to the instrument while George was in Los Angeles producing an album for Jackie Lomax.  There are only two tracks on Electronic Sound - "Under the Mersey Wall," which takes up side one, and "No Time or Space," which takes up side two.  Krause later said that he played "No Time or Space" as a demonstration for George based on ideas for his next album with partner Paul Beaver and claimed that George had recorded and used it without his knowledge.  George did give a credit to Krause on the front cover - which featured a painting by George of Krause himself - but as Krause had not intended to let George use it on his own LP, his credit was painted over.  Most Beatles fans overlooked the controversy, as they also overlooked the album; released on the Beatles' short-lived experimental Zapple label, it only reached number 191 on the Billboard album chart.   

Reviews of Electronic Sound were surprisingly divided, with many critics wondering why the hell George was playing with rather than playing this keyboard instrument and other critics praising him for creating interesting backwashes that show him to be a quick study with the Moog.  Having heard it, I would suggest that the truth lies somewhere in between, but unless you're really into electronic music, you'll likely find it to be a waste of time. 

George brought his synthesizer to EMI Studios during the Abbey Road sessions, and Paul McCartney, the leading proponent of electronic music in the Beatles, quickly gravitated to it, and so did John Lennon and Ringo Starr.  Rock musician Alan Parsons, in 1969 a tape operator at EMI Studios, recalled that everyone in the studio complex was fascinated by the contraption, and that all four Beatles tried various experiments with it before figuring out how to put it to use.  And they put it to extraordinary use, employing synth lines with incredible subtlety and using it in different ways.  John's synthesizer overdub on his song "Because" made the song more majestic and his use of the Moog for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" produced a great deal of intensity, while George's synth overdub on "Here Comes the Sun" produced a bright, warm ambiance, and you already know about Paul's synthesizer lines on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer."

But here's something you may not have known.  Paul didn't use the keyboard of the Moog to play the lines on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," choosing instead to pick out the notes on the ribbon that the keys struck by running his finger along it.  Parsons has said that Paul's ability to find the notes is a testament to his expertise with any instrument.

The Beatles may have seen the synthesizer as a device to supplement traditional musical instruments, but for many artists, over time, it would become a substitute for them.  It was not clear at first that this was going to be the case.  Stevie Wonder and the Who's Pete Townshend both used synthesizers judiciously and to great effect, as would Paul McCartney on his solo and Wings albums, and Family's Poli Palmer would show similar restraint with his synthesizer on that band's Fearless and Bandstand albums from the early seventies.  But for every rock and soul musician who restrained themselves on the synthesizer, there would be a Keith Emerson who'd go so overboard with it, he'd need a life raft to be brought back on stage.  When the microchip democratized the synthesizer, it was only a matter of time before numerous pop acts that arose out of the post-punk pop scene would increasingly rely on these new computerized keyboards.  The Human League opened the floodgates with their 1982 hit "Don't You Want Me," a song where every sound - even the percussion - was electronic.  Many of the hit songs from the 1980s were primarily electronic; if there was a traditional instrument involved at all, it sounded like an afterthought.  It got even worse as synthesizers became more and more able to reproduce the sounds of regular instruments, something the Mellotron keyboard, a forerunner to the synthesizer and an instrument periodically used on Beatles records, was capable of doing, though it proved not to be the threat to traditional instruments that the synthesizer became.

Today, we've gotten to the point where most pop performers - especially rappers - keep trying to get every possible note out of a computer program, and old-fashioned  instruments that require hours of practice to master are increasingly falling by the wayside.  When electronic music was in the hands of the Beatles, or even, later, an intelligent experimentalist like Britain's Thomas Dolby, there were still enough aspiring guitarists and gainfully employed piano teachers to keep tradition alive. Now you don't even need to play a keyboard.

We need to go back a time to when the synthesizer was the servant and not the master.  But short of another Beatles, don't bet on it. 

Silver Hammer Man

No song on the Beatles' Abbey Road LP has sparked more controversy and debate than "Maxwell's Silver Hammer."  And few Beatles songs have aroused so much partisan feeling - as Mark Lewisohn wrote, you either love it or you hate it. It was a McCartney song his bandmates grew to hate, mainly because Paul treated "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" like a grand statement, even though the others saw it as just an absurd song.

Paul in fact was inspired to write the song by absurdist literature, specifically French playwright Alfred Jarry, whose avant-garde work introduced the concept of what Jarry called "pataphysics," which Wikipedia defines as "a branch of philosophy or science that examines imaginary phenomena that exist in a world beyond metaphysics; it is the science of imaginary solutions."

In that spirit, Paul conceived the idea of a homicidal medical student who represents a phenomenon that comes out of nowhere, wrecking havoc on an ordered world.  Maxwell Edison disrupts everything by murdering his girlfriend (who studies pataphysics), his teacher, and a judge planning to send him to jail.  As Paul explains, the song was "my analogy for when something goes wrong out of the blue, as it so often does, as I was beginning to find out at that time in my life. I wanted something symbolic of that, so to me it was some fictitious character called Maxwell with a silver hammer. I don't know why it was silver, it just sounded better than Maxwell's hammer."

The music of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is a romp of sprightly piano and guitar accompanied by Paul's droll vocals delivering verses that set up life as we prefer it to be, where everything goes smoothly, but the refrains are heavier with the sound of Maxwell's silver hammer coming down and coming down hard and upsetting everything, with the occasional sound of a new instrument - the Moog synthesizer, underscoring the music throughout, providing a sense of dread, with one over-the-top Moog riff at the end of the first chorus that lets the listener know that nothing is right at all.  It's among the most English of Beatles songs, with its catchy music-hall trappings and its inherent irony.   It's also funny as hell, with the refrain the musical equivalent of the sixteen-ton weight that would interrupt many a sketch from the British comedy troupe that would make their debut soon after Abbey Road's release - Monty Python's Flying Circus.

In a perverse way, "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" was rather cute - too cute for John Lennon, who didn't play on the song and called it a tune "for the grannies to dig."  George Harrison concurred.  "Sometimes Paul would make us do these really fruity songs," he said in a 1977 interview.  "I mean, my God, 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' was so fruity."  And Ringo Starr?  "The worst session ever was 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer,'" Ringo, who clanged the hammer on the record, recalled years later. "It was the worst track we ever had to record . . .. I thought it was mad."

Paul's perfection, indeed, may have been what drove the other Beatles to madness, as he led George and Ringo through sixteen takes of the rhythm track, followed by numerous overdubs.  It took three days to record, as Paul kept hearing refinements in his head that George and Ringo couldn't.

Ironically, time constraints had prevented the song from being included on the White Album.  It was later rehearsed during the Twickenham sessions (as seen in the Let It Be film), where Paul admitted to its cuteness, calling it "the corny one," before it was finally recorded properly.

"They got annoyed because 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' took three days to record," Paul later said.  "Big deal."

Paul seemed to make it a big deal, specifically with those trisyllabic rhymes.  And he did have big plans for "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." As John later said, "He did everything to make it into a single, and it never was and it never could have been."

"Maxwell's Silver Hammer," though, is still a masterful depiction of the absurd, a point brought to the fore on the occasion of the three papal deaths that have occurred in the past fifty years.  When the pope dies, attendants perform a bizarre ritual in which they strike the deceased pope on the head thrice with a hammer, calling out his birth name with each strike.

And just as a hammer certifies the pope's death, a hammer - present throughout the song - comes down loud and clear to give "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" a definitive ending.    

'Abbey Road' at 50

After last year's White Album commentary on this blog, you're probably wondering what I'm going to do this year for the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the last album the Beatles would ever record together, Abbey Road. I regret to report that there will not be a comparable series of commentary for various reasons, including constraints on my time, other endeavors I'm pursuing, and the fact that not every song on Abbey Road is worth going over in great detail. Remember, roughly half of the songs on Abbey Road are in the form of a long medley, because John Lennon and Paul McCartney left most of the medley songs in an unfinished state.

Of course, Abbey Road is still a monumental album, one that put rock on the pinnacle of artistic and cultural influence.  Sadly, rock and roll has gone downhill since, first slowly, then at a much more accelerated pace owing to the rise of hip-hop and the fall of practically everything else in popular music.   But I come to celebrate, not mourn, so I will be commenting on Abbey Road for its fiftieth anniversary sporadically over the next several weeks in the same casual manner that I wrote about the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper in 2017.  As I did with Sgt. Pepper's fiftieth anniversary, I plan to comment on a few of the songs on Abbey Road, the ones I consider to be the most important, and I also plan to write a little about the trivial and anecdotal aspects of the LP, including, obviously, a look at the cover.

This is not the cover, as you can gather.  It's one of many outtakes from the photo session for the record sleeve, this one showing the Beatles walking toward, not away from, the recording studio.  It - or an outtake like it - has been the source of a meme you might have seen on Facebook that reads, "WE MUST GO BACK - MUSIC NEEDS US."  

That's wishful thinking, alas, and so is the idea that a new Beatles will rise from the wasteland that is the popular music of today.  Rock's dominance of pop ended some time around the turn of the millennium, and the increased corporatization of the record (or "streaming," since not too many people bother with physical, tangible records anymore) business precludes another high-quality band that can play instruments and write songs from rising to the top when there's so much money to be made in pop mediocrity.  Hence, Ed Sheeran.  Abbey Road was the Beatles' parting gift to popular music, and as the twenty-teens stumble to a close, the dearth of fresh talent makes us appreciate it even more.

And Abbey Road almost didn't get recorded.  Between February and May 1969, a few of its songs were randomly recorded, with the Beatles and sometimes Chris Thomas, George Martin's assistant, taking the lead on guiding the recordings, although George Martin was technically the producer.  The first of these sessions was, in fact, helmed by Glyn Johns, and at Trident Studios, not Abbey Road Studios (then still called EMI Studios).  Nothing was expected to come of any of this . . . until Paul McCartney called George Martin and told him the Beatles wanted to make another album.  "Will you produce it, really produce it?"  Martin agreed, but only if the Beatles allowed him to be in control of the production the way he had been before the White Album.  "Yeah, we will," said Paul.  "Only please let's do the album."  Today, July 1, marks fifty years since the recording of Abbey Road began in earnest.  

More on this great album soon.