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. :-)