Abbey Road,
the LP that represented the final collaboration of The Beatles, was
released this month 50 years ago to a public largely unaware of the tensions
that had disrupted and sidelined their prior album. As the group climbed the charts
again with this latest song, the news that they were splitting plunged their
fans into gloom.
As I recounted in a prior post, Rubber Soul
remains my favorite LP by the Fab Four, with hardly a dud from start to finish.
Revolver and, of course, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
has been acclaimed as revolutionary.
But critics and fans have been correct in calling Abbey
Road a masterpiece. In their final days, The Beatles continued to develop
and innovate as songwriters and musicians, and even as their lyrics speak of
the greatest stress they had ever experienced in their professional lives, the
sonic surface was as smooth and gorgeous as anything they had ever put to
vinyl.
No small credit for both came from the group member
who might have come the longest way as a musical force: George Harrison.
It was not only that his composition, “Something” represented his first A-side single for the quartet, but that—after being widely
regarded as a mediocre guitarist in the early days of Beatlemania—he had become
a peerless practitioner of his instrument. His confidence was evident in every
note he played.
“The quiet Beatle” who had chafed at having his
suggestions or contributions to prior albums shot down by Paul McCartney and
John Lennon had even learned, like the two principal Beatles songwriters, to
channel his frustrations into song.
“Here Comes the Sun” reflects Harrison’s elation
when, after a stressful business meeting in the spring with his bandmates about
the management dispute that eventually sundered them, he was able to drive out
to the estate of good friend Eric Clapton and enjoy the first real sunshine of
the season.
The time in the studio for Harrison and the other
Beatles went far more smoothly than it had at the start of the year, when a
planned album and documentary, Get Back, had to be shelved because of
acrimony during recording sessions. (The tapes had been in such chaotic shape
that Phil Spector, called in to salvage the product, released it over a year
later as Let It Be—much to Paul’s consternation’s over the super-producer’s
“Wall of Sound.”)
After a few months, McCartney approached longtime
producer George Martin about working with them again. He agreed to do so, but
only if they were more cooperative this time. They were as good as their word.
Years later, Martin still thought of this last
collaboration as his favorite with the group he had helped to stardom: "It
was a very, very happy album. Everybody worked frightfully well and that's why
I'm very fond of it."
For me, the emotional centerpiece of the LP is the
Side 2 medley, a string of half-finished songs that Paul figured out how to
turn into a long suite. (In its wake, other artists would be emboldened to try
similar quicksilver sonic experimentation, such as Cat Stevens in “Foreigner
Suite” and Marvin Gaye in Here, My Dear.) It rises to a level of
wistfulness in “Golden Slumbers,” where McCartney seemed to acknowledge the
increasing difficulty of recovering the group’s initial joy in music-making
(“Once there was a way to get back homeward”), and concluded with what amounted
to a final bow in “The End,” with each of the Fab Four (even the reluctant
Ringo) taking turns soloing.
Even Lennon, not above bad-mouthing McCartney in the
months after the group’s breakup, couldn’t help tipping his hat to the lyric
that concluded the medley and, it turned out, the group’s relationship with its
fans: “And in the end, the love you take/Is equal to the love you make.”
For a
group that began singing about love (“Can’t Buy Me Love”) and gave one of its
most buoyant endorsements of the emotion (“All You Need is Love”), it might
have been the only truly appropriate way to bid farewell.
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