The last session, dressed as a farewell
On 26 September 1969, the Beatles released the last album they would record together, and they dressed the goodbye as a walk across a road. Abbey Road does not sound like a band falling apart, which is part of its trick. The voices lock. The bass, played by Paul McCartney on most of the record, is melodic enough to be a second lead. George Harrison, so long the junior songwriter in the room, offers Something and Here Comes the Sun, two songs that have outlived the argument about who was allowed to write them. The zebra crossing on the cover, photographed by Iain Macmillan on 8 August 1969, took a few minutes and a policeman holding the traffic. The album took the summer.
They recorded it mostly in April, July, and August 1969, back at Abbey Road Studios, with George Martin producing and Geoff Emerick returning to the desk. Let It Be had already been filmed and would come out later, messy and public. This one was the cleaner exit. A Moog synthesizer, new in the room, colors Here Comes the Sun, Because, and Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. Come Together swaggers in on a swamp of a groove. I Want You (She’s So Heavy) ends side one by simply stopping, the tape cut, desire left hanging in the air like a door slammed by the machine rather than by a singer. Ringo Starr gets Octopus’s Garden, a child’s map of peace, and it belongs here because the album is also, secretly, about wanting a smaller life.
Side two is the part Lennon would later call a pop opera and dismiss. McCartney wanted a suite: fragments stitched until they felt like one afternoon. Martin helped sew them. You Never Give Me Your Money starts the walk. Little songs hand the melody to the next little song. Then The End, where the three guitarists take turns on the solo, McCartney, Harrison, Lennon, in that order, a last polite sharing of the spotlight. The final line is almost too plain to be the last thing they recorded as a working group. Plainness is the point. After all the invention, a sentence you could say to someone leaving a room.
I liked the A side but I never liked that sort of pop opera on the other side. I think it’s junk.
(John Lennon, interview with Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone, 1971)
A double A-side, Something and Come Together, followed in October and topped the American chart. The album did the same on both sides of the Atlantic. None of that canceled the fracture. The group was already done, in the practical sense, by the time the public held the sleeve. What the sleeve held was a band remembering how to play as if the future were still a shared room. Lennon’s objection to the medley is useful. It keeps the record from becoming a shrine. One of the people who made it did not love the architecture. The architecture stood up anyway, which is how you know it was architecture and not just a mood.
Cross the road in your head when the medley starts. The songs are short on purpose. Nobody gets to finish a thought before the next thought arrives, which is a decent description of 1969, and of any group that has loved each other long enough to know the exits. Abbey Road is the rare farewell that sounds like a hello to the listener. The band is leaving. The record stays on the curb, patient, still in tune.
