In what was unquestionably one of the lowest of the low points in their downward trajectory, The Beatles had recorded their warts’n’all Let It Be documentary and its musical soundtrack during January 1969. The cuddly mop-tops had been disintegrating since the White Album sessions in 1968, and the experience of making Let It Be had been agonising for all concerned.
Tony Bramwell, their roadie from the Liverpool days and later an Apple director, recalls: “Things started going wrong at the time of the White Album. Everything changed then. It became that Paul was doing lots and the others weren’t doing much more than being session men.”
By the time of the Let It Be sessions, John Lennon’s heroin addiction was at its worst, and the others simply could not cope with it. “We were disappointed that he was getting into heroin because we didn’t really know how we could help him,” Paul McCartney explained to Barry Miles in his book Many Years From Now. “We just hoped it wouldn’t go too far.”
Another spanner was thrown into the works on January 28, when John and Yoko Ono met with American music business mogul Allen Klein in London’s Dorchester Hotel, because Lennon felt that The Beatles were being financially shafted by NEMS Enterprises, their late manager Brian Epstein’s management company.
“Brian Epstein was a beautiful guy, and an intuitive theatrical guy, and he knew we had something and he presented us well,” reckoned Lennon, “but he got lousy business advice. He was taken advantage of. We all were.”
Lennon therefore wanted Klein to take over management of The Beatles and sort out their chaotically tangled financial affairs. As Tony Bramwell puts it: “There were huge expenses bills – catering, drinks, free cars and houses for people. Every Beatle had his own personal assistant, all of them overpaid.”
Immediately impressed by Klein, Lennon decided to make him his personal adviser. There and then he wrote to Sir Joseph Lockwood, chairman of EMI: “Dear Sir Joe: From now on Allen Klein handles all my stuff.” Lennon’s appointment of Klein would quickly open up yet another chasm between him and Paul, who insisted on being represented by lawyer Lee Eastman, the father of Linda McCartney.
Ringo, meanwhile, had embarked on an intense 13-week filming schedule at Twickenham Film Studios, playing support to Peter Sellers in The Magic Christian. Needless to say, this impacted on his availability for Beatles’ recording projects.
Ever the band’s cheerleader, McCartney’s response to the year’s depressing start was to get back to work. He proposed a Beatles album that would be quite different from Let It Be.
“I was quite surprised when Paul rang me up and said: ‘We’re going to make another record, would you like to produce it?’” George Martin recalled of the genesis of Abbey Road. “My immediate answer was: ‘Only if you let me produce it the way we used to.’ And he said: ‘We do want to do that.’ I said: ‘John included?’ He said: ‘Yes, honestly.’”
Let It Be had been completed on January 31, 1969, and the first sessions for Abbey Road took place less than one month later. At first, the sessions were sporadic, and frequently interrupted by other events, but by July they became more structured.
February 22. The Beatles, plus organist Billy Preston, begin recording sessions which will result in their eleventh album, Abbey Road, at Trident Studios in London. During this session they record a backing track for Lennon’s song I Want You (She’s So Heavy).
Paul McCartney: Before the Abbey Road sessions it was like we should put down the boxing gloves and try and just get it together and really make a very special album.
George Martin: Nobody knew for sure that it was going to be the last album – but everybody felt it was.
George Harrison: [I Want You] is very heavy. John plays lead guitar and sings the same as he plays. The riff that he sings and plays is really a very basic blues-type thing. But again, it’s a very original sort of John-type song.
February 25. Harrison is in Abbey Road studios, starting work on recording his song Something, which was inspired by his wife, Patti Boyd.
George Harrison: Something is a song I wrote towards the end of the White Album… but I never finished it off. I could never think of words for it. And also, there was a James Taylor song called Something In The Way She Moves… I thought of trying to change the words, but they were the words that came when I first wrote it, so in the end I left it as that, and just called it Something.
March 20. John Lennon and Yoko Ono get married in Gibraltar.
John Lennon: We wanted to get married on a cross-channel ferry. That was the romantic part, when we went to Southampton and then we couldn’t get on because she wasn’t English and she couldn’t get that Day Visa to go across, and they said: ‘Anyway, you can’t get married. The captain’s not allowed to do it any more.’ So we were in Paris and we were calling Peter Brown [Apple director]… and said: “We want to get married. Where can we go?” And he called back and said: “Gilbraltar’s the only place.”
March 25-31. Instead of a traditional honeymoon, John and Yoko stage their Bed-in For Peace in the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam.
John Lennon: We knew whatever we did was going to be in the papers. We decided to utilise the space we would occupy anyway, by getting married, with a commercial for peace. We would sell our product, which we call ‘peace’. And to sell a product you need a gimmick, and the gimmick we thought was ‘bed.’
April 14. Lennon and McCartney record The Ballad Of John And Yoko at Abbey Road. The song documents the difficulties surrounding the Lennons’ recent marriage.
Paul McCartney: John came round to my house, and he wanted me to help him finish up Ballad Of John And Yoko. He mainly had it all down. All he wanted was for me to help with the recording. He wanted to run in that day and record it, because he knew that between the two of us, I could play bass and drums and he could play guitar, so we could get it done.
April 18. Now contracted to Allen Klein, John, George and Ringo write to Lee Eastman stating that, although he represents Paul as an individual, they do not consider him their legal representative.
Tony Bramwell: When Klein came on board the whole atmosphere changed right away. You could no longer wander casually in and out of people’s offices; doors were closed. He was very controlling about any of us having personal contact with The Beatles.
Paul McCartney: Linda’s dad is a great business brain. He said: “If you are going to invest, do it in something you know. If you invest in building computers or something, you can lose a fortune. Wouldn’t you rather be in music? Stay in music.”
April 19. At around 1am, John and George record guitar overdubs for I Want You in Abbey Road’s Studio 2.
Jeff Jarrett (engineer): John and George went into the far left-hand corner of number two to overdub those guitars. They wanted a massive sound, so they kept tracking, over and over… I was getting a bit of pick-up [sound leakage], so I asked George to turn it down a little. He looked at me and said: dryly: “You don’t talk to a Beatle like that.”
April 26. Work begins on Octopus’s Garden in Abbey Road.
George Harrison: Octopus’s Garden is the second song Ringo wrote. And it’s, um… it’s lovely, y’know. Ringo, he gets bored, y’know, playing the drums. At home he plays a bit of piano, but he only knows about three chords. And he knows about the same on guitar. And so his main, the main music he likes, is country and western, so it’s really got a country-western feel, y’know. Actually, I think it’s a really great song, because on the surface it’s like a daft kids’ song. But the lyrics are great, really.
May 2. The Beatles begin recording a new version of Something at Abbey Road.
Paul McCartney: It appealed to me because it has a very beautiful melody and is a really structured song… I think George thought my bass playing was a little bit busy. From my side, I was trying to contribute the best I could, but maybe it was his turn to tell me I was too busy.
May 6. At Olympic Studios in Barnes, the whole group record the backing track for You Never Give Me Your Money, McCartney’s personal lament about the involvement of Allen Klein.
Paul McCartney: This was me directly lambasting Allen Klein’s attitude to us: no money, just funny paper, all promises and it never works out. It’s basically a song about no faith in the person, that found its way into the medley on Abbey Road. John saw the humour in it.
May 9. George Harrison releases a new album, Electronic Sound, on Zapple Records. For most of May and June, work on Abbey Road stopped, largely because the entire group had other commitments. McCartney was recording with Steve Miller, Harrison with Jack Bruce, McCartney and Ringo with Jackie Lomax. It was also in this period that Allen Klein was officially announced as manager of John, George and Ringo. George took off for a holiday in Sardinia, and Ringo sunned himself in the South of France.
May 26. John and Yoko Ono start their 10-day Bed-in in room 1742 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Canada.
John Lennon: The press came in expecting to see us fucking in bed. They all heard John and Yoko were going to fuck in front of the press for peace… We were a married couple, in bed, talking about peace. It was one of our greater episodes.
Petula Clark (singer): I was performing at the Place Des Arts. Late one night, I decided I would go and see him. It was open house; a very odd kind of atmosphere. Anyway, I went in and there they were, just sitting in bed. There was nothing saucy going on.
July 1. Sessions resume in earnest at Abbey Road, although Paul is the only Beatle present on this first day, recording his lead vocal for You Never Give Me Your Money. Lennon’s absence is because he and Yoko are on holiday in Scotland where, on this day, he crashes their Austin Maxi and ends up in Lawson Memorial Hospital, Golspie, Sutherland. He receives 17 facial stitches, Yoko gets 14 in her forehead, and her daughter Kyoko Cox four. Yoko is advised to have bed rest, which is why Lennon subsequently had Harrod’s install a bed in Abbey Road Studios, so she could be there during recording sessions. He also suspended a microphone above the bed so she could add her thoughts.
July 2-4. George, Ringo and Paul are in Abbey Road working on Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight. McCartney also records the humorous 23-second Her Majesty, which will eventually appear on the album as an uncredited hidden track at the end of the album.
Paul McCartney: It was quite funny, because it’s basically monarchist, with a mildly disrespectful tone, but it’s very tongue-in-cheek. It’s almost like a love song to the Queen.
July 7-8. The Beatles, with Lennon still not present, undertake the first recording sessions for Harrison’s Here Comes The Sun at Abbey Road.
George Harrison: Here Comes The Sun…was written on a nice sunny day… in Eric Clapton’s garden. Because we’d been through really hell with business, and, y’know, it was very heavy. And on that day I just felt as though I was sagging off, like from school, it was like that.
July 9-10. Work starts on McCartney’s Maxwell’s Silver Hammer at Abbey Road.
George Harrison: We spent a hell of a lot of time on it. It’s one of those instant sort of whistle-along tunes… but it’s pretty sick as well, though, cos the guy keeps killing everybody!
Tony Bramwell: They had an anvil brought in to add a percussive effect. Mal Evans [roadie] got the job of banging on it but his timing was pretty awful, so there were a hell of a lot of takes to get it right.
July 11-16. The Beatles continue working on Something, Here Comes The Sun, You Never Give Me Your Money and Maxwell’s Silver Hammer at Abbey Road.
July 17-18. The Beatles work on Oh! Darling and Octopus’s Garden at Abbey Road.
Paul McCartney: When we were recording Oh! Darling I came into the studios early every day for a week to sing it by myself, because at first my voice was too clear. I wanted it to sound as though I’d been performing it on stage all week.”
John Lennon: Oh! Darling was a great one of Paul’s that he didn’t sing too well. I always thought I could have done it better – it was more my style than his. He wrote it, so what the hell, he’s going to sing it.
July 21. The Beatles begin recording Come Together at Abbey Road.
Timothy Leary (LSD guru): I was running for Governor of California against Reagan, and John said: “‘What can I do?” I said: “Write a campaign song.” He said: “What’s the motto of your campaign?” I said: “Come together – join the party”, which was invented by my wife Rosemary. John immediately picked up on that and began strumming on tape: ‘Come together, right now, over me/ All I can say is you got to be free.’ And that was basically my campaign song.
Paul McCartney: I remember John bringing in Come Together. He brought it in as a sort of up-tempo thing. I was a bit worried that it was a bit too much like a Chuck Berry thing, and I said: “Hey, man, it’s a bit too like You Can’t Catch Me. I just thought we’d get sued. So I suggested that we swamp it down a bit, and we got that very solid drum beat with my bass lick, and John really liked that idea so he bought that one.
July 22-25. The Beatles continue recording Come Together, Oh! Darling, The End, Sun King, Mean Mr Mustard, Polythene Pam and She Came In Through The Bathroom Window at Abbey Road.
George Harrison: Mean Mr Mustard, John wrote, and Polythene Pam. I think he wrote both of those in India about eighteen months ago. She Came In Through The Bathroom Window is a very good song of Paul’s, with good lyrics. It’s really hard to explain what they’re about.
Diane Ashley (Apple Scruff – hard-core Beatles fan): There was a little gang of us, my friends Susan, Valerie and me, who stood outside Paul’s house at 7 Cavendish Avenue. One night in June 1969, we were a bit bored and we’d got into the garden and found a ladder behind his meditation dome. I was thin and athletic, so I was elected to climb in through the bathroom window.
I fell into the sink. The dogs went barmy, but I was able to calm them down. I went downstairs and let the tribe in. I didn’t take anything valuable, just souvenirs. I went through the linen basket and got some dirty shirts that smelt of him. We took one each. We looked in the wardrobe and saw all the Sgt. Pepper suits and winkle-pickers from the old days. We didn’t touch them.
Jul 30. Work continues at Abbey Road on Come Together and a rough mix of the medley – Sun King, Mean Mr Mustard, Polythene Pam, She Came In Through The Bathroom Window, You Never Give Me Your Money, Golden Slumbers and Carry That Weight.
Paul McCartney: We hit on the idea of medleying them all, which gave the second side of Abbey Road a sort of operatic structure, which was quite nice because it got rid of all these songs in a good way.
John Lennon: Abbey Road was really unfinished songs all stuck together. Everybody praises the album so much, but none of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all, only the fact that we stuck them together.
John Kurlander (engineer): We did all the remixes and cross-fades to overlap the songs. Paul was there, and we heard it together for the first time. He said: “I don’t like Her Majesty, throw it away.” So I cut it out, but I accidentally left in the last note. He said: “It’s only a rough mix, it doesn’t matter.” I said: “What shall I do with it?” “Throw it away,” he replied. I’d been told never to throw anything away, so after he left I picked it up off the floor, put about twenty seconds of red leader tape before it and stuck it onto the end of the edit tape.
August 1. Work begins on Lennon’s Because at Abbey Road.
John Lennon: I was lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on the piano. I said: “Can you play those chords backward?” She did, and I wrote Because around them.
George Martin: Between us we created a backing track with John playing a riff on guitar, me duplicating every note on an electronic harpsichord, and Paul playing bass. Each note between the guitar and harpsichord had to be exactly together, and as I’m not the world’s greatest player in terms of timing I would make more mistakes than John did, so we had Ringo playing a regular beat on hi-hat to us through our headphones.
George Harrison: This is possibly my favourite one on the album. The lyrics are so simple. The harmony was pretty difficult to sing, we had to really learn it.
August 5. At Abbey Road The Beatles make their first group use of a Moog synthesiser, when George Harrison overdubs Moog sounds on to the song Because.
Nick Webb (engineer): I think The Beatles used the Moog with great subtlety. Others in a similar situation would probably have gone completely over the top with it. It’s there on the record, but not obtrusively.
August 7. George, John and Paul add guitar solos to The End at Abbey Road.
Paul McCartney: They were done live. It was great. And once you know who’s playing, you can match the solo to the personality. It’s me first, George second, then John. You can tell. George is easily the best player, he plays like a guitarist, and me and John play with great personality. John was third, and he’s a really funky, dirty, lead player, making these licks that sound like a dog barking
August 8. The Beatles are photographed on the zebra crossing outside Abbey Road studios. The image, based on a Paul McCartney drawing and photographed by Iain Macmillan, will become the album cover. It will be the first Beatles album cover not to include either their name or the title of the album. And of course it inspired numerous theories about its meaning, many of them supporting the infamous ‘Paul is dead’ myth.
Paul McCartney: It was intended to show The Beatles walking away from the studio where they had spent so much time for the better part of the decade.
John Lennon: We’re meant to be recording, not posing for Beatle pictures. That’s what we were thinking.
Paul Cole (bystander during the shoot, and obviously not a fan): I’ve never heard Abbey Road. I’ve seen The Beatles on television and have heard a few of their songs. It’s not my kind of thing. I prefer classical music.
August 15. The Beatles oversee the recording of George Martin’s orchestral backings for Something, Here Comes the Sun, Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight and The End at Abbey Road.
George Martin: I had a heart to heart with John. He said he was a rocker and didn’t want any of my orchestral stuff, but we compromised.
August 20. All four Beatles are together in the studio for the very last time, when they complete overdubs for I Want You (She’s So Heavy) at Abbey Road.
Ringo Starr: After the Let It Be nightmare, Abbey Road turned out fine. The second side is brilliant. Out of the ashes of all that madness, that last section is for me one of the finest pieces we put together.
George Martin: It was a very, very happy album. Everybody worked frightfully well and that’s why I’m very fond of it.
Abbey Road was released in the UK on September 26, 1969, less than one week after Lennon had announced: “I want a divorce, just like the divorce I had from Cyn. I mean the group is over. I’m leaving.”
In the US the album was released on October 1. Soon after its release, Lennon told Rolling Stone: “I liked the A-side. I never liked that sort of pop opera on the other side. I think it’s junk. It was just bits of song thrown together. And I can’t remember what some of it is.”
Several critics agreed. “Surely they must have enough talent and intelligence to do better than this. Or do they?” groaned Ed Ward of Rolling Stone, while Nick Cohn of the New York Times reckoned that with a few notable exceptions it was “all pretty average stuff”. Rather more positively, Chris Welch of Melody Maker raved that it was “a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism”.
Posterity has tended to side with Mr Welch. In 2009, readers of Rolling Stone voted Abbey Road The Beatles’ greatest album, and it is now widely acknowledged as such.
Joe Public certainly seems to have quite liked the record. Abbey Road sold four million copies in its first two months of release, entering the British album chart at No.1, a position it held for 17 of its 81 weeks there. In the US it spent 11 weeks at No.1 during its initial chart stay of 83 weeks. It has now notched up worldwide sales of more than 30 million.
