The Beatles (14 page)

Despite this mood – or perhaps because of it –
Abbey Road
was an outstandingly inventive farewell offering. It features two of George’s best songs, ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and ‘Something’; a standout track by John, ‘Come Together’, and a fascinating medley of half-finished songs skilfully woven together by Paul.

George Martin remembered that after
Let It Be
, Paul came to him and asked him to produce a Beatles’ album with the kind of feeling they used to generate together. Martin agreed to help out if the Beatles were prepared to give him their co-operation. “That’s how we made
Abbey Road.
It wasn’t quite like the old days because they were still working on their old songs and they would bring in the other people to work as kind of musicians for them rather than being a team.”

In Britain,
Abbey Road
was released in September 1969 and stayed at Number 1 for 18 weeks. In America, it was released in October and was at Number 1 for 11 weeks.

COME TOGETHER

‘Come Together’ started life as a campaign song for Timothy Leary , when he decided in 1969 that he was going to run as governor of California against America’s future president Ronald Reagan.

Leary and his wife Rosemary were invited up to Montreal, where John and Yoko were between the sheets for another major ‘bed in’ on the 19th floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. They arrived on June 1, 1969, and were promptly roped into singing on the chorus of ‘Give Peace A Chance’, which was recorded in the hotel bedroom. Leary and his wife were rewarded for their participation by having their names included in the lyric.

The next day, John asked Leary if there was anything that he could do to help him in his campaign and was asked if he could write a song to be used in commercials and performed at rallies. Leary’s slogan was ‘come together, join the party’ – the ‘come together’ part coming from the
I Ching
, the Chinese book of changes. “There was obviously a double meaning there,” said Leary. “It was come together and join the party – not a political party but a celebration of life.”

John immediately picked up his guitar and began building on the phrase: ‘Come together right now, Don’t come tomorrow, Don’t come alone, Come together right now over me, All that I can tell you, Is you gotta be free.’ After coming up with a few more versions along the same lines, he made a demo tape and handed it to Leary.

Leary had the song played on alternative radio stations throughout California and began to think of it as his own. However, unknown to him, John had returned to England and within seven weeks had recorded a version with the Beatles. In October, it was released on the flip side of ‘Something’, the first single to be taken from Abbey Road.

Leary’s campaign to become governor of California came to an abrupt halt in December 1969, when he was charged with possessing marijuana and eventually imprisoned. It was while in prison that Leary first heard
Abbey Road
on a local rock station and ‘ Come Together’ came as a complete surprise. “Although the new version was certainly a musical and lyrical improvement on my campaign song, I was a bit miffed that Lennon had passed me over this way… When I sent a mild protest to John, he replied with typical Lennon charm and wit that he was a tailor and I was a customer who had ordered a suit and never returned. So he sold it to someone else.”

The recorded version was largely made up in the studio, the swampy New Orleans bass having been added by Paul. Two of the song lines referring to ‘old flat top’ were lifted from Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ and John was later sued for plagiarism. It was hard to deny where the words had come from, although, in this new context, they were nothing more than an affectionate nod towards the music of his youth. John strenuously denied any musical theft.

The conflict was resolved when John promised to record three songs belonging to the publisher of ‘ You Can’t Catch Me’. He fulfilled this promise when he recorded Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ for his
Rock’n’Roll
album and Lee Dorsey’s ‘Ya Ya’ on
Walls and Bridges.

SOMETHING

‘Something’ was the first Beatles’ A side to be written by George. Its sources of inspiration were Ray Charles, who he imagined singing it, and a 1968 album track by James Taylor titled ‘Something In The Way She Moves’, and his wife Pattie.

James Taylor, an American, was signed to the Apple label and his eponymous first album was produced by Peter Asher between July and October 1968. Paul played bass on one track. ‘Something In The Way She Moves’ was the last track on the first side of the album and the opening lines were: ‘There’s something in the way she moves, Or looks my way or calls my name, That seems to leave this troubled world behind.’

The White Album
was being recorded at Abbey Road at exactly the same time as Taylor was recording at Trident Studios in London’s
Soho. Indeed, on October 3, George was at Trident recording ‘Savoy Truffle’ with Paul and Ringo and probably heard the track then.

“I’ve always assumed George must have heard it but I never actually spoke to him about it,” says Taylor. “I’d written ‘Something In The Way She Moves’ about two years before I recorded it and, strangely enough I’d wanted to call it ‘I Feel Fine’, but of course that was a Beatles’ track.

“I often notice traces of other people’s work in my own songs,” Taylor continues. “If George either consciously or unconsciously took a line from one of my songs then I find it very flattering. It’s certainly not an unusual thing to happen. I’d made a tape of ‘Something In The Way She Moves’ and about seven other songs about a couple of months before I met Peter Asher. I know Paul listened to it at Apple but I’m not sure who else listened to it.”

The basic writing of ‘Something’ must have taken place in October because George has said that he worked it out on piano in Studio 1, while Paul was overdubbing in Studio 2. The only reason it wasn’t included on the White Album was because the track selection had already been completed.

George first offered ‘ Something’ to Joe Cocker and Jackie Lomax but then, in May 1969, decided to record it with the Beatles for
Abbey Road.
‘Something’ was an enormously successful song for George, becoming the second most covered Beatles’ song after ‘Yesterday’ (Ray Charles and Smokey Robinson both did versions) and giving him his first American Top 10 hit.

It had always been assumed that he wrote the song about Pattie but in a 1996 interview he said, “I didn’t. I just wrote it and then somebody put together a video that used some footage of me and Pattie, Paul and Linda, Ringo and Maureen and John and Yoko… actually, when I wrote it I was thinking of Ray Charles.” However, Pattie still believes that he had her in mind. “He always told me that it was about me,” she says.

MAXWELL’S SILVER HAMMER

A song, driven by strong rhymes, in which medical student Maxwell Edison uses his silver hammer to kill first his girlfriend, then a lecturer and finally a judge. Delivered in a jaunty, vaudevillian style, the only indication of Paul’s recent avant-garde leanings was the mention of ‘pataphysics’, a word invented by Alfred Jarry, the French pioneer of absurd theatre, to describe a branch of metaphysics.

“John told me that ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was about the law of karma,” says former Apple employee Tony King. “We were talking one day about ‘Instant Karma’ (John’s 1970 single with Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band) because something had happened where he’d been clobbered and he’d said that this was an example of instant karma. I asked him whether he believed that theory. He said that he did and that ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was the first song that they’d made about that. He said that the idea behind the song was that the minute you do something that’s not right, Maxwell’s silver hammer will come down on your head.”

OH! DARLING

Paul wanted his voice to sound raw on ‘Oh! Darling’, so he sang it through again and again each day for a week before finally recording it. “I wanted it to sound as though I’d been performing it on stage all week,” he said.

Inspired by the rock’n’roll ballads of the late Fifties, Jackie Wilson’s in particular, it was a simple song pleading for a loved one to stay in exchange for lifelong devotion.

John never rated Paul’s job on vocals and reckoned he could have done better. “It was more my style than his,” he said.

OCTOPUS’S GARDEN

Ringo’s second (and last) Beatles’ song was inspired by a family holiday in Sardinia which he took in 1968 on board Peter Sellers’ yacht. After Ringo had turned down the offer of an octopus lunch, the vessel’s captain started to tell him all he knew about the life of octopuses.

“He told me how they go around the sea bed picking up stones and shiny objects to build gardens with,” said Ringo. “I thought this was fabulous because at the time I just wanted to be under the sea too. I wanted to get out of it for a while.”

To most listeners, it was a children’s seaside song in the vein of ‘Yellow Submarine’ but, in 1969, George revealed that there were hidden dimensions. Even though Ringo only knew three chords on the piano, George said, the drummer was writing “cosmic songs without really noticing it.”

I WANT YOU

Consisting only of the repeated title line and the information that the desire is driving John mad, the lyric of ‘I Want You’ was once read out on BBC TV’s current affairs programme
24 Hours
as an example of the banalities of pop music.

This incensed John, who was convinced that its simplicity made it superior to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘I Am The Walrus’. To him, this was not a reversion to mindless monosyllabic pop but simply economy of language.

‘I Want You’ was written as a love song to Yoko. John admitted the influence she had on his new style of writing, saying that eventually he wanted to compose a perfect song using only one word. A 1964 poem of Yoko’s consisted of the single word ‘Water’.

HERE COMES THE SUN

Written by George, ‘Here Comes The Sun’ was an expression of delight at being able to slip away from the interminable business meetings which were now taking up so much of the Beatles’ time.

In January 1969, John and Yoko met with music business manager Allen Klein and shortly afterwards declared that he would be looking after their business affairs, despite the fact that the New York lawyer John Eastman, brother of Linda, had recently been brought in to represent the Beatles collectively. This was the beginning of a bitter drawn-out conflict over who should manage the Beatles and what should be done about the chaotic state of their finances. Despite the tremendous sales of Beatles’ music over the past six years, John claimed, “all of us could be broke in six months”.

Klein offered to restructure Apple, organize a takeover bid for the shares the Beatles didn’t own in Northern Songs and renegotiate a better royalty deal with EMI. He was able to persuade John, George and Ringo of his ability to do these things but Paul remained loyal to Eastman. As a result the Beatles’ existence was now under threat and the frequent meetings at Apple were fraught with tension. One morning in the early spring, George decided it was all getting a bit too much like school, and so he took a day off from the round table routine and went to see his friend Eric Clapton at his country home in Ewhurst, Surrey.

Borrowing one of Eric’s acoustic guitars, George took a walk around the gardens and, basking in the first real sunshine of the year, he felt a sudden flush of optimism and started to write ‘Here Comes The Sun’. “It was such a great release for me simply being out in the sun,” said George at the time. “The song just came to me.”

BECAUSE

John was relaxing on a sofa at home, while Yoko played the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 14 in C Sharp Minor (‘Moonlight Sonata’) on the grand piano. John has said that he asked her if she could play the same chords in reverse order. This she did, and it proved to be the inspiration for ‘Because’.

The similarity between the opening of the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ and ‘Because’ is striking, although close scrutiny reveals it to be a straightforward lift rather than the reversal of notes John suggested. Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers, author of
Twilight Of The Gods: The Music of the Beatles
puts it this way, “The affinity between the enveloping, arpeggiated C sharp minor triads, with the sudden shift to the flat supertonic, is, in the Lennon and Beethoven examples, unmistakable.”

There was a touch of irony in the idea of a Beatle borrowing from Beethoven because there was a common perception at the time that rock’n’roll was antithetical to classical music and that no one could genuinely appreciate both. It also probably didn’t help that the Beatles had recorded Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, an irreverent piece of advice to classical composers asking them to make way for rock’n’roll.

One of the first questions the Beatles were always asked in America was, ‘What do you think of Beethoven?’ It was Ringo who answered. “I love him,” he said. “Especially his poems.” But it was John, in particular, who came to regard Beethoven as the supreme composer, and one with whom he felt kinship. By 1969, he was no longer trying to be the artistic equal of Elvis or the Rolling Stones, but of Picasso, Van Gogh, Dylan Thomas and Beethoven.

YOU NEVER GIVE ME YOUR MONEY

‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ announced the medley of half-finished songs which dominate the second side of
Abbey Road.
Paul collected the songs and carefully worked out a way of linking them together. ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ itself is made up of three distinct fragments. The first, which develops the line in the title, was an allusion to the Beatles’ financial problems saying that instead of money all they ever seemed to get was ‘funny paper’.

“That’s what we get,” said George. “We get bits of paper saying how much is earned and what this and that is but we never actually get it in pounds, shillings and pence. We’ve all got a big house and a car and an office but to actually get the money we’ve earned seems impossible.”

The next fragment, which mentions being penniless after leaving college, may have referred to the same problems but was written in the jolly, nostalgic style of Paul’s ‘woke up/ got out of bed’ section of ‘A Day In The Life’. The final piece was about the freedom of Paul’s new life with Linda, where he could just pack the car and drive out of town leaving his worries behind.