Imperfect: Abbey Road
This hurts me. Not even in a poetic, abstract way. This causes me genuine physical distress. My decades of Beatles stan-dom. The (uniformly one-sided) screaming matches I’ve gotten into with those who dared accuse the Fab Four of being overrated or overplayed, with those who claimed their importance and influence to be somehow overstated, with those who claimed that pop music would have gotten along just fine without them. Have I forsaken all of this? The answer is a bit complicated. I still stand by everything I’ve ever said about The Beatles and their collective body of work, and I don’t regret that I’m willing to end friendships at the mere suggestion that “In My Life” or “Yesterday” are anything other than masterpieces. All that I’m here to say is that Abbey Road, arguably the most iconic album ever put out by the lads from Liverpool (or anyone else for that matter) is maybe, kind of, sort of….well….overrated.
This is by no means to say that Abbey Road is a bad album. It’s not. It’s a great album. A masterpiece. But it’s also inherently flawed. And with the number of publications willing to put it on a pedestal as a perfect 10, or even the best thing the group ever put out, I can’t help but wonder, “Why?” Or, perhaps more importantly for my own purposes, “Why do I disagree?”
Before evaluating Abbey Road, I’d like to first set the scene with some of the events that preceded its creation. While Abbey Road was not the last album The Beatles ever released (that honor instead goes to the ironically underrated Let it Be), it was the last album they ever recorded. The band was on its last legs as a unit, with creative differences, frequent infighting, and mounting personal animosity being clearly visible in the finished product that was the group’s previous full-length release, 1968’s self-titled record, colloquially known as “The White Album.” A stark departure from the lean, sonically unified, 13–14 track records that the group was known for up to that point, “The White Album” is instead a bloated beast of an album, clocking in at 30 songs and running over an hour and a half. There is no sense of cohesion on the album, and that almost feels like the point, with frequent, jarring shifts in mood, tone, and genre, ranging from the revelry and fun in the ska-tinged “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” to the suicidal depression of “Yer Blues,” to the whatever-the-hell-it-is-that-I’m-supposed-to-get-out-of-this of “Revolution 9.” “The White Album” was made not by the greatest rock group of all time, but by four solo artists who just happened to use one another as backing musicians, a fact is clearly shown by its scattershot, chaotic layout.
Keeping all of this in mind, let’s jump forward a year and talk about Abbey Road. Looking back at this era in hindsight, it seems fairly obvious that the Abbey Road sessions were, at their core, intended to serve as one last go-around for The Beatles, a way for them to say goodbye to each other and to come to terms with the lasting legacy of what they had created. And I’m happy to say that, in my opinion, the album does more than succeed on this front. Each Beatle is given the chance to shine, with special mentions going to George Harrison, who had his finest hour as a Beatle on Abbey Road, contributing both “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun,” and Ringo Starr, who gets his second ever solo writing credit on “Octopus’s Garden.”
So what is it that keeps it from attaining perfection in my eyes? To put it in simplest terms, Abbey Road cannot seem to tell what it wants to be. A common theme throughout seems to be The Beatles struggling between a desire for to continue to expand their musical palette, as they had been doing since, roughly, the Rubber Soul era, and an urge to simplify, to return to their roots, as they had just done in the “Get Back” sessions that would ultimately be released the next year as Let it Be. Abbey Road is more of a sampling of these two ideas, never
seeming to feel comfortable diving all the way into either of them. What this does, in essence, is create a rather uneven experience for the listener. While Abbey Road is certainly more cohesive than “The White Album,” it’s still a bit all over the place, whiplashing between a myriad of genres, including blues, psychedelia, music hall, and the straightforward pop rock for which The Beatles are best known.
The songs mostly range from good to great, but the aforementioned genre hopping often causes them to feel jarring positioned next to each other. Take, for example, the contrast between the first two tracks on Side 2 of the album, “Here Comes the Sun,” with its warmth and message of hope, precedes “Because,” dark, alien, and detached; the two could not be more different, and their respective placements give me pause every time I listen to the album. The same is true for much of Side 1. “Come Together,” a defining anthem of the time period, and “Something,” one of the greatest love songs of all time are followed by… “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” a jaunty little number about a medical student who kills people with a hammer. “Octopus’s Garden,” care free and wistful, is followed by “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” intense, stress-inducing, heavy.
The lack of unity found on much of Abbey Road is only made more apparent by the medley that makes up most of Side 2. Made up of eight mini-songs, the medley serves as a microcosm of just what made albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band succeed in the areas in which Abbey Road falls a bit short. None of these songs feel forced. Their inclusion and placement makes sense despite the differences in their sounds. Here, each song bleeds into the next. Each part serves a purpose in propping up the whole. Without any one of these parts, the machine stops functioning.
Maybe the pettiest criticism that I can offer is that, compared to Sgt. Pepper or Revolver, some of the music to be heard on Abbey Road just isn’t that interesting. “Oh! Darling” features one of the rawer, more emotional vocal performances that Paul McCartney ever gave, comparable even to the primal screaming heard on the latter half of “Hey Jude,” yet it is bogged down with repeated, substandard breakup lyrics (rhyming, “I nearly fell down and cried” with “I nearly fell down and died,” this can hardly be called one of the better sets of lyrics attributed to Lennon/McCartney), atop a fairly generic doo wop style composition. Once again, it’s not that this is a bad song, but it adds no real substance, and could likely have been confined to the B-side of a single without hurting the album at all. The same assessment can be applied to the aforementioned “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” described by famous pessimist John Lennon as “Paul’s granny music,” and by famous optimist Ringo Starr in 2008 as “the worst track we ever had to record.” While those assessments are maybe a bit overly harsh (Everyone knows that “Mr. Moonlight” is the worst song The Beatles ever recorded), it is pretty apparent that the recording of the song was meant as a concession to McCartney and that the rest of the group’s heart was hardly there at all.
On a more serious note, looking beyond my own personal likes or dislikes, I’d like to consider what I’ve always found to be a sense of unfinished business with Abbey Road. Neither of the two sides feature proper “endings” in a conventional sense, and, while allegedly unintentional, I see this as one of the most interesting aspects of the record. Side 1 closes with “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” a nearly eight minute song that continues to build, repeating the same progression, and seemingly climbing toward a mighty crescendo until it simply stops.
There is no dramatic finale, no fadeout, nothing resembling a satisfying denouement. The song is playing, and then it is not. It’s a highly disorienting experience for the listener.
As dramatic as the ending of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” may be, I feel that it pales in comparison to Abbey Road’s closer. The Side 2 medley concludes with “The End,” a song that somehow manages to be an epic in spite of the fact that it’s not even two and a half minutes long. All four Beatles are spotlighted, with the only drum solo in their entire discography being followed by three interwoven guitar solo before Paul McCartney concludes the song with the iconic line, “And in the end / the love you take / is equal to the love you make.” This feels like a proper finale. But after fourteen seconds of silence, a dynamic crash introduces “Her Majesty.”
“Her Majesty” did not appear on the original track listing on Abbey Road’s back cover, and is talked about today as a hidden track, though more recent pressings do include it in the track list. It is the shortest Beatles song, clocking in at only twenty three seconds, and features Paul McCartney with a lone guitar singing a few lines before the track abruptly cuts off. The last thing we hear is the dull “dum” of a note played on the guitar, right in the middle of a sequence that will never be finished. We hold our collective breath, waiting to see what comes next, assuming that there must be more, wondering if maybe we got a bad copy of the record. Surely there must be something. But nothing comes next; there is no next note, no next song, and as far as The Beatles are concerned, no next album. This is it. This is the way The Beatles ends, not with a bang, but a “dum.” To call it anticlimactic that this is the final sound heard on the final song on the final album that The Beatles ever recorded is an understatement of an immense degree. This is The Sopranos finale, thirty years before the show existed. The juxtaposition between “The End” and “Her Majesty” is fascinating to consider. That such a perfect ending to not only an album, but to an entire career as a band, being followed by such a defiant non-ending is, to me at least, an excellent symbol for Abbey Road as a whole, and cements it in my mind as a flawed masterpiece.