Abbey Road

• 1. Introduction

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  Abbey Road, the eleventh studio album by the Beatles, ends with a line that Frank Sinatra called the greatest love song ever written: not a Lennon-McCartney composition at all, but a George Harrison track. That tension, who gets the credit, who holds the power, who even wants to be in the band anymore, runs through every moment of a record made while the group was quietly falling apart. By the time Abbey Road reached the shops on the 26th of September 1969, John Lennon had already told his bandmates he wanted a divorce. The public would not find out for another seven months. What did it feel like to be inside that studio? And how did four men who could barely stand one another produce an album that would sell more than 30 million copies worldwide?

• 2. A Last Attempt at Peace

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  Paul McCartney made a direct appeal to producer George Martin after the bruising Get Back sessions: he wanted the group to record the way they used to do it. Martin agreed, but only on one condition. All four Beatles, and particularly Lennon, would have to let him produce the record on his own terms, with proper discipline. No one entered those sessions certain it would be their last album. George Harrison later recalled only that it felt as if the band was reaching the end of the line.

  The recording stretched across several months in 1969. The first session took place on the 22nd of February at Trident Studios, where the group cut a backing track for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" with Billy Preston on Hammond organ. A break followed, then a session on the 6th of May, then an eight-week gap before work resumed on the 2nd of July. The last backing track, for "Because", was taped on the 1st of August. Overdubs continued through the month, and on the 20th of August, all four Beatles were together in a studio for the last time to finalize the running order.

  McCartney, Ringo Starr and Martin have spoken warmly of those months. Harrison put it simply: the group actually performed like musicians again. Some of the goodwill traced back to April, when Lennon and McCartney had recorded the non-album single "The Ballad of John and Yoko" together, trading friendly banter between takes. That camaraderie was real, if partial. Lennon's wife Yoko Ono had become a permanent presence at Beatles sessions, and she clashed with other members. In June, Lennon and Ono were injured in a car accident in Scotland; a doctor ordered Ono to rest, so Lennon arranged for a bed to be installed in the studio so she could watch the sessions from there.

• 3. A Studio Built for Eight Tracks

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  The TG12345 Mk I was the only solid-state transistor mixing desk used on any Beatles album. Every earlier record had been made on tube-based REDD desks, and engineer Geoff Emerick recalled that the new console produced a softer overall sound than what came before. Music historian Kenneth Womack wrote that the TG12345's wider sound palette and mixing capabilities allowed Martin and Emerick to give the Beatles' sound greater definition and clarity, with brighter tonalities and a deeper low end that set Abbey Road apart from the rest of their catalogue.

  The desk also supported eight-track recording far better than its predecessors. Earlier albums including Sgt. Pepper had been made on four-track machines; the extra tracks gave the band more room for overdubs and layering. Abbey Road was also the first Beatles album issued nowhere in the world in mono. Starr seized on the new possibilities. He later described his drum work on the album as tom-tom madness, saying he went nuts on the toms. The individual limiters and compressors on each channel of the TG desk gave each instrument its own precise shape in the mix.

  Two engineers who worked as assistants on the sessions went on to notable careers of their own. Alan Parsons later engineered Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and produced records under the Alan Parsons Project. John Kurlander became a successful engineer and producer, most recognized for his work on the scores for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Kurlander would also, inadvertently, play a key role in how the album sounds at its very end.

• 4. Songs in Dispute

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  "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" caused more friction than almost any other track on the album. McCartney wrote it after the group's 1968 trip to India and had wanted it on the White Album, but the others rejected it as too complicated. When sessions resumed for Abbey Road, he brought it back and insisted on a perfect performance, recording it repeatedly until he was satisfied. Harrison said the band had to play it over and over until Paul liked it, calling it a real drag. Lennon hated the song enough to skip the session entirely; engineer Geoff Emerick recalled Lennon calling it more of Paul's granny music before walking out. Lennon did not return to the studio for two weeks, until the backing track for "Come Together" was laid down on the 21st of July.

  Harrison's contributions sat at the opposite end of the band's internal politics. "Something" had been given away to Joe Cocker before the Beatles recorded their own version; Cocker's reading appeared on his album Joe Cocker! in November 1969. Yet Lennon named "Something" his favourite song on the album, and McCartney considered it the best Harrison had ever written for the group. Sinatra, who performed it regularly, mistakenly credited it as a Lennon-McCartney composition and called it the greatest love song ever written. When it was released as a double A-side single with "Come Together" in October 1969, it became the first Beatles number-one in the United States that was not a Lennon-McCartney song.

  "Come Together" carried its own legal complications. Lennon originally wrote the song as a campaign piece for Timothy Leary's California gubernatorial run against Ronald Reagan. Its opening line, "Here come old flat-top", was lifted from Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me", and Morris Levy brought a lawsuit against Lennon over it. The two reached a settlement in 1973 in which Lennon agreed to record three songs from Levy's publishing catalogue for his next solo album. In the liner notes to the Beatles compilation Love, Martin described "Come Together" as a simple song that stands out because of the sheer brilliance of the performers.

• 5. The Medley and Its Architecture

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  During the sessions, Lennon pushed for an album split cleanly in two: his songs on one side, McCartney's on the other. The compromise that emerged reflected the gap between their aesthetics. Lennon wanted distinct, unrelated tracks; McCartney and Martin wanted to continue the thematic structure they had developed on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The result was a 16-minute medley of short songs and fragments on side two, known during recording simply as "The Long One". Lennon later dismissed it as junk, describing it as just bits of songs thrown together.

  "You Never Give Me Your Money" opened the medley. Its backing track was recorded on the 6th of May at Olympic Studios, before many of the sessions' worst arguments took place. McCartney said the song drew on the band's dispute with manager Allen Klein, though Ian MacDonald questioned whether the timing supported that reading. The track moves through a suite of styles, from a piano-led ballad to arpeggiated guitars, with guitar solos from both Harrison and Lennon. "Sun King" follows, using the same triple-tracked three-part harmonies as "Because". Lennon's "Mean Mr. Mustard" was written during the Beatles' 1968 trip to India. "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" was inspired by an actual fan who entered McCartney's home through his bathroom window. "Golden Slumbers" was based on Thomas Dekker's 17th-century poem.

  "The End" closed the medley with Starr's only drum solo in the Beatles' entire catalogue, mixed across two tracks in true stereo. Harrison suggested trading guitar solos within the song; Lennon decided each player would take turns; McCartney elected to go first. The three solos, two bars each, repeated twice, were cut live in a single take against the existing backing track. The final line, "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make", was recorded as a separate piano section by McCartney on the 18th of August. Musicologist Walter Everett mapped the medley's harmonic structure, finding that songs centred on selfishness cluster around the key of A, while generosity appears in songs centred on C major, with "The End" serving as a tonal compromise between the two.

• 6. The Photograph on Abbey Road

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  Photographer Iain Macmillan stood on a step-ladder on the morning of the 8th of August 1969 and had ten minutes to take the shot while a police officer held traffic behind him. Apple Records creative director John Kosh had designed the sleeve, and he made a deliberate choice to print no band name or album title on the front cover. EMI objected, believing the record would not sell without that information. Kosh's response was that they did not need to write the band's name on the cover, as they were the most famous band in the world.

  Macmillan took six photographs that morning. McCartney examined each one with a magnifying glass before selecting the image of all four walking in single file across the zebra crossing outside what was then officially called EMI Studios. Lennon leads in white, followed by Starr in black, McCartney barefoot and out of step, and Harrison in denim. The suits worn by three of the four were designed by Tommy Nutter. A white Volkswagen Beetle belonging to a resident of the nearby block of flats was parked beside the crossing; after the album's release, its number plate, LMW 281F, was repeatedly stolen.

  Within weeks of the album's release, the photograph became the visual anchor for the "Paul is dead" conspiracy theory spreading through college campuses in the United States. Followers of the rumour read the image as a funeral procession: Lennon in white was the religious figure, Starr in black was the undertaker, Harrison in denim was the gravedigger, and the barefoot McCartney, out of step with the others, was the corpse. Part of the Volkswagen's plate was read as 28IF, taken to mean McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived, even though he was only 27 at the time. Lennon, interviewed by New York radio station WMCA, ridiculed the rumour but acknowledged it had been invaluable publicity for the album. In October 2019, the crossing was still drawing enough visitors that Abbey Road re-entered the UK album charts, hitting number one again, fifty years after its original release.

• 7. Reception and Reach

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  Abbey Road sold four million copies in its first two months. In the UK it debuted at number one and stayed there for eleven weeks, displaced briefly by the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed before returning to the top for another six weeks, finishing with a total of seventeen weeks at number one. It then spent 81 weeks on the UK albums chart overall. In the US it spent eleven weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart and was named the National Association of Recording Merchandisers best-selling album of 1969. In Japan it remained in the top 100 for 298 weeks during the 1970s.

  Initial critical reception was mixed. Ed Ward of Rolling Stone called the album complicated instead of complex and felt the Moog synthesiser created a sound that could not possibly exist outside the studio. Albert Goldman of Life magazine wrote that it was not one of the Beatles' great albums. Others were more generous: John Mendelsohn, also writing for Rolling Stone, called it breathtakingly recorded and compared the side-two suite to the whole of Sgt. Pepper. Don Heckman of Stereo Review named it one of the best recordings of January 1970 and judged it probably the equal of Sgt. Pepper. Chris Welch wrote in Melody Maker that the album was entirely free of pretension.

  Critical opinion shifted substantially over the following decades. In 2020, Rolling Stone ranked Abbey Road at number 5 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, the highest-placed Beatles album on that list; a 2012 version of the same list had placed it at number 14. In 2009, readers of Rolling Stone named it the greatest Beatles album the group ever made. By the time those polls were published, Abbey Road had been certified 12 times platinum by the RIAA. Allen Klein reported in June 1970 that it was the Beatles' best-selling album in the US, with sales of about five million copies. By 1992 the total had reached nine million. The worldwide figure eventually surpassed 31 million copies, and in 2001 a CNN report identified it as the best-selling vinyl album of 2011.