Come Together

• 1. Introduction

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  In the finished recording of "Come Together" by the Beatles, John Lennon sings "Shoot me!" and most listeners catch only one of the two words. The engineer Geoff Emerick later suggested the reason. Paul McCartney's bass lands on the word "me", so only "Shoot" cuts through. The song opens the 1969 album Abbey Road. Lennon wrote it, and the credit reads Lennon and McCartney.

  Nearly every part of this track has a story attached. Where did the title phrase come from, and who else said they had a hand in the words? What did a brand-new mixing console do to the way the band played? Why did a music publisher take Lennon to court, and why did artists from Ike and Tina Turner to the Arctic Monkeys keep returning to the song?

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• 2. A Campaign Slogan

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  In early 1969, John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, staged nonviolent protests against the Vietnam War, which they called the Bed-ins for Peace. In May, during the Montreal portion, counterculture figures from across North America came to see Lennon.

  Among the visitors was the American psychologist Timothy Leary, an early advocate of LSD whom Lennon admired. Leary intended to run for Governor of California in the following year's election. He asked Lennon to write him a campaign song built on his slogan, "Come Together - Join the Party!"

  The result was tiny. The chant that came out of that request was only one line long: "Come together and join the party". Lennon promised to finish and record it. Leary later recalled that Lennon gave him a tape of the piece, yet the two did not interact again.

  The campaign song went nowhere, but the phrase stayed with Lennon.

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• 3. Borrowed Blues

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  In July 1969, during the sessions for Abbey Road, Lennon pulled the phrase "come together" out of the Leary chant and used it to start a new composition.

  The template for the music was a 1956 single, "You Can't Catch Me", by the American guitarist Chuck Berry. Lennon's piece began as an up-tempo blues number. He altered Berry's lyric only slightly. Berry had sung "Here come a flattop / He was movin' up with me". Lennon turned that into "Here come ol' flattop / He come groovin' up slowly".

  Another fragment came from Lennon's own drawer. The words "shoot me" were lifted from "Watching Rainbows", a song he had left unfinished and unreleased in January 1969.

  The author Peter Doggett described the effect on the ear. He wrote that each phrase "passes too quickly to be understood at first hearing, the sound as important as the meaning".

  In a December 1987 interview by Selina Scott on the television show West 57th Street, George Harrison stated that he had written two lines of the song. His claim was not the only debt anyone would raise, because Berry's publisher had one of its own.

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• 4. Studio Three

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  The Beatles taped the basic track at EMI Studios, now Abbey Road Studios, in Studio Three on the 21st of July 1969. George Martin produced the session. The balance engineers were Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald.

  Emerick's presence was a small reunion. At McCartney's request, it was his first session with the group since July 1968. Emerick had quit during the sessions for their 1968 album The Beatles, also known as the White Album, because he found the atmosphere tense and negative.

  The song was also Lennon's first new composition for the band in three months. The previous one was "The Ballad of John and Yoko", which Lennon and McCartney recorded on the 14th of April.

  The group taped eight takes, and take six was marked as the best. Lennon sang lead vocal, McCartney played bass, Harrison played rhythm guitar and Ringo Starr played drums. Starr laid tea towels over his tom drums to dampen their sound. With no guitar to play, Lennon added handclaps each time he sang "Shoot me!" He also added tambourine over the solo and the coda.

  The session was taped on 4-track equipment. At the end of the night, take six was copied to 8-track tape in Studio Two, which made overdubbing and adjusting the EQ easier.

  On the 22nd of July, Lennon sang a new lead vocal and added handclaps again. Both received tape delay, and automatic double tracking was added during the choruses. At Lennon's request, McCartney played a Fender Rhodes electric piano. McCartney recalled that Lennon "wanted a piano lick to be very swampy and smokey, and I played it that way and he liked that a lot". Harrison added a heavily distorted guitar during the refrains, and Starr added a maraca.

  More vocals followed the next day. On the 25th of July, McCartney sang a harmony below Lennon's part. On the 29th of July, Lennon overdubbed a guitar during the song's middle climax. Work ended the next day, when Harrison played a lead guitar solo on a Gibson Les Paul during the coda.

  Mixing was completed on the 7th of August in Studio Two, on EMI's new solid state console, the EMI TG12345. Emerick later suggested that its "softer and rounder" sound shaped the performances. The rhythm tracks came "back off tape a little less forcefully", and the overdubs were "performed with less attitude".

  Ten stereo mixes were made, and the first attempt was marked as the best. Like the rest of Abbey Road, the song was never mixed for mono.

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• 5. Four Talents

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  Lennon himself ranked the song high. He called it "one of my favourite Beatles tracks" and added, "It's funky, it's bluesy, and I'm singing it pretty well."

  George Martin went further. If he had to choose one song that showed the four disparate talents of the band and how they combined, he said, he would choose "Come Together". He traced how it grew in the room. "Then Paul has this idea for this great little riff." Starr heard that and played a drum part that fitted in, which set a pattern Lennon jumped on for the "shoot me" part. Then came Harrison's guitar at the end. In Martin's words, "The four of them became much, much better than the individual components."

  In May 2021, Ringo Starr told The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that it was his favourite Beatles song. The public had agreed with him since the autumn of 1969, when the single reached stores.

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• 6. Charts And Critics

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  Apple Records, the Beatles' EMI-distributed label, released Abbey Road on the 26th of September 1969, with "Come Together" as the opening track.

  On the 6th of October, the song came out in America as a double A-side single with Harrison's "Something", catalogued as Apple 2654. It stayed on the US Billboard Hot 100 for 16 weeks and reached No. 1. The British release followed on the 31st of October as Apple R5814, and it peaked at No. 4. Other countries put it even higher. It topped the Go-Set national chart in Australia, the Listener chart in New Zealand and the Cash Box Top 100 in the United States. West Germany placed it at No. 3 and Italy at No. 4.

  Listeners later heard how it began. The first take, recorded on the 21st of July 1969 with slightly different lyrics, appeared in 1996 on the outtake compilation Anthology 3. Take five was released with the Abbey Road 50th Anniversary edition.

  Reviewers noticed the song at once. Tony Barrow, writing in the Liverpool Echo, called it "magnificently funky" and singled out its "intriguing lyrics". The Western Daily Press named it among the album's best tracks. Jack Batten of The Toronto Star praised its "eminently hummable little melodic riff".

  The lists came later. In 2006, Mojo magazine placed it at No. 13 among the Beatles' 101 best songs. Four years later, Rolling Stone ranked it No. 9 among the band's 100 greatest. Entertainment Weekly put it at No. 44 and Ultimate Classic Rock at No. 20. In 2015, NME placed it at No. 20 and Paste at No. 23. Rolling Stone also ranked it No. 202 on its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, and No. 205 on the 2010 revision.

  The most specific honour came in 2024, when Consequence ranked the song's bassline as the best of all time.

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• 7. The Flattop Lawsuit

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  In late 1969, Big Seven Music, the publisher of Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me", brought a copyright infringement claim against Lennon. The company's owner, Morris Levy, contended that the song sounded musically similar to Berry's original and shared some of its lyrics.

  Lennon and McCartney had seen the resemblance coming. Before recording, they deliberately slowed the song down and added a heavy bass riff to make it more original.

  The case was settled out of court in 1973. Levy's lawyers agreed that Lennon would compensate by recording three Big Seven songs for his next album. A brief version of "Ya Ya", sung with his son Julian, appeared on the 1974 album Walls and Bridges. The 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll carried "You Can't Catch Me" and another version of "Ya Ya". The third song, "Angel Baby", stayed unreleased until after Lennon's death.

  The dispute then turned on the album itself. Levy sued Lennon again for breach of contract and was eventually awarded $6,795.00. Lennon countersued after Levy released an album of Lennon material using tapes in his possession. That record was called Roots: John Lennon Sings the Great Rock & Roll Hits. Lennon was eventually awarded $84,912.96.

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• 8. Covers And Afterlives

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  A month after the Beatles' version came out, Ike and Tina Turner began performing the song, most notably at Madison Square Garden in November 1969. The public response was so strong that Minit Records rushed out a studio version in December 1969, also crediting the Ikettes. It reached No. 57 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 21 on the R&B chart. Its B-side was another soul-infused rock cover, the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women". The song became the lead single of their 1970 album of the same name. A live version was recorded at L'Olympia in Paris on the 30th of January 1971 and released later that year on Live in Paris.

  Lennon returned to it on stage at his 1972 Madison Square Garden concerts. It was the only Beatles song he sang there, and his only full-length concert performance after leaving the band. The band Elephant's Memory backed him. The recording from the 30th of August 1972 was released in 1986 as Live in New York City.

  In 1978, Aerosmith recorded one of the most successful covers for the film Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Released as a single in July 1978, it reached No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was the band's last Top 40 hit for nearly a decade. The song later turned up on the soundtrack for the film Armageddon.

  Michael Jackson had a particular link to the song. He bought the publishing rights to the Beatles' catalogue in 1985, so he owned the rights when he covered it in 1986. It was recorded for Bad in 1987 but scrapped, and it landed on HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I in 1995. It also closed the 1988 film Moonwalker. It was the only Beatles song Jackson covered on an official release.

  Other versions kept arriving. In December 1995, McCartney joined Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller on a version for the charity album Help, under the name the Smokin' Mojo Filters. Weller sang lead, and the track reached No. 19 on the UK Singles Chart. In 2012, Godsmack released a cover on Live & Inspired, and Arctic Monkeys played it at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics. The Arctic Monkeys recording reached No. 21 in the UK and appeared on Isles of Wonder. On the 8th of September 2017, Gary Clark Jr. and the Dutch composer Junkie XL released a version as the first single from the Justice League soundtrack. It reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart.

  The most unscripted version came at the CalJam Festival in San Bernardino, California, in 2017. Foo Fighters, Liam Gallagher and Aerosmith's Joe Perry played it together. Gallagher forgot the words, and he later explained that he thought they were performing "I Am the Walrus".

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