Today’s Beatles “song” is actually a medley of seven short songs amalgamated on the second side of Abbey Road (1969). The medley ranks as #23 on Rolling Stones’ list of The 100 greatest Beatles songs. It’s curious that, to me at least, none of these stand out as a top-notch Beatles song, but together they do—almost like the Beatles themselves as a group compared to their post-group solo achievements.
You Never Give Me Your Money
Sun King
Mean Mr. Mustard
Polythene Pam
She Came in Through the Bathroom Window
Golden Slumbers
Carry That Weight
The End
The last line of “The End”: “And in the end, the love you take—is equal to the love you make” is one of my favorite Beatles lines, and quite profound in its own way. The other great and profound line by a Beatle, but produced by Lennon on his own, is this one from “Beautiful Boy” (1980): “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
I learned a lot from the Rolling Stone description:
“I wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music,” [George Martin] said. “Paul was all for experimenting like that.” McCartney, in fact, led the first session for that extended section of the album — on May 6th, 1969, for “You Never Give Me Your Money,” his deceptively sunny indictment of the business nightmares at Apple Corps.
Lennon was a lot less interested in the medley, although he contributed some of its most eccentric parts, like the sneering “Mean Mr. Mustard” and the quick, funky put-down “Polythene Pam.” He subsequently dismissed the concept as “junk” in Rolling Stone, saying that “none of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all, only the fact that we stuck them together.”
He was right in one sense. The 16-minute sequence — veering from “Money” and the luxuriant sigh of Lennon’s “Sun King” to McCartney’s heavy-soul shard “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” and the sweet lullaby “Golden Slumbers,” and closing with McCartney’s famous prescription in “The End” (“The love you take/Is equal to the love you make”) — has no narrative connection. But the Abbey Road medley is the matured Beatles at their best: playful, gentle, acerbic, haunting and bonded by the music. Their harmonies are ravishing and complex; the guitars are confident and cutting. “We were holding it together,” McCartney said proudly. “Even though this undercurrent was going on” — a reference to the pressures and differences that had been pulling them apart since the White Album — “we still had a strong respect for each other even at the very worst points.”
The Beatles recorded the sections of the medley at various times, out of order, during the July and August 1969 sessions for Abbey Road. “Mean Mr. Mustard” dated back to early 1968. The lingering hysteria of Beatlemania cropped up in “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” which was inspired by an overeager fan. But the emotional heart of the suite was the financial woes that were consuming the Beatles’ energy and were on the verge of bankrupting them. Lennon was instrumental in the hiring of Allen Klein, the business manager of the Rolling Stones, to straighten out the books and the chaos at Apple Corps; McCartney wanted the band to hire Lee and John Eastman, his future father- and brother-in-law. McCartney admitted that “You Never Give Me Your Money” was “me directly lambasting Allen Klein’s attitude to us — all promises, and it never works out.”
. . .The swapping of guitar solos in “The End” was a band brainstorm. Harrison thought a guitar break would make a good climax. Lennon suggested he, Harrison and McCartney all trade licks. McCartney said he’d go first. Coming after Starr’s first and only drum solo on a Beatles record, the scorching round-robin breaks — with Harrison in the middle and Lennon at the end — were cut live in one take, a last blast of natural brotherhood from a band only months from splitting.
“I didn’t know at the time that it was the last Beatles record that we would make,” Harrison said of Abbey Road. “But it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line.”
“Out of the ashes of all that madness,” said Starr, “that last section is one of the finest pieces we put together.”
I agree.
Me, too.
I disagree. “Money” is a great standalone song.
This is perfect music for a cosy lazy sunday.
I’ve heard rumors that the drum solo is actually Paul McCartney. I wonder if it’s true?
It sounds a lot like McCartney to me. Because Ringo, who is under-rated, listened to what was going on around him, musically, in the pop combo; and his style was to add little flourishes in a (very brief) call-and-response style to the musicians – the influence of the blues.
The extended solo is not his style, and frankly, compared to other more flashy contemporary drummers (Keith Moon – sublime, Ginger Baker – ridiculous), he may have thought a drum solo, especially as the Fabs hadn’t toured for the 3 years, unnecessarily self-indulgent.
This drum solo is only attention-grabbing because it’s the Mop-tops’ only drum solo, and most drum solos are only interesting if you hear them live, and if you’re:
a) under 22
b) in love or
c) about to lose your innocence to the euphoric joys of MDMA
As a musician, and feeling the way McCartney wrote in 1969, I wouldn’t be surprised if the solo was Macca.
Listen to it: it’s not the way a drummer thinks; it sounds the way a composer thinks that a percussionist should think – it’s formal, careful and relentlessly on the beat, after 1965 Ringo didn’t drum like that. He was a much better percussionist.
I think you’ve summed that up very well, Dermot. It’s never really sounded like Ringo to me either. And I completely agree with you about Ringo too, underrated – and you’re bang on about Moonie too! Sublime! Well said!
That story has been told about other songs as well. Years ago, somebody told me that Paul did the drumroll at the beginning of “All You Need is Love,” because Ringo didn’t know how. For what it’s worth, Wikipedia refers to Ringo doing the solo.
Ringo quit for two weeks during the White Album sessions, and in his absence Paul played on “Dear Prudence” and possibly “Back in the USSR.” My guess is that this is the source of stories about Ringo being unable to manage this or that drum part.
That said, the “Abbey Road” solo does have a different feel from most drum solos, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s McCartney’s influence.
The thing is, and I suspect the story has never been thought, that Ringo was a great musician; he listened to what these 3 geniuses were doing and thought, “How can I embellish this?” And he did it brilliantly; it’s not about how good I am, but about how good WE are.
At the top of their game, you can feel the Usness of the Beatles, when they groove as an effin great little pop combo, when they’re, as they say nowadays, ‘in the zone’; you’d almost think that their toppermost were the Abbey Road B side medley, but it’s not, because it’s too knowing, too controlled, too reconciled, too beyond rock ‘n’ roll, too adult.
Ringo Starr was a great musician: only Keith Moon was doing anything close to this in March 1966, when The Beatles recorded ‘Rain’. It is the Fabs at their greatest: punky, short pop, out-there lyrics, bonkers production, melody-gone-mad: and if you don’t think they talked about it A LOT before they wrote and recorded it, you know nothing about pop music.
Rain was Ringo’s favourite Beatles tune, and it’s hard not to see why!
No it’s not true. It was Ringo. I’ve met Geoff Emerick,and he’s a no-nonsense kind of guy… no reason he’d lie about it. linky
From the linked interview, it is interesting to note how reluctant Ringo was about playing the solo, though.
I’ve read elsewhere (another Emerick interview) that he wouldn’t initially do it unless George was tapping along, and Lennon & McCartney were not in the studio. Although I’m having trouble locating that reference, sorry.
You can also note that the really different drum sounds on that album towards the end were a result of Geoff having extra tracks to spare, and being able to mic them above and below. He had a whole EIGHT tracks to play with, instead of the usual four. Those were the days.
I think the really funny thing about this interview (and another I’ve read) is that “Her Majesty” was a complete goof.
They had the master tape all put together and produced the master acetate — and it was only DURING that process that it was discovered that an underling engineer (John Kurlander) completely botched the job by splicing the wrong piece of tape onto the end of the album. Normally a fuck-up like this would cost the underling his reputation, but Paul heard it and said it was really cool, and the result was that sudden orchestral BBAAMMMM followed by Her Majesty. Now it’s noted as “the shortest Beatles Song”.
Her majesty was intended for the medley. In front of polythene pam. The big d chord is the same as the first chord of ‘pam’. They
chopped it out as it didn’t flow and stuck it on the end of the master and it was accidentally included.
Did you check out linky above? I don’t see any reason to doubt what you are saying the original intention was, although I’d like to see a source. But what you are saying is at odds with Geoff’s account, and he was there. There was no “they”, it was a goof by John Kurlander, and the piece of tape was not a final master quality recording of anything; it was a demo. Spliced by accident from Geoff’s assistant. From Geoff:
Actually after having listened to the beginning of “Pam” and the beginning of “Majesty” (and the end of Mustard, for grins), there’s no way those bits of sound are from the same audio events, even. The beginning of Pam is nothing but guitar – sounds like slamming the hell out of a 12-string. The beginning of Majesty is a hit with orchestral notes in it, a bit of tambourine, followed by a quick flub into Paul’s 6-string and voice. On the DEMO recording Geoff talks about.
My info comes from the engineer in charge of the project. Where is your info coming from?
My favorite is from Penny Lane: And though she feels as if she’s in a play/ She is anyway. I’ve always thought that a clever comment on the human condition.
“Ummmm…is that true?”
Thanks for that. What a comic genius.
As I was reading the Rolling Stones review, the Sonics version of “Have Love, Will Travel” came on my background feed. I realized once again that I don’t care for profundity of lyrics, analysis of meaning, experimental ways of creating music, and think the very idea of music criticism (in rock ‘n’ roll especially) is a bit ridiculous.
Give me a raw, raucous singer, a hard beat, some screaming guitars, and I’m happy. Throw in a good, short drum solo, and maybe a tenor sax break and I’m moved to ecstasy. The lyrics can be as meaningful as Hank Ballard & the Midnighter’s “Annie’s Aunt Fannie”.
In a way, I agree with you.
A profound text is fine, and contributes to the overall package, but my estimation of the music will have nothing to do with the text, whether the text is sublime and meaningful, or trite and vulgar. Nor should it. They are separate things.
You never hear anyone praise a chef’s abilities based on what the reviewer thinks of the plate the dish is served on.
Songs aren’t just about music, they are about the synergy between the music and the lyrics. Clearly some people value one over the other, but a song that only does one of them well will not be as good as a song that does both well.
And I agree with you, too.
I may be one of those that values the music more than the text, but I can still acknowledge (as I did) that a beautiful text in addition to beautiful music will give you more, well, beauty than one or the other. And many times the music is written so as to help convey general or specific ideas expressed by the text, i. e., tone painting. So in one sense the text and the music are bound up. But it is a superficial sense.
The question “is this music well written” can be answered without reference to the text.
My go-to reply for arguments about what role consideration of the text should play in evaluating a piece of music is “what about any of the myriad Bach “parodies”? Bach recycled his own music all the time, removing the original text and inserting a new one, appropriate for the occasion of the piece’s repurposing.
Funny, that seems a bit like rock crit right there. Indeed, it sounds like something Rock’s ur-critic Lester Bangs might’ve said (except that he’d have said it a lot louder and much longer — much, much, much longer).
I really love the Lennon song “Beautiful Boy”.
I never had children, and usually I don’t regret that. I suppose it was a “choice”, but really it’s the cumulative result of a lot of little choices, and more the result of the fact that I never strongly wanted to have children. I attribute that to fear induced by the pain of my parent’s divorce, but I could be wrong about that.
Anyway, when I listen to that song I can actually get some sense of what one misses by not being a father. It strongly inspires the emotions of longing for that parental bond with a child.
If you like Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight/ The End (and I do) and amazing juggling search on YouTube for Chris Bliss Juggling Masterpiece. You won’t be disappointed.
So this is what became of The Quarrymen? The group seemed to fall off the face of the planet in the early Sixties. I told everyone they wouldn’t amount to anything once the band lost Stu Sutcliffe and Pete Best.
A lot you know! The Quarrymen regrouped, changed their hairstyle, and became “Dion and The Belmonts.”
Say what?!
After John, Paul, and George went off to form the Beatles, none of the relict Quarrymen ever got any closer to the Bronx (home turf of Dion DiMucci and the Belmonts) than the mouth of the River Mersey.
you haven’t looked at McCartney’s list of platinum, gold and silver disks.
Paul McCartney has a great gift for melody and a hell of a set of pipes. And after playing one for so long in public, he seems to have aged into a genuinely nice, decent, public-minded person — as opposed to the egomaniacal prick he could often be at the time of The Beatles’ break-up. (Of course John could be a jerk then sometimes, too — not to mention an “asshole with a Kotex on his head.”)
But as a song-writer, McCartney has spent his post-Beatles career foundering on the shoals of his own shallowness. Unlike any real rocker (including George and John) his roots run to Tin-Pan Alley and British music hall, rather than the blues. More Irving Berlin than Robert Johnson. (On The White Album, the egregious example being “Honey Pie.”)
Unmoored from Lennon’s gravitas, McCartney has consistently been at risk of floating away, carried into the thin air of pop Top-40 on the lift of his own hot air. It is an embarrassment that a grown man wrote “Silly Love Songs” — even more so that half of one of history’s great song-writing duos stooped to penning James Bond theme songs. And Wings? The less said there, the better. They make Oasis feel like Pink Floyd.
McCartney’s solo career was no worse than Lennon’s, which also had its share of troughs and mediocrity (his agitprop “New York City” album, the limp “Mind Games” album and the tame “Double Fantasy” for starters). And it’s ludicrous to say that the man who wrote and performed “Helter Skleter” was not a “real rocker”–just as it’s ludicrous to blast him for writing a song for a James Bond, especially when the song (“Live and Let Die”) happened to be a real rocker! “Silly Love Songs” is also pretty good as well–an apt rejoinder to people who couldn’t stand McCartney’s command of pop.
I thought that when Lennon used the line, “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans” he was incorporating an older folk expression into the lyrics. According to Quote Investigator, it dates back to at least 1957…
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/05/06/other-plans/
No matter, it still works well in “Beautiful Boy”.
I was born in 1967. When I listen to this, I love to think about what it would’ve been like for me to be a Beatles fan when this album came out, and listen to the medley for the first time. I romanticize that moment (as I imagine it) to the point that it seems magical.
Go back a five or six years before this album came out and force yourself to listen to the (mostly) insipid British pop music of the time for about a year, and then put on an early Beatles record. It becomes immediately obvious why the Beatles were such a huge hit.
Correction…. The guitar solos at the end are Lennon, Harrison and Eric Clapton, not McCartney.
False. Clapton plays only on while my guitar gently weeps.
While it may be due to its being overplayed I much prefer the Medley to A Day in the Life.
I see folks here are refering to the song “you never give me your money” as “Money” which may make sense to some as a pure abbreviation, but CANNOT as a substitute for the actual title.
The problem lies with the fact that the Beatles in their earlier years recorded the song “Money” and so the title has to remain with that song alone.
And while I’m at it (you know being a smart ass and correcting things n all lol) lets have none of this Ringo didn’t do the drum solo in the meledy silliness. Really folks, he did it, and the band members all spoke about it at various times in the past.
Last since it seems to be topical, I have to say that in order to understand how great a drummer Ringo was you have to think of him in two ways, one of which is of course the professional studio artist who created a backdrop for some of the greatest music ever recorded.
In the studio he had no need to be flashy, but instead had to be ever so smooth with his style and approach so that the music was complimented fully. He did that perfectly by any account so common people give the man his due…
But if one really has a deep need to see a drummer flailing away live, and mercilessly DRIVING a rock song to the brink, just google the Beatles doing “Please Please Me” live in say Washington DC.
The fact is in their early years Ringo beat the Beatles into a flame on the stage with a frenzied sound and yes subtle time changes which most folks miss totally.
But an astute observer will notice that Ringo live and doing his hectic job so coolly was a MAJOR factor in the early success of the Beatles. Their later development musically might not of occurred without the energy he alone imparted to set them on the path toward starrdom.
Just when the Beatles live performances reigned over their entire future, Ring was the man for the job absolutely.
SO GIVE THE MAN HIS DUE!
I have a special fondness for Tenacious D’s version, despite the occasional off-color liberties they took with the lyrics. Or perhaps because of it…
“Keeps a ten-bob note up his nose”
I wonder how many people know now what that means.
I’ve always considered the medley to begin with ‘Because’. The ending chord, D diminished flows perfectly into the A minor of you never give…
Even ‘Here comes the sun”s final chord, A major flows into the C# minor of Because making the whole side continuous to my ears.
Here’s me playing the whole thing on solo guitar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UprnWQW3R_k
Very, very nice!
Nice discussion here, recently this video with the vocals of this section isolated has started making the rounds, this seemed like a good place as any to share 🙂
http://icnt.mx/2013/09/abbey-road-isolated/
Very interesting.
Thanks. Listening now…I think I hear where Freddie Mercury got some of his inspiration from when doing choir arrangements. 🙂