I'm thinking of Abbey Road as the last Beatles album.
And as I've said in the videos leading up to this point, Let
It Be is actually released after Abbey Road, but most of it's recorded before.
And so as we follow the development of the group, Really Abbey Road
is the place where if we're going to say something about how the
group either has changed a ton since we first saw them back in
the, back in 1962 and 1963, or they've begin to synthesize things or whatever.
Whatever is going to happen, this is the place
to look for some of those kinds of things.
And in fact I will argue that a lot of
interesting things happen at Abbey Road and make it a
fitting finale for perhaps one of the top top pop
groups in the history of at least 20th century popular music.
Let's take a look a little bit at what was going on in the biography of
the group, just to remind ourselves of what
was happening through the second half of 1969.
Or at least in the period during which this
album was being recorded, February through August of 69.
Apple Corp continued to lose money through 1969, becoming a pressing problem.
How much money.
If you were the Beatles, how much money would you
have to be losing for that to constitute a problem?
I mean they had tons, making tons and tons of money.
If you're losing money, and you're the
Beatles, what, you've got, you've gotta stop that.
And they saw that as a really pressing problem.
Recommended to them came a guy by the name of Allen Klein.
A manager recommended to them by the Rolling Stones,
who they had told the Beatles had really helped them
clean up a lot of the business end of, of what was going on with their music and so.
The three Beatles, John and Ringo and George,
decided they wanted Allen Klein to manage the group.
But Paul wanted his father-in-law, Lee Eastman, to
manage the group, or at least the group's finances.
Paul, and the other guys said, well, we don't think that's quite, fair, Paul.
If the guy who's managing the group is like your
father-in-law, it doesn't seem like it would totally be fair.
Well Paul, I don't care, I don't like this Allen Klein guy, I don't,
you know, like the, I don't like being pushed into this kind of thing.
So there's a really standoff between Paul and the other three guys.
So, what ended up happening is, the three of The Beatles
signed a management deal with Allen Klein, and Paul did not.
And because the other guys did, and because Allen Klein
was coming in to clean up the mess at Apple.
Paul basically, withdrew from Apple.
He'd been there all the time up to that point.
He'd been the only guy who was showing
up with a great regularity, been very, very involved.
But, when it didn't work out the way that the way he hoped, he
became disappointed in dispirited about that and
decided he would invest his time other ways.
And so he, he went away from Apple and
Allen Klein sort of took over the show for awhile.
So, this again, the seeds of what's going to
become the final break up of the group has to
do with the business and that, that, this even more
gives us a sense of what must have been going.
What George Harrison must have been thinking when he wrote I Me Mine.
Anyway, we come to the album Abbey Road.
And as we've said before, recorded during February and
August of 1969 and released in August of 69.
A month earlier in the UK, September.
It rose, of course, to number one, on both
sides of the Atlantic in the U.S. and the U.K..
After the great fiasco of Get Back, which they expected most of that music would
never see the light of day that they'd recorded it all in the month of January.
They decided to return to the EMI Abbey Road Studios and do
an album the way they used to, with George Martin once again producing.
George Martin kind of had to be talked into it.
But he could believe that Paul wanted to go
back to doing that, but the relationship with John had
gotten to this point over the Get Back project
that he wasn't sure that John actually wanted him back.
But Paul assured him that they wanted him back.
John assured him that they wanted him back.
So George Martin came back.
And they did an album in Abbey Road, just like
they had done, you know, almost all of the times before.
The way they decided to work it out, Paul had this idea that he wanted to
do a big kind of piece that put together a lot of different pieces or fragments.
And, John Lennon just wanted to do his songs.
So, the way they made peace between John and Paul was
that, they decided that Side One would be done, pretty much
the way every other Beatles album had been done, Rubber Soul
or Revolver, or something, there'd just be a sequence of tunes.
Side Two, Paul would get to weave together various tunes
to create the big what, you know, we now think of
as Abbey Road Side Two, that big sort of piece
that's put together of, of, of other smaller songs and so.
The first, the first side was done in a very traditional way and the
second side became a kind of an enlarged version of A Day In The Life.
Now with several songs being put together to create one big coherent thing
as opposed to just two, two songs, a John song and a Paul song.
And so as we do our discussion of this, I want to spend a little
bit of time talking about the George songs first and then I'll talk through Side One.
We'll do a close up of some songs from Side One and a George song.
And then we'll look at Side Two and when we look at Side
Two that discussion will almost in itself be a kind of song close up.
Because it's very difficult to pull any of that material out of Side Two once
you get past Sun King say, and, and really be fair to the whole thing so.
So that's the way we'll proceed.
Let's then talk a little bit about the George songs, and the, the Ringo song.
The two George songs on this album, Something
and Here Comes the Sun are, well, maybe
in some people's opinion, the best songs that
George Harrison has written with the Beatles so far.
Some people would argue that, that these songs
are maybe the best songs on the record.
That we can even have such a discussion again
reminds us of how far George Harrison has come as
a song writer in the time he's been with
the Beatles, and how far his song writing has come.
He's really become a very accomplished
pop song writer, accomplished, maybe more accomplished
than many others, who were having hits in the business at the same time.
The song Something actually appears to be inspired by a line in a James Taylor song.
The James Taylor song, I think, is called Something in the Way She Moves, obviously.
You can hear where that line may have come from.
It's kind of a happier While My Guitar Gently Weeps a lot of
people think of Something as maybe being the best best George Harrison song ever.
I think the story goes that Frank Sinatra
often called it his favorite Lennon and McCartney tune.
So there you go, way to go, Frank.
anyway, it's a modified AABA form.
And you've probably heard the song a million times.
A great guitar solo, beautiful vocal, and all that kind of thing.
But if you've never taken time to do it, I would recommend you take
a little bit of time to listen to Paul McCartney's bass playing on this tune.
It's almost like Paul decided well I'm not going to get to
do much singing on this tune it's already a pretty good tune.
He just needs me on bass so, I'm really going to
focus on this bass part it is just wonderful bass playing.
And whenever you think about bass players into the 1970s who do much
more sort of adventures things in playing the bass than bass players had
tended to do in the 60s, you've got to look back at this
Paul McCartney track and think, well, I'll bet they were listening to this.
People like Michael Rutherford and Chris Squire and others who
played in alot of the progressive rock bands in the 70s.
No doubt listen very carefully to what Paul was doing on this track
as well as a lot of other things he was doing on Abbey Road.
The other song Here Comes the Sun, written on one
of Eric Clapton's guitars, during the first moments of Spring
we'll talk about in, one of our song closeups coming
up, so I'll save my, my remarks on that one.
Just while we're talking about with regard to something, let
me point out that both of these songs are AABA forms.
And so there really seems to be a sense in which George is coming to a kind
of a mastery of, of traditional songwriting forms and techniques here.
In a way that that that he's been working up to
now for the last couple of albums that we've been talking about.
Well, we get a chance to talk about, for the second
time, a Ringo song from the Beatles, and that is Octopus's Garden.
One of the few Ringo songs, clearly country tinged.
Related in many ways to Yellow Submarine.
A kind of a continuation of the Yellow Submarine idea.
Yellow Submarine, of course, had been a Paul song.
But still, you know, an Octopus's Garden.
It's an AABA form, so it's a fairly traditional kind of song forum.
And Ringo tells the story that is was inspired by.
Him going on a trip, and somebody, a tour guide or something, telling
him about how these octopuses would collect
together various kinds of shiny objects and
create little sort of gardens on the bottom of the, of the ocean
that they, that they would think of as their own little sort of garden.
The idea that these octopuses would, would you know, collect
together these various shiny objects and sort of maybe, one might
expect, take some pride, you know, by the way, the way
some suburban types might in their, in their lawn, you know.
Or somebody might over their car, and here's a
little octopus in the ocean, taking pride over their garden.
This Ringo found very enchanting, and so he wrote this song.
And for a lot of people it's one of the high points of the album.
Well, let's now turn our attention to Side One of Abbey Road, as we have
a look at that side, that of course was put together in a traditional way
to please John Lennon, but features songs by all four of the Beatles.
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