# Deep Tracks - The Beatles - "Abbey Road" - (Side One)



## Guest (Sep 22, 2018)

View attachment 108155


There is *No Limit* to the number of selections allowed for this particular poll.

Note: There are *two separate polls* for this release - (*Side One*) & (*Side Two*).

On all polls created if you click on the number of votes following the song title the username of all voters and their chosen selections will appear.

The tunes themselves will be found below the poll itself as links rather than as embedded videos due to bandwidth issues for those who wish to reacquaint themselves with a tune that may have receded a bit too far into the past to be remembered with the clarity that came when they were first released...

*Next up is - The Beatles - "Abbey Road"*

"Abbey Road" is the eleventh studio album by the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969 by Apple Records. The recording sessions for the album were the last in which all four Beatles participated.

Although "Let It Be" was the final album that the Beatles completed before the band's dissolution in April 1970, most of the album had been recorded before the Abbey Road sessions began.

A two-sided hit single from the album, "Something" backed with "Come Together", released in October, topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US.

Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Martin have reported positive recollections of the sessions, while George Harrison said, "we did actually perform like musicians again".

Lennon and McCartney had enjoyed working together on the non-album single "The Ballad of John and Yoko" in April, contributing friendly banter between takes, and some of this camaraderie carried over to the Abbey Road sessions.

Nevertheless, there was a significant amount of tension between the group members. According to author Ian MacDonald, McCartney had an acrimonious argument with Lennon during the sessions. Lennon's wife Yoko Ono had become a permanent presence at Beatles recordings and clashed with other members. Halfway through recording in June, Lennon and Ono were involved in a car accident. A doctor told Ono to rest in bed, so Lennon had one installed in the studio so she could observe the recording process from there.

The album's two halves represented a compromise; Lennon wanted a traditional release with distinct and unrelated songs while McCartney and Martin wanted to continue their thematic approach from "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by incorporating a medley.

Lennon ultimately said that he disliked Abbey Road as a whole and felt that it lacked authenticity, calling McCartney's contributions "[music] for the grannies to dig" and not "real songs" and describing the medley as "junk ... just bits of songs thrown together". During the sessions, Lennon expressed a desire to have all of his songs on one side of the album, with McCartney's on the other.

Nobody was entirely sure that the work was going to be the group's last, though Harrison said "it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line". After the album was released, the Get Back/Let It Be project was re-examined, and work on it continued into 1970. Therefore, "Let It Be" became the last album to be finished by the Beatles, even though its recording had begun before "Abbey Road".

By September 1969, after the recording of Abbey Road, Lennon had formed a new group, the Plastic Ono Band, in part because the Beatles had rejected his song "Cold Turkey".

While Harrison worked with such artists as Leon Russell, Doris Troy, Preston and Delaney & Bonnie through to the end of the year, McCartney took a hiatus from the group after his daughter Mary was born on 28 August.

On 20 September, Lennon formally announced his departure to the other Beatles. Abbey Road was released on 26 September 1969. The single "Something"/"Come Together" followed in October, while Lennon released the Plastic Ono Band's version of "Cold Turkey" the same month.

The Beatles did little promotion of "Abbey Road" directly, and no public announcement was made of the band's split until McCartney announced he was leaving the group in April 1970, at which point they disbanded.

"Come Together" was an expansion of "Let's Get It Together", a song Lennon originally wrote for Timothy Leary's California gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan. A rough version of the lyrics for "Come Together" was written at Lennon's and Ono's second bed-in event in Montreal.

Harrison was inspired to write "Something" during sessions for the White Album by listening to label-mate James Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves" from his album James Taylor. After the lyrics were refined during the "Let It Be sessions" (tapes reveal Lennon giving Harrison some songwriting advice during its composition), the song was initially given to Joe Cocker, but was subsequently recorded for Abbey Road.

"Maxwell's Silver Hammer", McCartney's first song on the album, was first performed by the Beatles during the Let It Be sessions (as can be seen in the film). He wrote the song after the group's trip to India in 1968 and wanted to record it for the White Album, but it was rejected by the others as "too complicated".

The recording was fraught with tension between band members, as McCartney annoyed others by insisting on a perfect performance. The track was the first Lennon was invited to work on following his car accident, but he hated it and declined to do so. According to engineer Geoff Emerick, Lennon said it was "more of Paul's granny music" and left the session. He spent the next two weeks with Ono and did not return to the studio until the backing track for "Come Together" was laid down on 21 July. Harrison was also tired of the song, adding "we had to play it over and over again until Paul liked it. It was a real drag". Starr was more sympathetic to the song. "It was granny music", he admitted, "but we needed stuff like that on our album so other people would listen to it".

"Oh! Darling" was written by McCartney in the doo-*** style, similar to contemporary work by Frank Zappa. Lennon thought he should have sung it, remarking that it was more his style.

As was the case with most of the Beatles' albums, Starr sang lead vocal on one track. "Octopus's Garden" is his second and last solo composition released on any album by the band.

"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was written by Lennon about his relationship with Ono, and he made a deliberate choice to keep the lyrics simple and concise. Author Tom Maginnis thought the song had a progressive rock influence, with its unusual length and structure, repeating guitar riff, and white noise effects, though he noted the "I Want You" section has a straightforward blues structure.

"Here Comes the Sun" was written by Harrison in Eric Clapton's garden in Surrey while Harrison took a break from stressful band business meetings.

"Because" was inspired by Lennon listening to Ono playing Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. He recalled he was "lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play ... Suddenly, I said, 'Can you play those chords backward?' She did, and I wrote 'Because' around them."

Side two contains a 16-minute medley of eight short songs, recorded over July and August and blended into a suite by McCartney and Martin. Some songs were written (and originally recorded in demo form) during sessions for the White Album and Get Back / Let It Be, which later appeared on Anthology 3. While the idea for the medley was McCartney's, Martin claims credit for some structure, adding he "wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music".

The first track recorded for the medley was the opening number, "You Never Give Me Your Money". McCartney has claimed that the band's dispute over Allen Klein and what McCartney viewed as Klein's empty promises were the inspiration for the song's lyrics. However, MacDonald doubts this given that the backing track, recorded on 6 May at Olympic Studios, predated the worst altercations between Klein and McCartney.

This song transitions into Lennon's "Sun King" which, like "Because", showcases Lennon, McCartney and Harrison's triple-tracked harmonies. Following it are Lennon's "Mean Mr. Mustard" (written during the Beatles' 1968 trip to India) and "Polythene Pam".

These in turn are followed by four McCartney songs, "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" (written after a fan entered McCartney's residence via his bathroom window), "Golden Slumbers" (based on Thomas Dekker's 17th-century poem set to new music), "Carry That Weight" (reprising elements from "You Never Give Me Your Money", and featuring chorus vocals from all four Beatles), and closing with "The End".

"Her Majesty" was recorded by McCartney on 2 July when he arrived before the rest of the group at Abbey Road. It was included in a rough mix of the side two medley, appearing between "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam". McCartney disliked the way the medley sounded when it included "Her Majesty", so he asked for it to be cut. The second engineer, John Kurlander, had been instructed not to throw out anything, so after McCartney left, he attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The tape box bore an instruction to leave "Her Majesty" off the final product, but the next day when mastering engineer Malcolm Davies received the tape, he (also trained not to throw anything away) cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence, including "Her Majesty". The Beatles liked this effect and included it on the album.

The front cover design, a photograph of the group on a zebra crossing, was based on ideas sketched by McCartney, and taken on 8 August 1969 outside EMI Studios in Abbey Road. At 11:35 that morning, photographer Iain Macmillan was given only ten minutes to take the photo whilst he stood on a step-ladder and a policeman held up traffic behind the camera. Macmillan took six photographs, which McCartney later examined with a magnifying glass before deciding which of the shots would be used upon the album sleeve.

Many critics have since cited Abbey Road as the Beatles' greatest album.

"Abbey Road" received high rankings in several "best albums in history" polls by critics and publications.

Time included it in their 2006 list of the "All-Time 100 Albums".

In 2009, readers of Rolling Stone named Abbey Road the greatest Beatles album.

In 2012, the magazine ranked it number 14 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbey_Road

Your commentary on any and every aspect of the album and especially any memories reawakened as a result of the poll is welcomed.


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## Guest (Sep 22, 2018)

"*Come Togethe*r" -






"*Something*" -






"*Maxwell's Silver Hammer*" -






"*Oh! Darling*" -






"*Octopus's Garden*" -






"*I Want You (She's So Heavy)*" -


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## Guest (Sep 25, 2018)

Wanted to give this a bump to join it up with the second part of the poll but thought that I would at least provide this to make it worth your while for having stopped by...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_is_dead

"In November 1969, Capitol Records sales managers reported a significant increase in sales of Beatles catalogue albums, attributed to the rumour. Rocco Catena, Capitol's vice president of national merchandising, estimated that "*this is going to be the biggest month in history in terms of Beatles sales*". The albums "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Magical Mystery Tour", which had been off the charts since February, both re-entered the Billboard Top LP chart, reaching number 101 and number 109, respectively."

The statement above is all the proof I need that Paul McCartney started that rumour himself...


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## ldiat (Jan 27, 2016)

ok i view the others now must have come in through the bathroom window...


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Come Together
Something
She's So Heavy

Don't care for the others on this side.


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## ldiat (Jan 27, 2016)

what tune is shorter "Her Majesty" or "Little Martha"???


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