Abbey Road (1969)
17 tracks, 47 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes
It took some time to decide which Beatles albums I was going to include on this blog. I gave myself a limit of three, and there were some obvious ones: Revolver was always going to be in there as one of my favourite albums of all time; Beatles For Sale is an abomination that should be disregarded from the group’s discography by any self-respecting fan. But what others to choose…?
When I considered Abbey Road, there were lots of things that jumped to mind. The top-of-the-head trivia about it being the last record the Beatles created (although it ended up being released before Let It Be), and the fact it contains both the shortest and the longest songs in their recorded repertoire. Then there are stylistic considerations of them aiming for a rawer sound, getting back to the rockier, bluesier sound in some way coming full circle to their days as mop-topped rock’n’rollers, while still incorporating the exciting new synthesiser technology of the Moog. Then there are individual songs that stand out: George Harrison’s stunning contributions of ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and Lennon’s majestic-in-different-ways pair of ‘Come Together’ and ‘Because’…and on the other side of the scale, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, a song that usually comes on-or-near the top (bottom?) of lists of the worst Beatles songs.
But the deciding reason I chose Abbey Road above the rest is the track ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’. Like Revolver, it took me a long time to really give this track a proper brain-listen as opposed to an ear-listen – when I was little, I somehow never paid that particular track much attention. It was a lot later that I listened to the album as a whole and was stopped in my tracks by it. ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ is that aforementioned longest Beatles piece at 7’46”, and for the first four-and-a-half-ish minutes of those it’s a fairly standard song, albeit an excellent one. Built on bluesy riffs and minor arpeggios with simple, repetitive lyrics (there are only 14 different words in the lyrics), a deliciously and uncharacteristically subtle guitar solo from John Lennon and lush organ fills by the incomparable Billy Preston, the song would have been impressive if it had just finished there, but it doesn’t. It just carries on with a never-ending loop of the piece’s opening arpeggio. It goes round and around in a perfect circle of tension and release and building tension again. There’s no lyrics in this section, just the hypnotic cycle that draws you in until you’re utterly mesmerised. All the way through is an ever-increasing tidal wave of white noise and wind that threatens to consume everything in its path; it starts silent, but by the end it’s almost deafening, the guitars struggling to be heard over its distorted roar. And then after three-or-so minutes – it stops. Out of nowhere, in the middle of the chord sequence, silence. And that’s your lot for Side A. It’s a genius way to end the song. There would be no satisfying way to finish such an immovable progression without sounding lame, so instead they make it as unsatisfying as possible. After having dragged you along for so long, letting the repetitions get up inside your head until it’s fully inside and you can think of nothing else, it disappears, and it’s like waking from a strange and intense dream into complete mundanity. It feels vaguely embarrassing yet exhilarating at the same time.
Abbey Road is a great album. It has some missteps, but when they get it right, it shows the Beatles at the top of their game – when you consider that it was made while the band were in the process of splitting up, it’s even more awe-inspiring. How blessed we are that these four musicians and their carefully selected collaborators got together to make music for ten years and – in the process – completely rewrote the history books several times. For them to go out making an album like Abbey Road just
No comments:
Post a Comment