[opening of "come together"] [john covach] abbey road i think sits at a kind of achanging point in the history of rock music. it's of course the legacy is thelast big studio album that the beatles worked on together. it has a lot of the pop element that had been so much a part of their success through '64. '65, and '66, but also a lot of sort of ambitious artistic elements that are maybe reinedin a little bit and synthesized better with the pop elements. ["she came in through the bathroom window]
abbey road is the first album that the beatles really focused on the stereo mix of the record as opposed to the mono mixand of course stereo became a big part of records in the 1970s. [opening guitar riff of "octopus's garden"] it seems to mefairly clear that the whole get back, let it be project of january of 1969, theyconsidered it to be a failure even though those recordings would come outlater actually after abbey road as the let it be album. they tried to get backto their original roots as just four guys playing together in a band rehearsing and writing songs together, but
everybody had sort of moved too far onand their own musical development for that to work anymore. and i think it waspretty clear that they have one more album left in them. let's get back intothe studio and make the best album we can make, as a way of putting a kind offinal note on the career of the beatles. [opening guitar from "i want you (she's so heavy)"] the thing about the end of side one isthat it ends after a big buildup of guitar arpeggios and synthesizer noiseand all of a sudden it cuts off very abruptly. and it throws the silence thatfalls into relief. that's on the record. on a cd orstreaming, the next thing you hear is not the
silence, but george harrison's guitarfrom the beginning of side two for "here comes the sun." and so you get there acontrast between loud and quiet, whereas in the original it was loud and silence. ithink david chase, coming some years later was also sort of following on thiswhen he ended the sopranos with just a cut. and all of a sudden your attentionwas thrown on the blackness. and i think that's what lennon was going for at theunder side one of abbey road. [opening notes of "because"] side one was really done the way that john wantedthe album to go, that is separate songs the way they had mostly been on theother records. side two however was done
the way paul wanted it to go, which wasby bringing all the songs together into one long side that wasrelatively uninterrupted and could be seen as one giant piece. [opening piano from "golden slumbers"] maybe the mostimportant lyric on all of side two is the one that goes "once there was a wayto get back home..." and in many ways the second side of abbey road i think ispaul's musings on this idea of the inevitability of the separation of thebeatles and he sort of longs nostalgically longs for those early days thatare now gone forever.
[beginning of "the end"] is there a last album a group like the beatles could do thatwould really put a satisfactory end to it? probably not. i think that's a littlebit what paul means when he says "you're gonna carry that weight a long time,"but it has come to be the thought of as really the end of an era and one of theiconic albums for the band
