by Bob Spitz
Throughout May and into July they blazed through most of the album’s basic tracks. Beginning with George’s masterpiece, “Something,” the Beatles laid the groundwork for an intensely stirring romantic ballad that would challenge “Yesterday” and “Michelle” as one of the most recognizable songs they ever produced. In John’s opinion, George’s songwriting “wasn’t in the same league [as his and Paul’s] for a long time,” but that opinion changed after “Something.” Even George Martin admitted being “surprised that George had it in him.” There was a sense of structure they could no longer overlook, an instinct for atmosphere and emotion that was absent in his earlier songs. Time, in its review, called “Something” simply “the best song on the album.” Paul, delivering a somewhat backhanded compliment, felt it “came out of left field,” but he was struck by its “very beautiful melody” and suggested releasing it as a single.
It was an odd segue into “You Never Give Me Your Money,” which Paul wrote, he said, “lambasting Allen Klein’s attitude toward [the Beatles]: no money, just funny paper, all promises, and it never works out.” The song was written immediately after Let It Be finished filming, when Paul’s emotions were at their most brittle, and as such, the lyric is infused with stinging bitterness. “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight” was another acid-tipped barb aimed in Klein’s direction and came next, although it was drawn from a nursery rhyme by a seventeenth-century playwright, Thomas Dekker, whom Paul discovered in a songbook belonging to his new stepsister, Ruth:*
Golden slumbers kiss your eyes / Smiles awake when you rise, Sleep pretty wantons do not cry / And I will sing a lullaby.
“I liked the words so much,” Paul recalled. “I thought it was very restful, a very beautiful lullaby, but I couldn’t read the melody, not being able to read music. So I just took the words and wrote my own music.” By contrasting it against “Carry That Weight,” he sewed a quiet fury into its lining. Only the tone of the song had changed, not the context of his feelings. He remained furious at his mates, oppressed by the “heavy” atmosphere Klein had brought upon Apple.
John was curiously missing throughout the sessions for the caprice (“Golden Slumbers” and “Carry That Weight” were recorded as one song). On July 1, while on a cross-country vacation in Scotland with Yoko, Julian, and Kyoko, he drove his white Austin Maxi off a road into a steeply graded ditch. “He was driving for the first time in his life,” recalled his cousin Stanley Parkes, who had entertained the entourage for a few blissful days in Edinburgh just prior to the accident. Stanley fretted over seeing John behind the wheel, knowing from experience how he “wasn’t a competent driver at all.” John was headed north, to visit a spectacular glacial bay situated in the Highlands at the Kyle of Tongue, via a weave of roads that Parkes considered dangerous under ideal conditions. A myopic, happily stoned Beatle spelled catastrophe from the outset. He warned John before leaving: “Remember, you’re on single-track roads up here. Be very, very careful.” But John wasn’t listening. Stubbornly, he waved Stanley off. “Oh, I know. Okay, okay.” But rounding a jagged bend near Golspie, John encountered another car head-on. “I didn’t know what to do,” he explained from a bed at Lawson Memorial Hospital, where he was taken after the incident, “so I just let go of the steering wheel,” sending the car careening over an embankment and nearly demolishing it. Miraculously, no one was killed, but John required seventeen stitches to close a facial wound, with Yoko and Kyoko suffering similar, if slightly less severe, injuries. Julian, who was traumatized and in shock, recuperated at his aunt Elizabeth’s house in Durness.
When the last of the bloody wreckage was recovered, John and Yoko had it shipped to their new home, a spectacular seventy-four-acre estate outside Ascot called Tittenhurst Park, where it was mounted as sculpture outside their living-room window. Ostensibly, as Yoko explained, it served as “a tribute to [their] survival.” Everyone knew it also functioned as a warning: John Lennon, under no circumstances, should ever again be permitted to touch the steering wheel of a car.
John must have grown impatient—out of the mix again—as the sessions at Abbey Road continued apace in his absence. It went without saying that Paul was back in the captain’s seat, George and Ringo playing at his infuriating whim. Precious tape was being spent immortalizing McCartney songs. Curses! There was no time to waste in reclaiming his rightful piece of the new album.
On July 6 John and Yoko boarded a chartered helicopter on the hospital’s front lawn and flew directly back to London. The next day he reported bright and early at Studio Two, where the rest of the Beatles gathered to work on a seminal recording.
In his absence, George Harrison had been on fire. “I think that until now, until this year, our songs have been better than George’s,” Paul admitted to John during a break. “Now this year his songs are at least as good as ours.” George insisted he “didn’t care if [Paul] liked them or not”—all their arrogance and self-complacency seemed suddenly, annoyingly, meaningless. “Here Comes the Sun,” which George wrote while meandering around the garden of Eric Clapton’s house one gorgeous afternoon in June, increased his currency. No lightweight throwaway, on the order of “Blue Jay Way” or “You Like Me Too Much,” it held its own against the Lennon and McCartney songs already on the album, standing out from the pack for its wispy, rolling simplicity and irregular guitar lick that seems to stutter behind the vocal: “Sun, sun, sun—here it comes.”
With John’s reappearance in the studio came Yoko, back at his side, ever conspicuous as an intruder; however, this time there was an even more offensive twist. Yoko was pregnant again, with strict orders from her doctor to remain in bed while recovering from the car crash. In a characteristically aggravating gesture, she had Harrods deliver a double bed to the studio and instructed an EMI electrician to suspend a microphone above her head that would adequately furnish her comments to the band.
“The three of us didn’t quite get it,” Paul recalled. Yoko lounged in the bed, reading or knitting, impervious to their scowls, while the Beatles pressed on, tackling a song of John’s that he’d completed upon returning from Scotland. “ ‘Come together’ was an expression that Tim Leary had come up with for” his mock presidential campaign, John recalled, noting his failed attempt at writing a stump song around the slogan. Later, long after the 1968 election, an idea came to him built around the catchy phrase. He also borrowed liberally from an early Chuck Berry tune, “You Can’t Catch Me,” recycling one of the master’s trademark lines: “Here comes old flat-top.” John acknowledged the debt when Paul called him on it during a run-through. It was too obvious; they had to spin it in a different direction, both agreed. “Let’s slow it down with a swampy bass-and-drums vibe,” Paul suggested, contributing that “querying bass line” that sets an identifying groove.
In an inspired, if eerie, touch, John leaned into the mike and delivered a breathy accent that sounded like “shoooook” against the downbeat, repeating the effect at the bridge tying each bar together. Paul must have tried from the beginning to mask the sound with his bass, knowing they’d catch hell if a careful listener caught on—because at the end of each line, John sang the phrase “shoot me!” Geoff Emerick, who’d only just returned as the Beatles’ engineer, noted how they were up to their old shenanigans. “On the finished record, you can really only hear the word ‘shoot,’ ” he said, explaining how “the bass guitar note falls where the ‘me’ is.”
“Shoot me!” The taunt was indicative of the way John was feeling at the time. If Yoko helped reinforce his contempt for Paul, the heroin made their differences more irrational. Convinced that Paul was stealing his thunder, if not his soul, John fought his resentment with numbness. In John’s eyes, any attempt to function as “a group thing… really means more Paul.” Abbey Road, he concluded, was a perfect example, merely Paul’s way of producing “something slick to preserve the myth.” Not only that, he despised Paul his self-importance, dismissed his shameless indulgences with the press, and deeply resented wh
at he called “those airs.”
John’s fury made everything harder. As engineer Phil McDonald recalled: “People would be walking out, banging instruments down, not turning up on time and keeping the others waiting three or four hours, then blaming each other for not having rehearsed or not having played their bit right.” Yet even though relations among the boys were “getting fairly dodgy,” as Paul recalled, the music remained sharp and daring “even though this undercurrent was going on.” The band worked intently throughout the summer of 1969, utilizing every available hour, if not every square inch, in the warren of EMI studios. They crisscrossed regularly between Studios One, Two, and Three, like the cast of a British drawing-room comedy, where different phases of the recording process were simultaneously under way, often communicating with one another or the engineers by walkie-talkie to coordinate the proceedings. “There was a great sort of theater to it,” recalled one of the resident technicians, who watched in amazement as the Beatles conducted their tour de force. Not content with just the limited studio facilities, they also took over isolated offices and storage areas where special effects, by remote linkup, were produced.
For example, in Room 43, at the top of a second-floor staircase, they had stashed a cumbersome futuristic-looking machine called a synthesizer—“a fantastic toy,” as someone close to them described it—which George attempted to program, laboring over it like a demented scientist. The size of a small truck, with “hundreds of jackplugs and two keyboards,” it had taken him months of fiddling with the apparatus just to get it switched on. “There wasn’t [even] an instruction manual,” George recalled, frustrated by his initial inability to get any music out of it. But eventually they figured it out, and the Beatles were the first popular group to record with a synthesizer, incorporating it into the solo on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and the instrumental track of “Because.” John also used it to create a deliberate white-noise effect during the last three minutes of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” a jarring little surprise, which he added to disrupt the final version.
By August 8, with the battle still raging around them, the Beatles had completed most of the basic tracks for the album and decided, almost on the spur of the moment, to shoot a photograph for its cover. They had originally contemplated calling the album Everest, after the brand of cigarettes that Geoff Emerick smoked. It was typically vague, much like Rubber Soul or Revolver, typically catchy, typically Beatlesque. That title became so fixed, according to engineer John Kurlander, that by July “someone mentioned the possibility of the four of them taking a private plane over the foothills of Mount Everest to shoot the cover photograph.” When they finally came to their senses, however, it was decided to simplify matters completely: “just go outside, take the photo there, call the LP Abbey Road and have done with it.” Abbey Road: it was perfect, a tribute to the studio where they had made almost all their incredible music. On a sheet of white typing paper, Paul roughed out a few sketches that he thought might be appropriate: just an understated picture of the four of them, walking along the crossing in the road outside the studio. None of the other Beatles objected. Even John obliged without the usual huffy debate, and sometime after ten o’clock that Friday morning, they marched companionably onto the street to shoot the now-famous cover photo.
As Paul recalled, “it was a very hot day.” All of the Beatles, except George, had worn suits for the occasion, which they regretted in a matter of minutes, courtesy of the brutal overhead sun and the soaring humidity. Iain Macmillan, the photographer, intent on grabbing the shot as quickly as possible, lined them up in the most eye-pleasing order: John, “all leonine” in a resplendent white suit and tennis shoes at the head of the pack; Ringo, dressed funereally, in black tails, just behind him; Paul, wearing navy blue and an open-necked oxford shirt trailing in third place; and George, looking very much like a prisoner from a work-release program in a blue jean outfit, bringing up the rear. John, impatient as ever, urged the process forward. “Come on, hurry up now, keep in step,” he muttered, thinking, “Let’s get out of here. We’re meant to be recording, not posing for Beatle pictures.” But there were obstacles, most notably a yellow Volkswagen—a Beetle, of all things—parked at the curb in the middle of the shot. “It had been left there by someone on holiday,” Macmillan recalled. “A policeman tried to move it away for us, but he couldn’t.” The VW would stay, along with three other bystanders who had drifted into the scene.
Finally, with all the distractions and everyone’s patience growing thin, they lined up for a final take, as Macmillan climbed a ladder in the middle of the street. At the last minute, Paul kicked off his sandals and rejoined the procession. “Barefoot, nice warm day, I didn’t feel like wearing shoes,” he remembered. Accordingly, he lit a cigarette and carried it at his side.
The ordeal was over after six quick shots, but the scene that morning would linger for posterity. Aside from being perhaps the most famous cover shot ever taken, it inspired a bizarre episode—another bizarre episode—in the extraordinary Beatles saga.
When Abbey Road was released on September 26, 1969, it touched off a feeding frenzy unusual even for Beatles albums. While the record itself received only lukewarm praise—Newsweek, for example, called it “a pleasant but unadventurous collection of basically low-voltage numbers,” while the New York Times considered it “sincere” but “rather dull”—fans swept up copies at a rate that surpassed all precedent. In Britain, advance orders topped out at 190,000 copies, breaking all previous records for an LP, while in the States the album went gold even before its release. There was no indication that the fans were losing interest; if anything, the Beatles’ popularity seemed to be exploring new heights. Their fame had begun to feed on itself. Having survived a tumultuous seven years that won them legendary status, they stood poised to cross into a new decade riding an improbable wave of success.
As always, with the success came the madness. On Friday, October 10, a Detroit disc jockey named Russ Gibb went on the air at WKNR-FM and astonished his listeners with news that Paul McCartney was dead. In fact, he had been dead for several years, Gibb insisted, since at least November 1966, when “at 5 o’clock on a rainswept morning… [Paul] was out for a spin in his Aston-Martin; the car crashed and the Beatle was killed.” How did he know this? Gibb reached this incredible conclusion after reading a review of Abbey Road by a University of Michigan student named Fred LaBour in which elaborate clues were presented as proof that Paul had died and was replaced by a stand-in. The Abbey Road cover alone provides rich evidence. On it, Gibb argued, Ringo is dressed in a mortician’s outfit, while Paul walks behind him, barefoot, in the manner of a corpse prepared for burial in Italy. In fact, the picture itself resembles a funeral procession. The Volkswagen’s license plate was another tip-off: it reads 281 F, suggesting that Paul would be twenty-eight if he had lived. (That the plate’s number was 28 IF didn’t daunt this conspiracy theory.) There was more. On the back cover photo of Magical Mystery Tour, Paul wears a black carnation, while John, George, and Ringo wear red ones; meanwhile, Paul is dressed in black, the other Beatles in white; inside the album, a picture reveals Paul, in costume as a soldier, standing above a sign that proclaims “I Was You.” This particularly convinced Gibb, who recalled a Paul McCartney look-alike contest two years earlier in which a contestant named William Campbell was chosen the winner. No doubt with a little plastic surgery and minimal makeup, the imposture was completed.
Gibb’s announcement touched off rumors that swept across the country. Every commercial radio station, joined by an army of impetuous college deejays, jumped on the story, sending hundreds of thousands of distraught fans scrambling to scour their Beatles records for clues. As if anyone needed more evidence, there was plenty to be found in the grooves. For instance, if “Strawberry Fields Forever” is played at 45 rpm instead of 33, probers claimed that John sings the words “I buried Paul.” On the White Album, if the drone “number nine, number nine” is taped and played in reverse,
they heard a voice saying, “Turn me on, dead man, turn me on, dead man.” Others who played the entire track of “Revolution No. 9” in reverse identified it as the sound of a horrifying traffic accident (although the same could be said of the original track), with a voice crying, “Get me out, get me out!” And still others, listening to the regular version, heard “He hit a pole! We better get him to see a surgeon. [scream] So anyhow, he went to see a dentist instead. They gave him a pair of teeth that weren’t any good at all so—[a car horn blares].” A disc jockey at WNEW-FM in New York even picked up some moaning in the silent groove between “I’m So Tired” and “Blackbird,” and when it was reversed he supposedly heard John declaring: “Paul is dead. Miss him. Miss him. Miss him.”
Paul is dead. The phrase became a slogan as familiar as almost any tune on Abbey Road. TV anchors hammered away at it; so did all the major newspapers. Paul is dead. It made good copy, despite vehement denials issued by the dearly departed himself. “I’m alive and well and concerned about the rumors of my death,” he told the Associated Press, standing large as life on his doorstep ten days after the story broke. “But if I were dead, I’d be the last to know.” It also boosted the Beatles’ catalogue sales, with “millions of youthful fans straining ears and eyes for signs of Paul’s purported passing [on]… album jackets.” Sgt. Pepper’s reappeared at number 124 in the American charts, with Magical Mystery Tour close behind, at 146. And Abbey Road continued to outsell its competition by a million units.
While Paul is dead brought the Beatles all kinds of financial rewards, for the subject in question it soon became “a bloody nuisance.” He couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without some busybody making a federal case out of it. “Can you spread it around that I am just an ordinary person and want to live in peace?” he pleaded with a LIFE correspondent who tracked him down in the flesh at his farm in Scotland. “For the record: Paul is not dead.