As already elaborated in other reviews on this blog, I don’t care much for the 1960s, I have no special affection for the Beatles, I didn’t grow up listening to them, and if I had to characterize my attitude toward them and the decade they defined, I would probably use the term ‘intrigued but sceptical.’ I don’t reiterate my relative indifference to the Beatles or the 60s in order to be controversial, or to antagonise the omniscient Brahmin of rock music – although that’s certainly an added bonus – but merely to emphasise the rather banal fact that I was born in 1983, and that this culture doesn’t mean all that much to me. I come from the Northwest of England, so I have every reason to be proud of the fact that a band from my part of the world essentially created modern rock music, and I fully recognise the Beatles’ formative contribution not just to rock, but to Western (and global) culture in the second half of the 20th century. But they don’t really do it for me, and nothing can change that, as much as I like some – even many – of their songs.
Most rock albums have three or four key themes and, when I write these reviews, I usually try to tease out these themes and structure the review around them. But, in the case of Abbey Road, this proved to be a monumental challenge because, thematically, this album is all over the shop. Even Revolver, as hallucinogenic a record as anything else that came out of the 60s, had obvious conceptual building blocks in the form of women, drugs, and what might charitably be termed ‘psychedelic-induced universal consciousness’. On Abbey Road, I’m a bit stumped, maybe because I’m trying to impose the Luciferian logic of the rational intellect on a body of work that transcends tiresome Western notions of individual reason. Or maybe it’s because, by the time they made this album, they were all permanently off their tits on assorted hallucinogenics, and the band was in the process of breaking up. Who knows?
I like the sound of “Come Together”. It’s a cool, confident opener, a slinky, sexy, shifty bass line, an exuberant chorus. Apparently, it’s Ringo Starr’s favourite Beatles song, and it was written to support the election campaign of LSD advocate Timothy Leary as Governor of California. But the lyrics are utter gibberish. One of the most lamentable aspects of modern rock music is this tendency toward nebulous, free association-style lyrics that simply issue forth from the pen without any appreciable intervention from the brain.
From what I can tell, Abbey Road has only two Lennon / McCartney relationship songs – perhaps the fewest of any Beatles’ album – and they’re both bad-tempered, brooding, actually rather harrowing pieces. This shouldn’t come as a surprise – their reputation for flower power gloopiness notwithstanding, a remarkable number of Beatles’ love songs are in fact exceptionally tormented and mean spirited, as I suggested in the reviews of Rubber Soul and Revolver. At the start of “Oh Darling”, with its bluesy, teeny, doowop trappings, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is a throwback to the pre-Rubber Soul boyband albums. But then comes Paul’s rather unhinged and feral shrieking in the chorus. “I Want You (She’s so Heavy)” is harder still – the verses are quiet, tense, and build to a fury of desperate, stabbing keyboards as John sings of an obsessive sexual and emotional dependency, presumably on the comical, 24 carat nutjob Yoko Ono, who was, in fact, anything but heavy. The song’s monstrous chorus, with its plodding drums and apocalyptic guitars, essentially constitutes the invention of doom metal. Then, after seven minutes, it simply ends, like waking up from a nightmare. Is it great? Yes, it’s great. But it also means that a song about Yoko Ono marked the advent of metal music, if you can deal with that.
“I Want You” is not the best song on the album, though – that would be “Something”, which was written by Harrison. Apparently, John and especially Paul were still a bit sniffy about George’s contributions, which is unfortunate, as he had long since been essaying the highlights of the Beatles’ albums (“Taxman”, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”). “Something”is a lazy, dreamy, possibly heroin-addled love song about unconditional, almost childlike devotion, as if the object of Harrison’s worship is some kind of spiritual visitation rather than a mere mortal. Good old George, always looking to reconstitute his relationship to the womb and the divine, like a little boy lost. Anyway, the song is atmospheric, cinematic, and melts easily in the ears like butter in the mouth. George’s second contribution, “Here Comes the Sun”, is also one of Abbey Road’s highlights – a cheery, breezy tribute to spring and the end of winter, apparently written in Eric Clapton’s back garden. Truth be told, after an agreeable opening, the song goes a bit mad, with its shrill synths and strange mantra-like “sun, sun, sun, here it comes”. He probably wrote that bit after Eric threatened to play him some of Cream’s ‘new material’.
And then, there are several songs on Abbey Road that I’m not sure how to think about. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, a McCartney composition, was apparently abhorred by the other Beatles, and dismissed as ‘granny music’ by the more cutting-edge Lennon. It does sound a bit 1950s music hall, for sure. But it’s kind of darkly engaging – essentially, a rockabilly song about a hammer-wielding serial killer, a discomfiting premonition of the Yorkshire Ripper, who terrorised northern England at the end of the 70s and whose weapon of choice was also a hammer. I’m similarly flabbergasted by “Octopus’s Garden”, written by Ringo Starr about wanting to take his friends down to the seabed to dwell with the marine life. My six-year-old daughter likes it, put it that way. But didn’t Ringo also write, or at least sing on, “Yellow Submarine”? How do we explain his apparent affinity for Kindergarten-esque songs about the sea? I won’t advance a Freudian interpretation about the sea representing the womb, an ‘oceanic feeling’ that Ringo was especially susceptible to due to his basic psychological immaturity, because I think that would be reading too much into it. Anyway, this baffling song was surely good prep for Thomas the Tank Engine.
Another track that I’m struggling to classify is “Because”, a strange and unsettling rendering of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” on a Clockwork Orange-esque electric keyboard, with (again) rather nebulous lyrics about (I assume) being extremely and inappropriately horny, all delivered chorally, by multiple voices, thereby recreating the experience of psychosis, the Lacanian self overwhelmed and consumed by jouissance. The Fab Three contend that, because the world is round, it turns me on, as if roundness inevitably leads to turned on-ness. Is it something to do with the vagina, and thus a reiteration of the album’s basic psychedelic theme of dissolving the ego and returning to the womb? Fucked if I know (no pun intended). Anyway, by the end of this spooky number, the boys are crying because the sky is blue – or perhaps because the LSD was starting to wear off.
Speaking of LSD, almost the entire second half of Abbey Road comprises a bizarre, inventive, almost operatic, dream-sequence-like medley, nominally made up of nine separate songs but which, in fact, arguably constitutes a single piece of music. “You Never Give Me Your Money” is very beautiful and sad, which only makes it funnier when you realise that Paul is singing about how much he hates the band’s accountants. This segues affectingly into the chirping crickets of the languid “Sun King”, with its choral singing and Spanish-language lyrics, duly providing the inspiration for every Pink Floyd album, for better or worse. Everyone is laughing and happy, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why. But after the psychedelics and downers, “Mean Mr Mustard”, “Polythene Pam”, and “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” reintroduce amphetamines, once again with barely decipherable lyrics about, I assume, an abhorrent, possibly cocaine addicted old man; a sexy, butch woman; and fuck knows what else; a phone call from Tuesday, or something. “Golden Slumbers” and “Carry That Weight” are replete with the incurable melancholy that is characteristic of the process of being civilised and longing for perfect union with the mother, although fortunately, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make – and in case that’s too pompous, there’s a 23 second outro about “Her Majesty”, to wake you up in case you got stoned and fell asleep.
So, basically, a succession of pretty good and two great songs, followed by twenty minutes of critically acclaimed, dream-like, drug-addled rock opera. I am an arch-conservative who likes clearly individuated, four minute, conventionally structured radio hits, so I am immediately sceptical about art-rock of the kind purveyed on the second half of Abbey Road. I don’t deny that the medley is a work of creative genius, wildly inventive, that it somehow captures what it feels like to be in a dream – jarring, incoherent, sad, terrifying, peaceful, but with some kind of strange underlying logic, detectable in the recurring harmonies and cryptic lyrics. Nonetheless, for my money, the album’s highlights are its more conventional moments on side A, though I never tried listening to it with a spliff. Maybe I should.
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Highlights: “Something”, “She’s So Heavy”, “Here Comes the Sun”