By Gillian G. Gaar

It is safe to say that nearly every Beatles record could be a five star-album. “A Hard Day’s Night” is unparalleled pop; “Revolver” has the group’s talents honed to a fine edge; “The Beatles” (aka “The White Album”) is a veritable feast of different musical styles. But “Abbey Road” proved to be a work of exceptional craftsmanship.

The Beatles 1969. Photo courtesy of EMI /Copyright Apple Corps Ltd. 2009

It was also The Beatles’ swan song; though released before “Let It Be,” it was actually the last Beatles album to be recorded. Though the group had nearly split up in January 1969 while working on the “back-to-roots” venture then titled “Get Back” (later “Let It Be”), by April, the band was back in the studio, where they worked steadily through August. Ironically, though there were numerous occasions when less than four Beatles were at a session, they sounded more like a group than they had since the halcyon days of 1967.

The album had a different character in those pre-CD days. Side One was a straightforward collection of six songs, with each Beatle getting at least one vocal turn (McCartney and John Lennon got two each), with Side Two, the “concept” side, where the first two songs are followed by two extended medleys. In essence, The Beatles were showing where they were at present on Side One, and where they might’ve gone on Side Two, had the group stayed together.

Like “Sgt. Pepper,” “Abbey Road” is an album dominated by Paul McCartney’s aesthetic sensibility — mostly on Side Two — but with less of his whimsy. The most whimsical, of course, was “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” a light-hearted ditty that wouldn’t have been out of place on “Sgt. Pepper.” McCartney gave the song some bite by making his tale of a merry murderer a decidedly black-humored one, though the endless retakes nonetheless tried the patience of the other Fabs (you can see some of this discomfort in the film “Let It Be”).

But on the record, “Maxwell” was followed by “Oh! Darling,” with McCartney unfurling the rock ’n’ roll screamer voice he’d displayed to such good effect on “Long Tall Sally” and “Helter Skelter,” a smart retort to those who might have written him off as a lightweight. McCartney sang the song for days in order to get the just right degree of roughness in his voice, and it paid off with one of his most powerful vocal performances.

George Harrison came into his own as a composer on “Abbey Road,” with the songs he contributed to the album rightly considered among his best work (though it’s a bit ironic that the opening line of “Something” was pinched from another song — James Taylor’s “Something In The Way She Moves,” released in 1968 on Taylor’s self-titled debut for Apple Records.

Harrison’s natural pensiveness resulted in a number that, while melodically beautiful, expressed a surprising amount of doubt in what was ostensibly a love song (primarily in the bridge, which bluntly states “You’re asking me will my love grow/I don’t know, I don’t know”).

Conversely, there was nothing hesitant in “Here Comes The Sun;” instead, Harrison’s repeated affirmation “It’s all right” beautifully complements another sparkling melody.

For his part, John Lennon was thoroughly caught up in his relationship with his new wife, Yoko Ono, who inspired much of his work during this period. The album’s opening track, “Come Together,” had started out as a possible campaign song for LSD advocate Timothy Leary. But when legal problems thwarted Leary’s would-be political career, Lennon transformed it into a funky slice of free association, kicking off with a few lines from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” (which eventually landed him in legal hot water with that song’s publishers), and references to “Ono sideboard” and “Bag Productions,” a company he’d co-founded with Ono. The Beatles weren’t known as a blues band, but this track showed they were more than capable of getting down.

But whereas “Come Together” indulged in playful wordplay, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” was stark in its simplicity, consisting mainly of variations on the phrase “I want you,” which Lennon delivered with increasing force throughout the number. The intensity inexorably rises as white noise begins to swirl, eventually engulfing the song until it abruptly shuts off. No other track in The Beatles’ catalogue is as punishing. “Because” was nearly as lyrically minimal, but is especially notable for its intricate three-part harmonies. The song is now used to open the show “Love” in Las Vegas, where it provides a suitably breathtaking beginning.

Most of Side Two came together under McCartney and producer George Martin’s influence, cobbling together bits and pieces to create a work that was definitely greater than the sum of its parts.

McCartney’s wistful “You Never Give Me Your Money,” inspired by The Beatles’ business problems, leads directly into Lennon’s atmospheric (if lyrically nonsensical) “Sun King,” then introduces some typically Lennonesque characters, the unsavory “Mean Mr. Mustard” and the slightly kinky “Polythene Pam.” McCartney’s given the last word in “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window,” inspired by a break-in at his London home. The fun of the piece is in hearing how well the disparate sequences come together.

“Golden Slumbers”/“Carry That Weight”/“The End” clearly envisions the looming breakup of The Beatles: the realization that you can’t go home again, coupled with the responsibility of carrying a legacy that’s destined to live on. The “last hurrah” atmosphere is further heightened by Starr’s drum solo — the only time he so indulged himself — followed by McCartney, Harrison and Lennon battling it out on their guitars. But after a closing line seemingly summing up the group’s philosophy (“And in the end/the love you take/is equal to the love you make”), there’s a final joke when the cheeky “Her Majesty” bursts forth unexpectedly from the speakers. It was another fortuitous accident, like the feedback during a session that ended up opening “I Feel Fine.” The snippet had originally appeared between “Mean Mr. Mustard” and “Polythene Pam,” but was removed and spliced on the end of the tape reel for side two; McCartney decided he liked it there, and left it in.

Overall, it’s a consummate Beatles album — fine musicianship, superlative vocals, expert harmonizing, a monumental leap from the “Please Please Me” album, recorded a mere six years before. And that’s the most tantalizing aspect of “Abbey Road” — who knows how far the group might have progressed in another six years? But it also reveals why the band broke apart, with Lennon’s work becoming increasingly personal in contrast to McCartney’s more objective third-person stance (and his unerring facility with melody), and Harrison finally able to break free from standing in the shadow of the Lennon-McCartney partnership. Their talents were exceeding the limitations of the group format; in hindsight, it was the group’s very success that broke up The Beatles.

But “Abbey Road” also shows that even at a time when their personal relationships were fracturing, when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr dedicated themselves to working with — not against — each other, they were still capable of creating magic.

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Artists and songwriters from across the EMI family have been supporting the Red Cross to raise funds for the people affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Over the next three weeks, incredible auction items from more than 150 of the world’s biggest stars will be available to bid on to help this important cause.

ARTISTS SUPPORTING THE APPEAL INCLUDE: COLDPLAY, THE BEATLES, THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS, DAFT PUNK, CORINNE BAILEY-RAE, DUFFY, KEITH URBAN, 30 SECONDS TO MARS, THE BEASTIE BOYS, MICHAEL FRANTI, TIZIANO FERRO, JUAN LUIS GUERRA, HERBERT GRONEMEYER, RAPHAEL, NORAH JONES, KATY PERRY, IRON MAIDEN, JANE BIRKIN, GORILLAZ, THE BEACH BOYS, DEPECHE MODE, GOOD CHARLOTTE, 30 SECONDS TO MARS, JEFF BRIDGES, TINIE TEMPAH, AND DEADMAU5, KYLIE MINOGUE, THE KOOKS, DAVID GUETTA, ANGELA GHEORGHIU, LADY ANTEBELLUM, BILLY CORGAN OF SMASHING PUMPKINS, ARCADE FIRE.

Some of the items up for bid are:

• The last of an extremely limited edition of a Schwinn bicycle featuring the The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine artwork (left), never sold publicly
• An Abbey Road Steinway Grand Piano
• Coldplay singer Chris Martin’s jacket from the Viva la Vida tour 2010
• Depeche Mode, signed Limited Edition Lithograph Print

EMI promises that more items will be added over the coming weeks.

EMI will match all funds raised from the auction up to a maximum of one million euros.

AUCTION RUNS APRIL 5 – 21, 2011

Click here to bid.

A very young Fab Four get down and dirty at a junkyard for this early press photograph . Photo courtesy of Parlophone/Apple Corps Ltd.

By Dave Thompson

It was John’s fault.
No, it was Paul’s.
No, it was George’s.
Or maybe it was Ringo’s.

Or, maybe it was nobody’s fault, and the end of The Beatles, like the end of any other pop group, was just one of those things — four people finally looking around the pressure cooker in which they’d spent the last 10 years of their lives; four people, too, who had grown immeasurably as both musicians and as adults, in the years since they first started, and who finally needed to spread their wings beyond the confines of “the group.”

An easy cameraderie is evident among The Beatles in this early press photo. Promotional Photo

The Beatles weren’t just “a group.” For the generation that had grown with them in the years since their initial emergence, they were so much more than that. Well, we can’t blame the Beatles for that. They just did what any group does — made records, played concerts and talked as knowledgeably (or otherwise) as they could about whatever subjects the chasing journalists might throw at them. And after all that they had achieved, breaking up was probably the only thing left for them to do.

It wasn’t exactly a surprise, either. Rumor had been pushing one or another of the quartet out of the door for the past two years, what with George always grumbling that they never recorded his songs; Paul high-tailing it to the Scottish islands to record low-fi pop songs in the kitchen of his croft; John going all arty on us, and cutting experimental yowling with his new wife, Yoko. And Ringo. It was funny; people always said George was the quiet one, because he had those secretive eyes and he didn’t speak a lot. But go back through all the old newspaper cuttings, or even Google him today, and Ringo was the real mystery man, because he hardly said a word. He was also the first to quit the group, during the fractious sessions for the “White Album.” He came back, of course, but if there ever was a volcano waiting to blow….

Photo courtesy of Parlophone/Apple Corps Ltd.

It was all of them. They all had their flash points, they all had their disagreements, and, most of all, they all had their reasons, and only a few of them were down to the eternal game of Chinese Whispers that has sustained the Beatles biographers of the world since then. Like who said what and sided with whom, and whose lawyer is bigger and badder than the rest… history looks back and slaps Paul on the back; “You called that one well,” it tells him, as it surveys the tangled mess of legal un-niceties that were the legacy of his bandmates’ insistence on recruiting Allen Klein to oversee their affairs. But it also looks back on other events from those last couple of years of Fabs being fab, and everyone made mistakes, because that’s what being young and rich and in the most successful band the world has ever known is all about.

It was Brian Epstein’s fault. If he hadn’t died in summer 1967, it’s very likely that none of the next three years of The Beatles would have played out as they did, and maybe the Beatle fans’ favorite party game, playing “What would the album after “Abbey Road” have sounded like?” would have been answered in late 1970.

Tensions seem evident in this 1969 photo shot during the Abbey Road cover session. Photo by AP Photo/Linda McCartney

“Abbey Road” would not be the last new Beatles album to be released — that honor would fall to the soundtrack to the “Let It Be” movie. But it was the last LP they would ever record together, and if the word “together” hangs awkwardly at the end of any sentence involving the latter-day Beatles, that is because it’s the last word that could describe them.

The sessions themselves, John Lennon later sighed, were “hell… the most miserable sessions on earth.” In the history of The Beatles, added George Harrison, they represented “an all-time low.” Only producer George Martin detected any light at the end of the tunnel. “It was a very happy record,” he insisted. And then he turned the knife. “I guess it was happy because everybody thought it was going to be the last.” “Abbey Road” concludes with a song called “The End.” And it was.

Nobody knew that for sure, of course, any more than they knew that their next photo session at Tittenhurst Park, Lennon’s newly-purchased home in Ascot, would be their last. “It was just a photo session,” Ringo reflected, just as George said of Abbey Road, “I didn’t know… that it was the last Beatles record that we would make.” He acknowledged, “it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line,” but he also insisted, “I don’t recall thinking that was it because there was so much going on all the time.When you pick out all the ‘Beatle days’ and ‘Beatle moments’ or records, there were long gaps in between. If we had a day off from the Beatles, we’d be doing something else. There were plenty of other activities to fill the gaps.”

Behind the scenes, however, Lennon had already made his decision, and was holding off only for as long as it took for Allen Klein to renegotiate the Beatles’ contract with Capitol Records — who would surely not have been so generous with the purse strings if they’d known that they weren’t actually signing a functioning band. In fact, he only told McCartney in the hope of getting him to give up on his latest dream, that the Beatles get back out on the road together and play a bunch of club dates.

“John looked at me in the eye and said ‘Well, I think you’re daft.’ I wasn’t going to tell you until… but I’m leaving the group.”

“I started the band. I disbanded it. It’s as simple as that,” Lennon later reflected, and while he acknowledged that it took “guts” for him to finally make the announcement, “they knew it was for real — unlike Ringo and George’s previous threats to leave.” He felt guilty about it as well… so guilty that he even gave Paul a co-writing credit on “Give Peace A Chance,” rather than handing it to Yoko, who was his real co-writer.

But his bandmates admitted that, after so much indecision and uncertainty, it was good to know where they stood. Nobody doubted that all four would continue to carve careers once The Beatles were behind them; they had, in fact, already set to work on just such a course of action. True, there was the possibility, as McCartney later put it, that the whole thing was “just one of John’s little flings, and that maybe he was going to feel the pinch in a week’s time and say ‘I was only kidding’.”

A week became a month, however, and one month became two, which became three, and “then eventually we realized, ‘Oh well, we’re not in the band any more. That’s it. It’s definitely over’.”

And the cat was still in the bag.

The new record deal had been signed, a new decade had dawned and, so far as the watching, waiting world was concerned, it was Beatle business as usual. The Plastic Ono Band, John and Yoko’s own undertaking, had already been consigned to sideline status by most observers, no more or less relevant than George’s dalliance with Delaney and Bonnie, touring Europe as part of their “and friends” entourage at the end of 1969. “It was very obvious it was finished,” he reflected of The Beatles’ continued existence. “But nobody said ‘Well, that’s it — we’ll never get together again.’ If the newspapers asked us, we were still saying ‘Who knows? Sure, we’re still together.’”

It was McCartney who finally told the world. A squabble with Apple over which album should be released first, his McCartney solo debut or The Beatles’ “Let It Be” was resolved with the Macca platter, and Paul issuing his now-famous statement to the world, a “self interview” inserted within advance copies of the album, and sent to the national press and broadcasters.

The statement, issued late in the evening of April 9, 1970, did not say the Beatles had split, merely that he had left the group. “Business and musical differences” played a part in his decision, but so did the awareness that “I have a better time with my family” than with his bandmates. “I do not know whether the break will be temporary or permanent,” he continued. But “I do not foresee a time when the Lennon and McCartney partnership will be active again in songwriting.”

The following day, PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES was the front page story of the Daily Mirror newspaper.

The reaction to the news was swift and immediate. Distraught fans who began gathering at The Beatles’ Saville Road headquarters in the early hours of the new day were only the beginning; by the time an American film crew arrived on scene, the crowd was so large and voluble that the CBS evening news hypothesized that future historians might “one day, view [this] as a landmark in the decline of the British Empire. The Beatles are breaking up.”

“This is all news to me,” Ringo shrugged.

The Times, for so many years the most level-headed voice in the British press pack, addressed the story the next day, April 11. And the words of columnist William Mann perhaps brought home the sheer finality, not to mention the momentous shock, of McCartney’s declaration.

Himself a long-standing admirer of the Beatles (it was Mann who compared some of their earliest compositions to the work of Gustav Mahler), Mann mourned, “if The Beatles were just another pop group, there would be no cause for alarm in Paul McCartney’s suggestion. The others would simply find another bass guitarist and lead singer, and go on roughly as before.”

The difference was, there could be no other bassist or vocalist to fill his shoes — no, not even the fictional Billy Shears whom sundry conspiracy theorists were convinced had replaced the dead Macca five years before. “The Beatles’ image and influence on pop culture in the last 10 years has depended on four distinctive personalities working well together. They would not be the same without Paul.”

And, in many ways, that was it. There would be all manner of recriminations thrown over the years that followed, but there would be all manner of contradictory statements released as well — such as when John told the BBC in May, “I’ve no idea if the Beatles will work together again or not. I never really have. It was always open. If somebody didn’t feel like it, that’s it.” So far as the future held, “It could be a rebirth or a death. We’ll see what it is. It’ll probably be a rebirth.”

Then he got on with his career, George got on with his, and Ringo got on with his. By the end of the year, The Beatles — individually and collectively — had spent a total of 56 weeks on the Billboard singles chart, including two months at No. 1. In terms of sheer numbers, it was their most successful year since 1965.

Album wise, the figures are even more spectacular. John opened 1970 with a top 10 slot for Live Peace In Toronto and closed it with John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band cruising toward its chart peak of No. 6. McCartney was No. 1 for three weeks. Ringo’s “Sentimental Journey” sold half a million copies, and George’s “All Things Must Pass: would soon become the biggest-selling (six million plus) triple album of all time. It finally topped the chart in the first week of 1971, and remained at No. 1 for seven weeks, almost twice as long as “Let It Be” could muster. Anybody who believed that The Beatles breaking up would bring an end to their indisputable reign clearly needed to think again. Just as anyone who held onto the belief that this was all an awful aberration, and that the moptops would one day be yeah-yeah-yeahing again, was also in for a very long wait.

Because, as Paul said in a handwritten letter to one of the U.K. music papers, “in order to put out of its misery the limping dog of a news story which has been dragging itself across your pages for the past year, my answer to the question ‘Will the Beatles get together again?’ … is no.”

They would not.