When the Beatles Walked Offstage: Fifty Years of “Abbey Road” | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/when-the-beatles-walked-offstage-fifty-years-of-abbey-road
Excellent article sur le plus grand album de la pop musique.
In the spring of 1969, Paul McCartney telephoned George Martin to ask if he would be willing to work with the Beatles on a new album they planned to record in the months ahead. Martin, who was widely regarded as the most accomplished pop-record producer in the world, had overseen the making of all nine albums and nineteen singles that the Beatles had released in Britain since their début on E.M.I.’s Parlophone label, in 1962. His reputation was synonymous with that of the group, and the fact that McCartney felt a need to ask him about his availability dramatized how much the Beatles’ professional circumstances had changed since the release of the two-record set known as the White Album, in the fall of 1968. In Martin’s view, the five months of tension and drama it took to make that album, followed by the fiasco of “Get Back,” an ill-fated film, concert, and recording project that ended inconclusively in January, 1969, had turned his recent work with the Beatles into a “miserable experience.”
“After [‘Get Back’] I thought it was the end of the road for all of us,” he said later. “I didn’t really want to work with them anymore because they were becoming unpleasant people, to themselves as well as to other people. So I was quite surprised when Paul rang me up and asked me to produce another record for them. He said, ‘Will you really produce it?’ And I said, ‘If I’m really allowed to produce it. If I have to go back and accept a lot of instructions that I don’t like, then I won’t do it.’ ” After receiving McCartney’s assurance that he would indeed have a free hand, Martin booked a solid block of time at Abbey Road studios from the first of July to the end of August.
To speak of “sides” is to acknowledge that “Abbey Road,” like most Beatles albums, was originally released as a double-sided vinyl LP. This was the format with which the group had revolutionized the recording industry in the sixties, when its popularity, self-sufficiency, and burgeoning artistic ambition helped to establish the self-written album as the principal medium of rock. Earlier, in the fifties, when “long-playing” records first became available, their selling point was their capacity. Unlike the 78-r.p.m. records they replaced, LPs could hold more than twenty minutes of music per side, which made them an ideal format for the extended performances of classical music, Broadway shows, film soundtracks, modern jazz, and standup comedy that accounted for the lion’s share of the record market at the time. Best-selling pop singers like Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte, and Elvis Presley also capitalized on the potential of the LP, not least because a prime virtue of albums in the pop market was their packaging. The records were sold in foot-square cardboard sleeves, faced with a photograph or illustration that served as an advertisement for the product within. By providing a portrait of the artist and a platform for the sort of promotional copy that had previously been confined to fan magazines, album “jackets” served as a tangible accessory to the experience of record listening. LP covers became an established form of graphic art, and the high standard of the graphic design on the Beatles’ early albums was one of the ways that Brian Epstein and George Martin sought to distinguish the group from the patronizing stereotypes that applied to teen-age pop.
All of this, it goes without saying, is ancient history in an era of digital streaming and shuffling, which threatens the very concept of a record album as a cohesive work of art. In this sense, the fiftieth anniversary reissue of “Abbey Road” is an anachronism, a throwback to a time when an LP cover could serve as a cultural icon and the order of the songs on the two sides of an album became etched on its listeners’ minds. In the iconography of Beatles album covers, “Abbey Road” ranks with the conclave of culture heroes on the front of “Sgt. Pepper” and the mysterious side-lit portrait on the group’s first Capitol LP. Yet, like so much else on the album, its cover was a product of compromise. After entertaining the notion of naming the album “Everest” and travelling to Nepal to have themselves photographed in front of the world’s tallest peak, the Beatles elected to simply walk out the door of the studio on an August afternoon. The famous tableau of the four of them striding purposefully across the now-landmarked “zebra crossing”—Lennon in white, Starr in black, McCartney in gray, and Harrison in hippie denim from head to toe—advertised the differences in a band that had first captured the attention of the world in matching suits and haircuts. But its iconic status owed to the way it came to serve, in retrospect, as a typically droll image of the Beatles, walking off the stage of their career as a group.
To return to Ned Rorem’s formulation: How good were the Beatles, notwithstanding the fact that everyone knew they were good? Good enough to produce this self-allusive masterpiece with their dying breath as a band. Good enough to enlist the smoke and mirrors of a modern recording studio to simulate the merger of musical sensibilities that they had once achieved by means of an unprecedented concentration and collaboration of sovereign talent. In this sense, “Abbey Road” memorializes a paradox of the group. The singing, songwriting, and playing on the album affirm the extent to which all four of the Beatles became consummate musical professionals in the course of their eight-year career. But the ending of that career affirms the extent to which these four “mates” from Liverpool, whose lives were transformed by such a surfeit of wealth and fame, never gave a thought to professionalizing their personal relationships with one another.
Their contemporaries, such as the Rolling Stones and the Who, would carry on for decades as lucrative rock franchises, long after the bonds of adolescent friendship that originally joined them together had withered away. But, for the Beatles, whose adolescent friendship institutionalized the archetype of the rock group, a ubiquitous mode of musical organization that has endured to the present day, the deterioration in their personal relations completely outweighed the financial incentives that came with their status as the most successful musical artists of their time. From the beginning, they were understood to be a “band” in both senses of the word: as musicians, of course, but also, on a more elemental level, as a group of young men who shared a sense of identity, solidarity, and purpose. “I’ve compared it to a marriage,” Lennon would say. “Up until then, we really believed intensely in what we were doing, and the product we put out, and everything had to be just right. Suddenly we didn’t believe. And that was the end of it.”