It’s never easy to pinpoint the exact time The Beatles decided to split up. Even though the band’s breakup could be traced to the moment Paul McCartney announced their split in 1970 with the release of his first solo album, the signs of a split had already begun to show in the months leading up to the new year, with the band falling out over various business practices. Although The Beatles still came together for one last album, one of their filler tracks marked the last time they were in the studio together.
Throughout the making of the band’s intended return-to-roots album Get Back, every piece of their recording process began to fall through, with the band not getting along and beginning to fracture when George Harrison decided to leave the band for a few weeks. While the band convinced the guitarist to return to the fold, it would be a few more weeks before they decided to put the album on the shelf in favour of something different.
When talking about the recording of what would become Abbey Road, producer George Martin remembered the band wanting to bring things back to their experimental prime, telling Anthology, “Paul said, ‘We want to make a record. Do you want to produce it?’ And I said, ‘only if you let me record it the way we used to’. And he said, ‘We want to do that’”.
Rather than go with to-the-point songs, nothing was off the table so long as it served the track, from the basic groove of John Lennon’s ‘Come Together’ to using a synthesiser for the first time on George Harrison’s ‘Here Comes the Sun’. As the band began working on their solo careers, though, they had one of their most ambitious recordings reserved for last.
While making Get Back, Lennon was already working on a song entitled ‘I Want You’. Being an exercise in minimalism, the group would all add their contributions on top of the spare riff that Lennon brought. Outside of their classic harmonies, McCartney’s stunning bass playing and the addition of Harrison’s synthesiser created a cacophony before Lennon demanded that the tape be broken at a specific time. While the song featured every band member working to their strengths, it would be the final time that all four of them appeared in the studio together.
From there, the band would split into separate factions for the rest of the recording. Once Lennon announced his intent to leave in September 1969, all of the new Beatles products would be put together only with The Beatles in different configurations. Although more work had to be done tweaking songs such as the medley that closes out the record, the recordings for what would become Let It Be would be without Lennon’s involvement, with Harrison’s ‘I Me Mine’ being one of the final songs recorded with only McCartney, Harrison, and Ringo Starr.
Even though every member had their own vision for their solo careers, their collaborations would only happen in bits and pieces, with Star occasionally lending his skills to McCartney’s albums and Harrison lending a hand to Lennon’s solo material. Although the group may have had the ‘Three Musketeers’ mentality when they went into their first-ever album session for Please Please Me, they had all become much different people by the time the decade was out.
