There seems to be a bit of a golden sheen spread across every single release by The Beatles. Even if it’s not to your liking, it won’t take long for any prospective fan to find their favourite song among the more maligned sections of their catalogue. While pretty much all of their post-1966 had been musically deified at this point, Ringo Starr said that the album Abbey Road was the closest they had come to true perfection.
If the band had continued down the road they were going, though, we probably wouldn’t have had any records after The White Album. The guys clearly did not like where they were heading musically, and the effort to bring everyone back for a back-to-basics fell apart as soon as they began on the Get Back project.
Even though John Lennon and Paul McCartney weren’t as collaborative as they used to be, McCartney figured it was best not to leave their fans on such a dour note. They needed to tie a ribbon on their career correctly, so they ended up calling on producer George Martin to make their final statement.
As much as Lennon and McCartney got their creative camaraderie back, George Harrison actually walked away with the best songs on the record. Since he had been hoarding his best stuff for a while, ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’ said it all about how much the silent guitarist had been neglected by the rest of the group.
Culminating in one final medley of song fragments, the final minutes of the album are enough to get any music fan to tear up. This was the last time the group would spend time together in the studio, and hearing them cutting loose for one last jam before they all went their separate ways felt like the end of a golden age of rock and roll.
Despite the band breaking up a few months after the album came out, Starr thought that no one could knock what they did, telling BBC Radio, “Everybody was writing at a great level because they always did – but on side two, everybody wasn’t finishing the songs. But that medley? It works so great. It’s like we could do no wrong: You don’t have to finish the song! Let’s just edit them together, and it works like a mini-play”.
That kind of untouchable talent is most evident on the track ‘The End’. Although Starr loathed the idea of playing drum solos, his short drum break, followed by every other band member trading guitar licks, is the kind of final showcase that fans only dream of seeing, eventually leaving McCartney to turn out the lights with the line “the love you take is equal to the love you make”.
Even though the members’ solo careers saw each of them shaking off the shackles of being Beatles, it felt like they knew they had to come up with something special to give a final wave goodbye to the fans. Lennon didn’t care for the medley as much as the other members of the band, but the fact that they could make something sound that good out of fragments was a testament to their musicianship. They didn’t even need direction to their songs anymore. They just had a firm confidence in what they were doing.
