Abbey Road was the final album The Beatles recorded and was a relatively pleasant studio experience for John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. Recording The White Album and Let It Be had been contentious and challenging. While the recording process for Abbey Road was smoother, not everything was perfect. Lennon walked away unhappy with a significant portion of the record.
John Lennon disliked Paul McCartney’s additions to ‘Abbey Road’
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By the time The Beatles were working on Abbey Road, Lennon and McCartney were writing separately despite sharing a writing credit. Lennon did not approve of the songs McCartney added to the album.
“I tried to get Paul to get back into the old Pepper way of creating something really worthwhile and we put together the long side,” producer George Martin said in The Beatles Anthology. “John objected very much to what we did on the second side of Abbey Road, which was almost entirely Paul and I working together, with contributions from the others.”
Lennon objected to the idea of a concept album and just wanted to put out a collection of good songs.
“An album to me is a bunch of records that you can’t have — I like singles myself,” he said. “I think Paul has conceptions of albums, or attempts it, like he conceived the medley thing. I’m not interested in conceptions of albums. All I’m interested in is the sound. I like it to be whatever happens. I’m not interested in making an album into a show. For me, I’d just put fourteen rock songs on.”
Still, Martin said that Lennon worked diligently on the parts of the album he did not like.
John Lennon believed he could have sung an ‘Abbey Road’ song better than Paul McCartney
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One of the songs McCartney worked hardest on for Abbey Road was “Oh! Darling.” He explained he arrived to the studio early for a week in order to give his voice the worn-out sound he wanted. Lennon believed he should have been the one to sing the song.
“‘Oh! Darling’ was a great one of Paul’s that he didn’t sing too well,” he said in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono by David Sheff. “I always thought that I could’ve done it better – it was more my style than his. He wrote it, so what the hell, he’s going to sing it. If he’d had any sense, he should have let me sing it.”
He was more of a fan of ‘Let It Be’
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Though Abbey Road was the final album the band recorded, Let It Be was the last one they released. McCartney had major problems with this album, but Lennon defended it. He believed Phil Spector saved the album from its mediocrity and rolled his eyes at anyone who claimed otherwise.
“If anybody listens to the bootleg version, which was the version which was pre-Spector, and listens to the version Spector did, they would shut up — if you really want to know the difference,” he said. “The tapes were so lousy and so bad none of us would go near them to touch them. They’d been lying around for six months.”
McCartney disliked Spector’s version so much that he released an alternate version in 2003 called Let It Be … Naked. He said this version is closer to his original vision for the album.
