The ‘Abbey Road Medley’ is undeniably a masterpiece, yet its message can easily be overshadowed by its brilliance. Abbey Road is a divided creation created amidst heightened tensions during The Beatles‘ final year. The boundary between sides one and two mirrors the Berlin Wall, symbolising the clear separation between John Lennon and his once-close collaborator and friend, Paul McCartney.
It always feels like a crime when a song gets stripped of its meaning or intricacy to become not much more than a big, boisterous singalong. Sure, maybe McCartney didn’t help himself when he made ‘Carry That Weight’, but under the stomping, football chanting lead, the tone is less jovial and cautious – maybe even parental in a way.
“Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight,” McCartney sings, almost adopting the tone of a concerned father looking around at his kids and gently warning them. While sung out with so much gumption and repeated as such ever since, there’s an intricacy in it as he manages a tone that’s worried and warning but not patronising.
“[He’s] singing about all of us,” Lennon said of the track. With some hindsight, the caution yelled across their wall seemed to get through. McCartney was singing about his friends, the dangerous waters they’d landed in, and the feeling that if they weren’t careful, everything would be marred forever. Or, in short, he was singing about the fact that if they didn’t make the right moves now, they’d carry that burden, or weight, forever.
“I’m generally quite upbeat, but at certain times, things get to me so much that I just can’t be upbeat any more, and that was one of the times,” McCartney explained of the song. What often gets brushed off as a throwaway, fun little number is actually McCartney’s boldest statement on the dark descent of the Beatles into the world of drugs and into the hellish pit of their later relationship.
By 1969, Lennon had gone beyond LSD and was using heroin, propping himself up on the drug to complete Abbey Road. Lennon and McCartney’s once tight friendship was in tatters as they argued in the studio, while Harrison and Starr looked on, simply wanting out of the situation. Everyone expected that the record must surely be the end as their working and personal relationships felt utterly irreparable. They were doped up and fighting when McCartney seemed to suddenly step back and realise that they might be destroying something more significant than them.
The drugs that had once provided fresh and exciting new inspiration were now gripping too tight for any light to come in. “We were entering a period in the mid-to-late sixties when we were doing LSD, staying up all night, then wishing it would wear off, discovering it wouldn’t,” McCartney explained. “A bad trip could leave you feeling a bit heavy instead of enjoying the normal lightness of youth.”
“You know, we started off smoking pot, and it was just giggles,” he continued. “It was such fun. We loved it and it was great, and the worst that would happen was you’d fall asleep, and that was fine. Once it got into sort of more serious stuff, then you were just sort of doing it, and there wasn’t this light relief. It could be oppressive”.
By 1969, the drugs were damaging everything. Paired with business issues going on at Apple Corps, it’s a recipe for a bad trip as McCartney added, “That was coupled with the business problems at Apple Records, which really were horrible. The business meetings were just soul-destroying. We’d sit around in an office, and it was a place you just didn’t want to be with people you didn’t want to be with.”
Friendships, health, business, and productivity were all the necessary pillars that crumbled. The Beatles weren’t just collapsing around the band, but all the rubble was landing on them as far as McCartney could see. The end of the end was threatening to become a heavy and lifelong regret if they continued to let it disintegrate in such a bad way. “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, Carry that weight a long time,” the song went as McCartney wrote a warning to himself and his friends.
“Carry that weight a long time: like forever! That’s what I meant,” he explained, revealing the chanting track to be a purposeful design to try and march themselves out of trouble and back into the light lest they shoulder it all.
