The final Beatles song recorded by all four members
By the end of their run in the 1960s, The Beatles were truly ready to call it a day. After going through the worst sessions that they’ve ever worked on during the making of The White Album, their attempt to come back to their roots failed miserably with the Get Back project, later to be turned into the album Let It Be. Coming off both of those miserable experiences, the band felt it was right to leave their fans on a high note if this was the end of the line.
Going in to make Abbey Road, producer George Martin remembered there being a lot of enthusiasm in the studio working on it, remarking to Rolling Stone, “It was very happy. I think it was happy because everyone suspected that it was going to be the last”. As the rest of the band started to move outside of their comfort zone, they always came back together to serve the song.
When working on the first batch of tunes, John Lennon had the makings of a song called ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, which was an exercise in minimalism. Taken from the same practices that Yoko Ono had worked on in her poetry, Lennon decided to get across his feelings in the most succinct way possible, only saying 12 words throughout the song, not counting the screams of passion.
Although the song was one of the first to be worked on for Abbey Road, it would become one of the last songs to feature all four group members. After the production was finished on the song, Lennon was long gone, having already started working on his solo material with Yoko Ono on tracks like ‘Give Peace a Chance’.
Even in its final form, ‘I Want You’ is a showcase of what every member of the band could do. Being Lennon’s material, his blues-infused lead playing is the perfect accompaniment throughout the song, following his main vocal line. As the song gives way to the swirling outro riff, Ringo Starr’s drums create a cascade of noise in the headphones, all while Paul McCartney lays down the wildest bass slides of his career.
Regardless of Lennon’s contribution to the song, George Harrison puts the icing on the cake with his taste for the avant-garde. Having been working with different Moog synthesisers for the past few years, Harrison was the one who suggested the wind machine be brought into the mix, creating a veil of white noise. Given how hypnotic the final track is, it’s almost as if the white noise represents the feeling of the tape breaking.
Though the song would be at the end of side one of Abbey Road, Lennon would not participate in any further Beatles sessions. While touch-ups were needed to turn Let It Be into something salvageable, only McCartney, Harrison and Starr turned up at the studio to record bits and pieces of the song ‘I Me Mine’. Although the song may have been ambitious for its time, it’s hard not to think of the sudden stop at the end of ‘I Want You’ as the sound of the Fab Four coming to an abrupt end.
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