How many songs are actually in the medley on The Beatles album ‘Abbey Road’?
The 1969 album Beatles Abbey Road is a landmark in rock history for many reasons. It’s the last LP the band recorded, and in many ways, it feels like the closing chapter of a decade of music they came to define. Not least because its final song on original pressings of the track listing is entitled ‘The End’.
Aside from the historic ‘lasts’ it accomplished, though, the record is widely considered to feature the first extended medley of distinct songs in rock and roll history. Yes, earlier in the year of Abbey Road’s release, The Who had closed out their seminal rock opera Tommy with the track ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’, which contains multiple songlets within its seven-minute running time. The 1969 self-titled debut album of folk rock supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash similarly opens with ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’, a continuous recording spanning four different sections, each of which is essentially a song in itself.
Nevertheless, these examples, albeit innovative, weren’t new to rock music. Roy Orbison’s stunning 1963 single ‘In Dreams’ traverses through five separate verses each with their own melody, rhythm and metre, within the space of just two minutes and 48 seconds. What The Beatles were doing was something else entirely.
Several otherwise unconnected songs, each with their own theme, tone, mood and genre, joined together to form one continuous piece of music by virtue of seamless transitions. It wasn’t a last-minute gimmick, either, by a conscious decision made early in the process of recording Abbey Road. John Lennon and Paul McCartney both realised they had unfinished songs left over from their time on a meditation retreat in India and their previous studio sessions for the aborted Get Back project. And so, together with producer George Martin, they worked on a way to make these seemingly disparate half-songs fit together into a whole greater than the sum of its parts, dubbed ‘The Long One’ while it was still a work in progress.
What resulted was an imperfectly ingenious passage of music that does what it set out to do. The medley transforms fragmented musical vignettes into a mini-anthology of sorts and, in turn, makes a group fracturing in four different directions sound like one entity again.
So, which songs does it include?
‘The Long One’ encompasses most of side two on Abbey Road’s vinyl disc, and there’s a common misconception that it starts at the beginning of the side. In fact, two songs precede the start of the medley on the LP’s second side. Namely, George Harrison’s wildly popular feel-good anthem ‘Here Comes the Sun’, and John Lennon’s baroque vocal-harmony experiment ‘Because’. Elsewhere in The Beatles’ musical canon, ‘Because’ does feature in a medley, as an acapella remix of the song begins an extended medley of the band’s classics on Love, the 2006 soundtrack album for the Cirque du Soleil show based on their music.
But not on Abbey Road. There, a few seconds after the final harmonies of ‘Because’ subside, McCartney’s ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ opens with a sombre piano motif that will return in the form of a brass instrumental break in ‘Carry That Weight’, later in the album.
It’s the opening salvo of a medley that contains eight songs in all. And as the jangling guitar refrain of ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ fades out, chirping cicadas fade in, along with the woozy chords of ‘Sun King’, the first of three disparate Lennon tracks that somehow sit back-to-back like it’s the most natural thing in the world. His boogie-woogie music hall piece ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ and proto-punk ‘Polythene Pam’ then segue effortlessly into McCartney’s ‘She Came In Through the Bathroom Window’, which seems to pick up where he last left off.
However, when that song draws to a close, the most celebrated part of the medley arrives. McCartney opens ‘Golden Slumbers’ in earnest, as orchestral strings swell around him before he unleashes a powerful vocal in the song’s only chorus. ‘Carry That Weight’ soon follows, as The Beatles sing in unison about the rod they’ve made for their own future music careers by participating in the greatest ensemble in rock history.
Until the only Beatles drum solo Ringo Starr ever performed tells us we’re almost out of time, McCartney, Lennon and George Harrison spar in four-bar guitar breaks, and ‘The End’ really is upon us. Except that 30 seconds later, ‘Her Majesty’, a ditty cut out of the medley during the mixing process, lands unexpectedly with a thud. We can hardly include it in the collection of tracks which make up the final medley, though, given its very deliberate removal from a spot between ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ and ‘Polythene Pam’, and the time lapse between the final note of ‘The End’ and the start of the song.
What’s arguably more controversial about the historical categorisation of the Abbey Road medley is the natural break which occurs between ‘She Came In Through the Bathroom Window’ and ‘Golden Slumbers’. Taken as a three-song medley, ‘Golden Slumbers’, ‘Carry That Weight’ and ‘The End’ work perfectly well on their own. Moreover, neither Martin nor The Beatles themselves made any effort to segue from ‘She Came In Through the Bathroom Window’ into its follow-up track. Instead, we have six seconds of silence, just as we would between two tracks on any other Beatles album.
So, is there really a single eight-song medley on Abbey Road? Or is it instead two separate medleys of five and three songs, respectively? We might just be splitting hairs here. Either way history will always count ‘The Long One’ as one of the great innovations to the album as an art form, whether it really is one single piece of music or not.
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