‘Abbey Road’: The Beatles album side John Lennon called “junk”
Lennon-McCartney: on the credits of The Beatles songs, the talent of John Lennon and Paul McCartney is one and the same. The two musicians worked as a unit, creating, together, a history-shaking discography of songs. However, that doesn’t mean they always say eye to eye, as there was one section of one album that Lennon did his best to kill off.
Regardless of how sour things got towards the end of the group’s lifespan, it is impossible to separate Lennon from McCartney or McCartney from Lennon. After meeting as mere teenagers, the two boys learnt how to write songs together. Their earliest compositions were born around their kitchen tables in their childhood homes, as they’d share songs they loved and mutual inspirations until their own words came.
It feels unlikely that had the two never met, The Beatles would’ve existed in the iconic shape we remember them as today. Sure, John Lennon already had a group together, but it wasn’t until he met McCartney and formed an incredibly close friendship that turned into a creative partnership that anything started moving. Without the songs they wrote as a duo in those early days, Beatlemania never would have boomed.
But things changed. As the years wore on, relationships in the band became increasingly strained. Lennon and McCartney grew apart, and in time, their process did too, as their later albums were less Lennon-McCartney and more the work of two separate entities. That’s seen on The White Album as the mammoth tracklist reflected all the members’ refusal to compromise or work together. But it’s seen clearest on Abbey Road, the last album the band recorded and the true nail in the coffin.
The Beatles’ last two albums were released out of order. While Let It Be was their final release in 1970, they actually recorded that before Abbey Road. After making Let It Be, there was a final burst of optimism as they managed to get through the record, leaving them all in higher spirits. “We did actually perform like musicians again,” George Harrison said of the energy as they began working on Abbey Road.
As everyone knew this would be their final record, every effort was being put into making it something special. For George Martin, the band’s producer, he especially wanted to push McCartney to make another masterpiece. “I tried to get Paul to get back into the old [Sgt.] Pepper way of creating something really worthwhile,” he said, referencing the band’s earlier loose concept album, but that required a level of collaboration to pull something so grand off. McCartney was up for it, but Lennon was not.
What McCartney and Martin created was the famous ‘Abbey Road Medley’, the eight-song run-on piece that populates the majority of the album’s second half. Including tracks like ‘She Came In Through the Bathroom Window’, ‘Golden Slumber’ and the moving finale, ‘The End’, it closes with the apt goodbye message from the band, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
Historically, this piece is considered as one of the band’s triumphs. It is clearly still as a creation that McCartney is incredibly proud of as he closes out his live shows today with a section of the piece. But Lennon never shared his enthusiasm.
“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,” Martin said. But that’s a far more polite way of putting it as, in reality, Lennon deemed the piece “junk”, called it “[music] for the grannies to dig,” and even refused to play on some sections of it.
At a moment when the band were facing their inevitable collapse, Lennon’s dismissal of McCartney’s final project in The Beatles was one of the true nails in the coffin, bringing a sad end to their collaborative love.
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