In what turned out to be a marathon read, I finally finished The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz. It started out as something I thought would be a fun read and actually turned into a multi-month affair with over 900 pages of heft and text. In a way though, it seems befitting of the subject matter. Difficult, frustrating, exhausting, and in the end, pretty incredible. It’s not a perfect read, there is a lot of messiness to it, and not everyone agrees with Spitz’s conclusions or accuracy.
I picked up the book after watching Peter Jackson’s remarkable Get Back documentary released in late 2021 for an even deeper dive into the lore of my favorite band. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend setting aside the time to do so. The doc and the book turned out to be a really fun rabbit hole to get swallowed up in, but the sheer length of the book was a challenge. At any rate, finally finishing it inspired another go around of listening to a lot of The Beatles catalog, which brought me around to Abbey Road again.
I love re-listening to Abbey Road. It is my absolute favorite album. Not just favorite Beatles album. Favorite Album, full stop. It just is. And I know all the reasons why Srgt. Pepper’s is the best Beatles album (true), and why Revolver is underrated (also true), and I will even go to bat for The White Album as a wild mess of a masterpiece (it is both). I agree with all of that, and love those albums and all the others. But Abbey Road just has all the pieces in the right place for me. The album cover, the hidden track, the harmonies. Plus it has Here Comes The Sun on it, which, I mean, come on. Something about it just sticks with me in a way I haven’t been able to fully articulate.
Anyway, I’d argue that conversations about ‘best’ are really rather droll, when you get right down to it. Who cares? What someone considers to be their ‘favorite’ and why is much more interesting, and more telling.
And Abbey Road is my favorite.
I have been a Beatles fan since as far back as I can remember. And plainly, it is because of my dad. There is no more to it than that. He loves The Beatles and so I did too. Still do, obviously.
Making music is an integral part of my dad’s side of the family in a way that didn’t quite extend itself to me. He grew up playing the piano, organ, and the guitar. His brother is a songwriter in Boise, ID. Their father (who I am named after) played drums in a band. My dad always seemed to be listening to a favorite band of his, talking about this track or that one, wondering how they came up with that guitar riff or that sound. But for whatever reason, despite the guitar and drum lessons I took growing up, the art of and interest in making music myself never quite stuck the way it was supposed to. It’s reasonable to assume, then, that latching on to his fandom of The Beatles as a kid was my way of trying to connect with him and music absent any real musical talent. And if he was disappointed in my lack of musical ability, he never showed it. He just found ways to meet me where I was at, I guess.
It’s not a complicated line to draw from his fandom to mine.
Maybe it’s because I just moved away from home recently, or that I had been talking to my dad on the phone more lately, but something was different on this particular re-listen of Abbey Road. The whole thing felt warmer. Closer. A little sharper. And by the time I hit the medley in the back half of the album, or The Long One, as The Beatles called it while recording, it made more sense. I started to flashback to my first memory of listening to Abbey Road with my dad as a kid. A memory I hadn’t revisited in a long time.
I don’t recall the day in any particular detail, to be honest. I could have been any age between 8 -12, plus or minus a year. Things are very hazy around the edges of it, though. It’s certainly possible that none of this happened in the order I recall. Memory is a funny and malleable thing sometimes. It’s mostly the very warm feeling I remember now, like I was being included in something magical. Like I was being given a gift of some kind. It certainly wasn’t the first time I had heard a lot of those songs, but sitting down and listening to the album cover to cover for the first time seems to have stood out to me. The idea that I could listen to it as its own entity, it’s own thing. I had never really appreciated that before. My dad was never one to sit still for long, he’d always be getting up and walking in and out of the room for something. And he has a peculiar affect in conversation sometimes, a long drawn out pause right in the middle of a sentence while he works out the thought in his head. It’s just his way.
But that day was different. I remember sitting down with him to listen to Abbey Road (or maybe it was in the car, or on a trip, or…) and realizing that something special was happening. It wasn’t hard to tell. He was intently focused and seemed excited, almost jumping at the chance to listen to the album again. He wasn’t up and down from his chair or checking on something else in the other room. He was just locked in. Occasionally he’d say something like “listen to the way McCartney links up these songs in the medley”, or his long drawn out, “whoaaaaa” when Come Together kicks in with that first baseline and Lennon “shhhhhhhhhhoooooot” comes through the speaker. Surprise in his voice like he was hearing it for the first time again instead of the 50th or 500th. I knew it was something special then, not because I had some grasp of the quality of the music, which came later (a true, if underrated testament to the greatness of The Fab Four though is just how listenable their songs and albums for kids and adults), but because I could felt like I was being included in this thing that clearly meant so much to him. The focus and the fun he was having with the music made it impossible for me to be anything but happy.
The album stays with me, it always has. It’s a soothing thing, a comfort. Like a favorite book or movie, I know I can always count on it to reliably hit the spot.
I love Abbey Road, the music and the memory of it.