The Beatles, Abbey Road (1969)

This Musical Life: Essential Albums, Part 1 of 5

The Beatles’ Abbey Road (1969)

The Beatles’ Abbey Road (1969) is an album that has always existed. I can’t remember a time in my life that it wasn’t a part of my DNA. I first recall my mother telling me she played it non-stop while pregnant with me (I was born in 1971).

Abbey Road takes the listener on a journey, yet we really have no idea where we are headed, and we don’t care. While the composition of the music is rock and roll perfection, it is the words – the stories – in the songs that keep us riveted. It is filled with characters and situations that seem absurd, fantastic. Who is Polythene Pam? Mean Mr. Mustard? Maxwell with his silver hammer? They conjure up an almost cartoon-like scene of rambunctiousness and misbehaving, yet their tales – made alive through the lyrics of John Lennon and Paul McCartney – endear them to us, and we can hardly wait to find out what happens next.

Why did she come through the bathroom window?

Also, George Harrison’s lyrical offerings on Abbey Road – “Here Comes the Sun”—can move one to tears; the same with “Something,” played at my marriage ceremony.

The real clincher for me on Abbey Road is Side B, particularly the three songs culturally considered a medley, blending in a sort of mini-saga – “Golden Slumbers,” “Carry That Weight,” and “The End.” These three songs soar together in an operatic fashion, setting a contemplative, romantic tone with “Slumbers,” giving us a heroic challenge in “Weight,” and ending with an emotional climax and resolution in the aptly named “The End.”

As mentioned, Abbey Road was always a part of my musical bone structure and DNA, yet the album became embedded into my heart and soul in 2007. I had returned to India – a spiritual pilgrimage location shared with The Beatles themselves – in 2006, this time with a one-way ticket and no intention of returning to the States anytime soon. At this time, iPods were brand new, and a coworker gave me one of the first models – a brick that stored some 3,500 songs or more. Another friend loaded up the brick with everything she could fit from her Apple Mac iTunes – music we both loved – and, of course, Abbey Road made the list. I traveled thousands of miles over many months with this iPod.

That January 2007, I had an adventurous romance with a young man named Jan from Prague. The Beatles were a shared favorite band that bridged our cultural gaps, so we listened constantly to Abbey Road (as well as Magical Mystery Tour).

The real grafting of the Abbey into my spirit came one sleepy pre-dawn morning as my new Czech boyfriend and I boarded a bus from my favorite place in southwest India, a village on the Konkan Coast. It was very hard to leave. I had made friends there, I was practicing guitar, and I felt a bit more localized – it was my home away from home. But I had to go now, with Jan in the lead, if I wanted to travel in a vagabond fashion on his crazy bushwacking itinerary to the jungles of the remote Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, thousands of miles away via bus, train, and boat.

With a heavy and hopeful heart, I popped on my iPod and headphones to listen to Abbey Road as the ancient Tata local bus sputtered out of the village to start its horrifically long overland journey to the opposite side of the country. That Side B – all the way from “You Never Give Me Your Money” to “The End” – seared itself into my very being.

Soon we’ll be away from here. Step on the gas and wipe that tear away. One sweet dream came true today. . .

I honestly had a fantasy, a very real feeling, that the souls of The Beatles themselves knew that there would be this girl – this young woman of thirty-five – going through a bittersweet conflict of leaving a home she loved to adventure with a boy she’d just met; that she would be hearing these words almost forty years later; that they wrote and recorded this album for her. It was written in the stars, the Akashic records – who knows? My soul knew – the Fab Four wrote that medley as a tonic for me.

Later, when we pitched our barebones camp in those islands in the Bay of Bengal, we set up our mini-speakers and iPod to play Abbey Road. Naturally, we named our little seaside encampment “The Octopus’s Garden.”

And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make. . .

Such is the magic of holy music and why gratitude is the natural response.