The Final Beatles Recording

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human . As America marks its 250th anniversary, we're looking back at two and a half centuries of rebellion and liberty through the eyes of the heroes who defended it. The whole thing about this country is freedom. If we're not careful, we could lose that I'm J.R. Martinez, a U.S. Army veteran. On Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, we bring you the defining moments of valor that went above and beyond the call of duty. Listen to Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage. Hi everyone, it's Paul Muldoin. Before we get to this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can binge all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and Lyrics right now and free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/ plus like an operatic undertak think we had this little bit and that little bit and the Sun King Polite and Pam all all these little bathroom window all these little things that John and I always would tend to just finish the fragments into a full song. But at this point, we kind of had enough songs for the album . We had these fragments, so we hit upon this idea to put the fragments together into a medley and then it would have its own fullness . That was that and then I wanted an end. And in the end . And I just happened to think of this little couplet, which in school I had learned that was often how Shakespeare ended, with a rhyming couplet. Absolutely. And I always thought that was pretty cool that it told his audience at the time. That's it folks. And in the end , the love you tak e is equal to the you make I'm Paul Muldoon. For a while now, I've been fortunate to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of the era. And will you look at me? I'm Paul M Lul'Tour. I'm actually a performer. That is Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a book looking at the lyrics of more than 150 of his songs. And we recorded many hours of our convers It was like going back to an old snapshot album, looking back on work I hadn't ever analyzed. This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music. In this episode, the entire Abbey Road medley, G olden Slumbers, Carry That Wit, and The E nd As a poet, I tend to approach song lyrics as if they were indeed poetry. Sometimes these readings are a stretch, but Paul McCartney takes pride in his literary background. In fact, he says that had his music career not taken off, he may well have been an English teacher . And in the end , the love you take is equal to the Cartney's choice to conclude Abbey Road with a rhyming couplet hearkens back to a long tradition of endings . For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Robio . Shakespeare often marked the end of a scene with a rhyming couplet, which signals to the audience some degree of finality. The couplet indicates the completion of a thought. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee. If the two lines in Paul McCartney's the end function as a concluding couplet, I've come to understand the entire Abbey Road medley, Golden Slumbers, Carry That Wit, and then the End as a sort of figurative sonnet It's not that Paul McCartney ended Abbey Road with fourteen perfect lines in iambic pentameter. There aren't three quatrains following a rigid rhyme scheme leading into the couplet at the end, this is rock and roll, after all. But when we zoom out, a sonnet is often a poem that wrestles with a particular claim, approaches it from several angles in divisible sections, before coming to a sort of McCartney put it, the ending says, that's it folks. And in the end , the love you take is equal to the God In other words, these two lines, the only lyrics in the song, are deceptively simple. To understand them , let's return to the first song of the Medley, the first stanza, if you will, Golden Slumbers. Does a way to get back homework . Paul McCartney was raised towards the end of the golden age of piano music. Yes, in the mid twentieth century records were ubiquitous, but it was still not uncommon for families or party guests to gather around the piano in the living room. You read about Gershwin and Harold Arlen, it says, you know, in New York at that time, every apartment, every building had a piano. That was the one thing they all had. So I do think a lot of golden era music came out of that fact . That was the thing that many houses had a piano. So yeah, there were lots of pianists. My dad was our one . His friend at the Cotton Exchange, Freddie Rimmer, was another one for his family, so there was always someone who could sort of play the piano. And then I think when records came in , then that's how people started to play their music. Except, you know, whenever there was a gathering, a New Year's Eve too, in our case, the booze and the piano were wheeled out you know once there was a way to get back home work And um the piano would be belting out these old songs that everyone knew . Like everyone knew them. Particularly the aunties. The aunties had them down and knew all the verses. But the camaraderie of people all standing around in a room getting drunk singing these songs was something very special . Once there was a way To get back homework. And I always thought my family was just an ordinary family, but I realize now how lucky I was to have that kind of a family where people were decent, good , friendly people , not rich, nobody had any money, but that was almost an advantage because they had to do things themselves . Once there was a way to get back home work once there was a way to get back home , sleep pretty darn you do not cry , and I will sing a lullaby As America marks its 250th anniversary, we're looking back at two and a half centuries of rebellion and liberty through the eyes of the heroes who defended it. The whole thing about this country is freedom. If we're not careful, we could lose that. I'm J.R. Martinez, a U.S. Army veteran. On Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, we bring you the defining moments of valor that went above and beyond the call of duty. Listen to In the final days of The Beatles, McCartney took a trip back home to Liverpool. He was visiting his father, who had remarried and was living with his wife, Angela and her daughter, Ruth. Even though Paul McCartney didn't know how to read sheet music, he went to I always look in a piano seat because people always have sheet music . They always used to , definitely. Now sometimes they can be empty. But I always look to see. And this time I think it either in the Panic or it might have been up on the uh music stand was this song Golden Slumb ers ? The sheet music, here performed by the Cambridge singers, was a Victorian piano melody accompanying a seventeenth century poem called Cradle Song. The poem came from a play, Patient Crysel , which was written by the Elizabethan dramatists Thomas Decker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton. Golden slumbers fill your eyes, smiles awake when you eyes, sleep in the dying, do not cry, and I will sing a lullaby . That chorus that I've used as chorus literally is the lyrics to an old Victorian song. Is this what we call sampling? Well yeah. It's it's called stealing . But because I don't read music I didn't know what the melody that went with this was. So I put my own melody to it and just took these words. It's turned out to be quite soulful. I think that's what attracted me to those lyrics in the first place. It's like , you know, that sort of consoling the baby or reading kids bedtime story. I find there's something very sort of deep in that. Something very human and international it strikes a chord with me sleep with it darling do not cry and I will sing a the by When I saw those lyrics golden slumbers fill your eyes it just seemed like a beautiful way to say go to sleep my dear. Smiles awake you when you rise. I like that too. That's nice and very optimistic. Sleep with it, darling , do not cry . And then I did the other bit once there was a way to get back home because I think at that point I hadn't been home for a long time. And here I was at my dad's house. Now this wasn't quite home, because it was a house I'd bought him, you know, when I got some money. So it wasn't quite home, but it was Liverpool and it was homewood. It was his home. Monsters away to get back home sleep in it, darling , do not cry and I will sing a lullaby so you know here I was seeing this lov ely lullaby lyric and thinking of all things warm and wonderful . And you know what's really nice about this talking about this touching a nerve in the human psyche. One of the things I love about writing songs is you'll be watching a film or listening to the radio or something, and it'll reappear, it'll appear with someone else singing it. And I just love that it's touched their nerve . So much so that they think this would be a good song for this film. One of the times Golden Slumbers reappeared was in the 2016 children's film Sing, where the song was covered by Jennifer Hudson portraying a glamorous and vocally talented animated sheep They use golden slums to open the thing, and it's very powerful, and then right at the end when you've heard the whole story and everything's worked out, they use it again. So , you know, people have said to me, do you mind people doing versions of your song? Do you think they're distortions of your original meaning? And I say, no, no, no, far from it. I'd love to hear another interpr etation of one of my songs as a compliment, that I thought enough of it to cover it. So what's great about it is the next generation who are watching a kid's animation thing now know Golden Slumbers. For the same reason exactly, they now know Blackbird . So I'm not surprised when people come up to me and say, Oh, little Tommy's favorite song is Blackbird. What was Blackbird used in recently? That was used in Boss Baby, which is another animation. Yeah, I haven't seen that either. It's another gap in your cultural picture. It is . Okay . Now, would it be too much to say that this is a kind of lullaby for the Beatles? I think that's too much to say. Right. But, you know, it will have been written around that time, and who knows, you know, that I could have been feeling downown. I actually can't tell you whether this is true or not, but it's very possible that I was feeling down in London. Went back up to see my dad, was feeling better now. I'm in Liverpool and thinking of the troubles down south and thinking, you know , wouldn't it be nice to get home? Wouldn't it be nice to have that comfortable feeling again once there was a way to get back home work As America marks its 250th anniversary, we're looking back at two and a half centuries of rebellion and liberty through the eyes of the heroes who defended it. The whole thing about this country is freedom . If we're not careful, we could lose that. I'm J.R. Martinez, a U.S. Army veteran. On Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, we bring you the defining moments of valor that went above and beyond the call of duty. Listen to Medal of Honor Stories of Courage wherever you get your podcast . There were indeed, as Paul McGartley said, troubles south of Liverpool about which to feel bad. Down in London, the Beatles were hashing out their business matters and the very future of the band. This was the end of the nineteen sixties. The Beatles were the most famous musicians in the world, but the tensions brewing the in group were impossible to ignore. You never give me a money . John, George and Ringo wanted to sign a deal with the businessman Alan Klein, but Paul was convinced they would come to regret that decision. The dispute was tearing the band apart. It was becoming a heavy burden to bear. You're gonna carry that way . Carry that way So that was the heavy. That was the heavy. The business meetings you'd go in. They were just soul destroying. You'd sit around and it was a place you didn't want to be with people you didn't want to be with and I could just see that this guy was going to steal everything we put in the bank or invested in Scottish farms , whatever it was , was going . And this guy was gonna have it, like he had Sam Cook and he had the stones . And I remember asking McJack, who I knew him, I said, what's this guy like? Because I could see the others were very enamoured of him for various reasons. He was doing a great flannel job on them, you know. I never give you my p illow . I only send you my inv itations and in the middle of the sam e cre ations I break down . You're gonna carry that way The band's breakup was so agonizing that McCartney even started to see it as divine punishment, with the paradise of the Beatles success crumbling before him That whole period, that year, a couple of years, was very sort of heavy. And it seemed to me, you know, this all tied in very unfortunately with stuff that was out there already, like original sin . Even though my mum were Christopher Catholic, we weren't brought up as Catholics. I thought it was very depressing to think that you were born a loser. An original sin. Who the fuck? What chance have you got? You know, no wonder people freak out as you're a sinner. No, I'm not. Well I'm a very nice person. You know, I'm not buying this idea that's 'cause you said or 'cause some priest or some vicar says love it . And if contemplating the fall of man wasn't enough, the psychedelic trips at the end of the sixties didn't make these existential questions any easier. You know we'd started off smoking pot. Right. And it was just giggles. It was such fun. We loved it and it was great. And the worst would happen is you'd fall asleep. And that was fine. But once it got into sort of more serious stuff, you know, LST, staying up all night, wishing it'd wear off and it wouldn't, it was a bit heavy heavy then you were just sort of doing it and there wasn't this light relief it was heavy so you know this idea boy you're gonna carry that weight was sort of yeah you know life's not all joyous there's a weight to it and um you're gonna have to carry it When taken as two stanzas in conversation Golden Slumbers and Carry That Wet seem to be a reckoning with the tenderness and gravity of adulthood. There's a gentle lullaby, and then the burden of conflict, longing for the way things used to be, and knowing you can never truly return home. The beginning of The End is a cycle of two-bar guitar solos, traded off between John, George and Paul . Jeff Emmerich, the Beatles studio engineer, observed that during the recording session for the end, Paul and George looked like they had gone back in time, like they were kids again, determined to outdo one another. Yet there was no animosity, no tension at all, you could tell they were simply having fun. After the wistfulness of Golden Slumbers and the heaviness of Carry That Wet, we come to what in a sonnet would be called a volta , a turn . In this case the turn of the song leaves behind the longing and the burden, and brings us back to love . Is equal to the you make . That was the end. And in the end the love you take is equal to the Love You Make. Which is a nice way to end my show now. That's how I end my consort . And it feels very complete . Yeah, so I'm kind of proud that it is a rhyming goblet just as I was taught all those years ago by my little literature teacher but you know the thing is you know I never went on to study because I was in the band and the band took over. But that was the path I thought I was heading for with my A-level in literature. Was this medley a lullaby for the Beatles? Was it meant to capture the sweet nostalgia heav,y weight and grand finale of the group. The end is believed to be the last song John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Paul McCartney ever recorded all together . Okay , let's hit one, two, three. They'd grown from boys, writing songs in their Liverpool parlor rooms, to arguably the most influential