The Abbey Road Medley | Page 10 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I’m still not a huge fan of this one. If you ask me for my favourite songs and moments from Abbey Road , several from the first half jump to mind first, if you ask me for my favourite Beatles songs, I’d listen twenty, thirty, fourty, fifty before I even think of this one. I just never really got the concept so to speak.

It starts with a complete, standalone song. The next one after Because . The melody is picked up later, otherwise YNGMYM is pretty much self-contained and I like it. It’s followed by the dreaded Sun King , seriously, by far one of my if not my least favourite Beatles song. So you could say I’m already outta here at this point.

Next there are three mostly insignificant snippets, tied together. Here I always ask myself, why does Why Don’t We Do It In The Road often get bashed but something like Mean Mr Mustard doesn’t? If Mean Mr Mustard was on the White Album , would it get bashed too? As a track it’s by no means less meaningless. This part here from Mustard to Window is nice, but it only poses the question to me why there isn’t a Harrison song or two there instead.

Then there is a break, so it isn’t even a single “Medley” anymore, and we have a new one with three songs that are all really good, the little throwback to YNGMYM is great and I love how it builds all up to the ending of The End , which is a worthy finale of the Beatles’ career. A great closer where everything works together well, but that’ s mostly true for me when we’re talking about the last three.

By the way, I like Her Majesty being between MMM and PP, and once I’ve heard this “restored” version, I can’t unhear how it was supposed to be there originally. The melodic direction taking this small detour just makes more sense so to speak than MMM going abruptly into PP, it also gives it all a contrast and makes things more interesting around that point.

As you can see above, I’m sort of a “medley critic” so to speak. On my latest listening of Abbey Road , I paid attention and counted the number of seamless transitions that elevate the material and make the songs more than the sum of their parts. If you ask me: One. Golden Slumbers – Carry That Weight .

You Never Give Me Your Money is a good song, but it’s three times as long as anything that follows and is almost a medley in itself, so it mostly stands on its own and honestly, I don’t even know why I should count this as the beginning and not e.g. Because . Or Maxwell’s Silver Hammer .

Sun King is just kind of pointless to me, honestly, I don’t see much of a difference between it and e.g. Wild Honey Pie or the Can You Take Me Back segment. It’s not terrible, it’s just… Why? Where are the Harrison songs that he long overdue deserved at this point?

The Mustard – Window thingy is mostly its own thing again. The quality improves with each track, meaning Window is great, Mustard is just kind of… Meh. It’s comparable to Why Don’t We Do It In The Road to me, but the difference is that unlike with WDWDIITR, I never wished there was a longer version of Mean Mister Mustard… This may show my main issue with the so-called medley: At this point, there are snippets of full songs that don’t exist, so to speak. I sort of learned the term “Medley” as a seamless compilation of music that you know, re-arranged in new ways. But neither do I really care for those snippets, because those songs like Mean Mister Mustard or Polythene Pam are more like unfinished filler short tracks coming Out Of The Blue , nor is the arrangement seamless. I love Her Majesty as a hidden track, but ever since hearing the “restored” version I can’t unhear how fitting the original placement was, and how jarring and random the transition from Mustard to Pam sounds without it.

The finale is again a mostly separate medley, consisting of the best material in the bunch and like I said the best transition by far. Carry That Weight – The End again doesn’t really work that well again, but in exchange The End is possibly my favourite track of this whole “medley”, because Ringo hitting drums, guitar triello between the boys and the piano intheendtheloveyoutakeisequaltotheloveyoumake ending, which is the perfect tear-inducing closing chapter to the greatest discography ever.

Well, this probably sounds really negative, but it’s not half as bad. Mostly I just don’t fully get or feel the hype and the structure of it, and maybe even of the whole album, y’know.

To add insult to injury: I think the best transition on the whole album is IWYSSH – Here Comes The Sun . Endless coda, white noise, abrupt ending, a few seconds of silence, then the gentle sounds of the Harrisong – brillant. But ironically, this only works nowadays on CD or digital, not if you have the flip the record anyway.

About the song hyperlinks: Same, and Mean Mr Mustard and IWYSSH are two of those, which give me the most problems, so thanks for clearing those up. But for the love of god, I can’t figure it out for Why Don’t We Do It In The Road…

sigh butterfly said

 

I don’t remember anybody thinking that Side 2 was a medley  

Regarding my rant above: Was it really obvious to listeners in 1969 that this was a “medley” or did they just perceive it as mostly shorter songs with a few more transitions? (Transitions already being a part of the Bottles music on SPLHCB and White Album ). I’m really curious. Maybe I’m looking for validation here, but somehow I can’t imagine anybody listening to Abbey Road on its first day out and immediately saying ‘The MEDLEY was superb!’ instead of ‘a few times I didn’t recognize immediately that it had changed to the next song’.