TRACK SEVENTEEN
- WRITTEN BY: McCartney
- LEAD VOCALS: McCartney
Bonus track! Unlisted on the vinyl
album cover is a cheeky 23-second
ode to the Queen: “I want to tell her
that I love her a lot, but I gotta get
a belly full of wine. Her Majesty’s a
pretty nice girl. Someday I’m going
to make her mine, oh yeah.” The
song nearly ended up in the Abbey
Road Studios dustbin. Originally
included between “Mean Mr. Mus-
tard” and “Polythene Pam,” the track
was cut on McCartney’s order when
he decided it was out of place and
did not fit the song cycle’s overall
design. According to music historian
Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Bea-
tles Recording Sessions, an assistant
engineer asked McCartney what he
should do with the snipped length of
audio tape. “Throw it away,” came
the reply. Fearful of violating strict
studio policy, the assistant picked it
up off the floor and attached it for
safekeeping to the end of the fin-
ished medley tape. When McCart-
ney listened to the playback and the
discarded tune played 20 seconds
after “The End,” he decided to keep
it on the finished album, delay and
all. And so the throwaway track that
McCartney once said was written as
a joke, became the musical coda for
the Beatles recording career. “Keep
that one,” McCartney is heard to
say about one finished track in the
Abbey Road documentary. Then,
in what might be another kind of
epitaph, he adds, “Mark it fab!”
TRACK SIXTEEN
- WRITTEN BY: McCartney
- VOCALS: McCartney,
Lennon, Harrison
The final track the Beatles re-
corded for their last studio album
opens with the first drum solo of
Ringo’s Beatles career. “I don’t
want to do no bloody solo!’ ” he
had insisted when his bandmates
urged him to in the past. “Usually
you have to try to talk drummers
out of doing solos!” session
engineer Geoff Emerick recalled
in 2014. “Everybody said, ‘No, it’ll
be fantastic.’ So he gave in—and
turned in a bloody marvelous per-
formance.” In another first, “The
End” showcases Paul, George
and John, in that order, as they
perform dueling guitar solos. “You
could really see the joy in their
faces as they played. It was like
they were teenagers again. The
musical telepathy between them
was mind-boggling.” And finally,
the Beatles sang their famous
epitaph, written by McCartney:
“And in the end, the love you take/
Is equal to the love you make.”
THE BEATLES 1969 PEOPLE 65
