“The whole idea, I must say, was Paul
McCartney’s,” said photographer Iain
MacMillan, who had a remarkably easy
time creating perhaps the most copied
album cover in history. “A few days
before the shoot, he drew a sketch of
how he imagined the cover, which we
executed almost exactly that day,” he
told The Guardian in 1989. Around
11:30 a.m., on sunny Aug. 8, 1969, in
roughly 10 minutes, “I took a couple
of shots of the Beatles crossing Abbey
Road one way. We let some of the traf-
fic go by, and then they walked across
the road the other way, and I took a few
more shots. The one eventually chosen
for the cover was number five of six. It
was the only one that had their legs in
a perfect ‘V’ formation, which is what I
wanted stylistically.”
Famously, conspiracy theorists
immediately got to work spreading
the news that Paul was dead, having
crashed his Aston Martin in 1966 and
was being played by an imposter. The
evidence? First, Lennon was dressed as
an undertaker and Ringo in customary
funereal black. The license plate on
the white car reads LMV28IF, the age
Paul would be if he were alive. But most
telling? Paul was barefoot! A dead
giveaway, said theorists, who noted
some cultures bury their dead without
shoes. “It was taken as a bizarre Mafia
sign of death,” McCartney joked years
later. He poked fun at the scale and
longevity of the whole phenomenon
on the cover of his 1993 Paul Is Live L P,
recorded during a world tour, which
showed him back in the crosswalk
outside Abbey Road Studios, wearing
shoes this time and walking one of his
beloved sheepdogs.
The album was named for the
St. John’s Wood neighborhood street
that was home to EMI studios, where
the Beatles recorded 190 of their
210 songs. Housed in an 1829 nine-
bedroom Georgian townhouse, the
studio has been in operation since- After the album cover made
the location famous, the studio
adopted the name “Abbey Road” in - Today it is still used for classi-
cal recordings and by pop acts from
Radiohead and Oasis to Kanye West.
Under threat from developers in the
early aughts, it was listed by the British
government as a protected building in - “I have so many memories there
with the Beatles,” McCartney said at
the time. “It still is a great studio.”
WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENED
Below: EMI’s Abbey Road Studios (seen in 2013), where the Beatles recorded
plenty of their albums.