TRACK TEN
- WRITTEN BY: Lennon
- LEAD VOCAL: Lennon
Like many of the short tracks that make
up Abbey Road’s medley, this was a frag-
ment of a song that Lennon had started
writing in India but never finished. “We
always have tons of bits and pieces lying
around,” he said in 1969. “I’ve got stuff
that I wrote around [Sgt.] Pepper.” With
the Let It Be album shelved for the time
being and the band uncertain if they
had enough new songs to fill a new one,
McCartney hit on the idea “to put all
the spare bits together [and] medleying
them all [to give] the second side a sort
of operatic structure.” No fan of what he
called McCartney’s “pop opera,” Lennon
helped out anyhow, recalled George
Martin in the 1995 Anthology. “He would
come and have an idea for sewing a bit
of music into the tapestry. Everybody
worked frightfully well, and that’s why
I’m very fond of [the medley].” Even
so, Lennon dismissed “Sun King” as “a
piece of garbage I had around.” Some
disagreed. The song, wrote AllMusic
critic Tom Maginnis, “is a wistful snippet
of breathtaking beauty, providing one of
the most tender moments on the entire
album.” There is no direct reference to
history’s Sun King, Louix XIV of France
(left). And despite the pseudo Latinate
incantations he and McCartney sing
(“We just made it up,” Lennon told an
interviewer in 1969), he apparently had
a pagan monarch in mind. According to
engineer Geoff Emerick, Starr draped his
tom-tom drumheads with muffling tea
towels “in order to give John the ‘jungle
drum’ sound he was after.”
TRACK ELEVEN
- WRITTEN BY: Lennon
- LEAD VOCAL: Lennon
Queen Elizabeth II is the foil
for the title character in this
Lennon number about a miser
and shut-in who, when his
sister Pam gets him out of the
house “to look at the Queen
[he] always shouts out some-
thing obscene—such a dirty
old man!” Another unfinished
song from the Beatles 1968
hiatus in India, Lennon said in
one of his last interviews, with
Playboy’s Sheff in 1980, that he
had “read somewhere about
this mean guy who hid five-
pound notes not up his nose
but somewhere else.” And
“No,” he added, “it had noth-
ing to do with cocaine.” As for
sister Pam, Lennon changed
her name from “Shirley” to cre-
ate a teasing connection to the
medley’s next titular eccentric.
‘ONLY PLACE HE’S
EVER BEEN’
Lennon dreamed up the
miserly Mustard while in
India (here in 1968).
62 THE BEATLES 1969 PEOPLE
