Apassage from YESTERDAY: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF PAUL McCARTNEY
July 1st, 2009This comes from page 296 of Chet Flippo’s 1988 unauthorized biography:
“And Abbey Road, which was recorded over the course of the last Beatle summer, the summer of 1969, remains in many ways the purest expression of Beatles music. John didn’t much like it, mainly because it was really Paul’s album. John would later dismiss it as “folk songs for grannies”. His own contributions, however, were minimal compared to Paul’s. John was more interested in the work he was doing with Yoko. Paul, though, poured his heart into it and turned side two, most of which he wrote, into an elegant little pop symphony, each exquisite song flowing into the next jewel-like song with no break in between: “Here Comes the Sun” (which George wrote on a brilliant sunny afternoon in Eric Clapton’s garden, the same Eric Clapton to whom George was best friend and “husband-in-law”), “Because” (another of John’s songs about Yoko), “You Never Give Me Your Money” (Paul’s lament about Allen Klein and the situation at Apple), John’s “Sun King,” “Mean Mr. Mustard” (by John and left over from the White Album sessions), “Polythene Pam” (also by John and written in India, it is about a Liverpool “scrubber”), “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” (by Paul, about an Apple Scruff who got into his house via that method), “Golden Slumbers” (by Paul, inspired by a traditional song of the same name), and Paul finishes the album with his songs “Carry That Weight”, “The End” and “Her Majesty”. The album went immediately to number one on the British charts and sold four million copies in the first two months it was out.
