Imagine, if you will, that The Beatles survived as a functional unit beyond Abbey Road and went on to make a new album in 1971. How might it have happened, and what might the album have looked like?
In taking on this poignant thought experiment, let’s first make our job a little more tricky by preceding the counter-history with a little bit of actual history: 1970 as the year in which John, Paul, George and Ringo get to focus on solo projects. Only with this condition in place, I would argue, does a 1971 Beatles album release become a plausibly thinkable scenario.
There is a crucial scene in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary where George is expressing to John and Yoko his frustration at the band’s current working model. He has this huge backlog of songs written. Why not just go off and splurge on a solo record? That way, he could come back to The Beatles rejuvenated, no longer hounded by the awful feeling that his role in the band precludes him from showcasing all his wares. John and Yoko give the idea a warm reception. After all, neither they nor George are exactly strangers to the pleasures of a non-Beatles side project.
This is how I envisage a viable path to our hypothetical new Beatles album of 1971. The boys have held it together long enough to make Abbey Road, and now they need a decent break from Beatledom. There is also heavy business stuff that needs sorting out, and no guarantee that things will come good on that particular front.
So let’s imagine that, as soon as Abbey Road is done, dusted and released on 26 September 1969, The Beatles hold a critical meeting. Paul and Ringo agree to George and John’s proposition that 1970 be declared a non-committal gap year for the band. An album put together by Glyn Johns from the tapes of the Get Back sessions will be released during the year, while the individual members will be free to immerse themselves in solo recordings. Michael Lindsay-Hogg is to be refused permission to release the film he is under the impression he made back in January. “Tell him we’re still trying to book the boat for Sabratha,” quips John.
At the start of 1971, there will be an option to come back together to start work on a new Beatles album. Whether this option will be picked up is very much an open question: it all depends on how everyone is feeling by then, and on whether the business problems have been amicably settled.
Off the boys go, with a good-humoured vow to see each other round the clubs.
Paul makes McCartney, a disarmingly lo-fi effort — but without ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ (its place taken by the lovely ‘Pillow For Your Head’).
John, on the far side of Primal Scream therapy, makes the shockingly raw Plastic Ono Band. Its penultimate track, however, is not the Beatles-renouncing ‘God.’ Instead, it’s the anguished ‘How.’
George has a whale of a time making All Things Must Pass with Phil Spector.
And Ringo cuts Sentimental Journey and Beaucoups of Blues — as well as lending a hand to John and George on their albums.
None of these records contains a full-frontal assault on any fellow Beatle. No bridges have been burned. John doesn’t return Jann Wenner’s calls. Paul writes no letter to the Melody Maker 'Mailbag' section about the “limping dog of a news story” about The Beatles breaking up. As far as the world knows, the Beatledog has still got four legs. Derek Taylor parries all press queries with the words: “The boys are just taking a well-earned break from recording together.”
By the time the four reconvene at the start of 1971, Allen Klein has been dismissed by a thoroughly disillusioned John, George and Ringo, and Stephen Maltz persuaded to come back in to manage the group’s finances on an interim basis. As to musical collaboration, all four Beatles declare themselves willing to give a new album a try.
Paul is raring to go. John, though somewhat sullen and wary, is genuinely intrigued to see what might emerge. George, fresh from his All Things Must Pass triumph and riding high on the success in the singles charts of ‘My Sweet Lord’, is in fine fettle. And Ringo is uncomplicatedly delighted at the sheer fact that this miracle is happening at all.
With George Martin on hand, they settle in at Abbey Road to work on a bunch of songs new and not so new. So as to keep the stakes from being intolerably high, the ever-curious outside world has been told that the band are in studio to supervise post-production for a live album of their 1964 and 1965 Hollywood Bowl shows, as well as beginning the editing process for The Long and Winding Road, a documentary about the band.
The sessions go well. Really well. Twenty-five candidate songs are given consideration. After an intensive few weeks’ rehearsal and recording, a new Beatles double-A-side single (John’s ‘Gimme Some Truth’/Paul’s ‘Another Day’) is in the can, and the LP whittled down to an agreed track listing…
SIDE A
1. IMAGINE
2. MAYBE I’M AMAZED
3. TRY SOME BUY SOME
4. MONKBERRY MOON DELIGHT
5. THE BACK SEAT OF MY CAR
6. MY LOVE
7. I DON’T WANNA BE A SOLDIER MAMA I DON’T WANNA DIE
SIDE B
1. HEART OF THE COUNTRY
2. JEALOUS GUY
3. I LIVE FOR YOU
4. WATCHING RAINBOWS
5. OH MY LOVE
6. UNCLE ALBERT
7. GOD
[HIDDEN TRACK: HAIL TO THE THIEF]
How might these new Beatles tracks have sounded? Let’s take a playful stroll down Speculation Lane and try to imagine our way into the album. This will of course involve more than simply slotting already familiar tracks into position. The Beatles in studio were an incredibly dynamic force: not alone would they have taken familiar songs to unfamiliar places, they would surely have inspired one another to brand new song ideas. Even trying to envisage the musical alchemy that might have happened in 1971 is thus as forlorn an enterprise as trying to catch mercury with a fork. But let’s work with what we do know, the songs we do have, and see where the little thought experiment takes us.
‘Imagine’
John is a little self-conscious about this one. He really, really wanted to write a classic song to rival Paul’s ‘Yesterday’, but now on first run-through with the boys he realises that he unconsciously took recourse to Paul’s wistful chord progression in the bridge of ‘Hey Jude’ (“And anytime you feel the pain…”/ “Imagine all the people…”). The embarrassment is only amplified by the fact that this too is a piano-based number, and conceived with similar pace and pattern to ‘Jude.’
But the song comes together terrifically well nonetheless. In the course of jamming it over and over, John opts to make a critical change in the final verse: he bluesifies the signature b-note in the first three lines. “Imagine no PO-SSESS-ions”: the higher notes become b-flat instead of b-natural. Then, for the fourth line, he switches out a C chord for E minor, thereby accommodating the return of the yearning b-natural: “A brotherhood OF man.” Ringo’s drumming, meanwhile, is more inventive than Alan White’s on the version we know. George, still smarting from Paul’s strictures on his over-busy guitar part during the rehearsing of ‘Hey Jude’, offers tactfully mellow-toned plucked-chord support. And he and Paul lend fetching vocal-harmony texture to the bridge section with a little ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’-style Q&A:
JOHN: “You may say I’m a dreamer”
PAUL & GEORGE: “But are you the only one?”
JOHN: “No, I’m not the only one”
PAUL & GEORGE: “Tell us, tell us, what you see”
JOHN: “I hope someday you will join us”
ALL THREE (in three-part harmony): “Ah! And the world will be as one.”
George Martin’s orchestration goes well beyond the safe, legato approach that Torrie Zito takes in the alternative universe in which we live and move and have our being. The strings here are more venturesome, tunefully answering and counterpointing John’s singing; tuba and French horn work anthemic magic in the chorus.
All in all, a stunning opening to the new album. This is the song with which The Beatles will open their Live Aid set in 1985.
‘Maybe I’m Amazed’
This extraordinary song brings the reunited Beatles closer to an out and out row than any other. Paul wants to play the lead guitar solos himself, and George is none too pleased. In the end, a compromise is reached: Paul takes the first solo, George the second, subtly developing its melody and giving it heavy overdrive.
Other than that, the track comes together much like the glory we already know so well, only with John and George taking up backing-vocal duties.
‘Try Some Buy Some’
George has not — on our alternative timeline — given this cracker of a song to Ronnie Spector, instead holding it back with some excitement for the Beatles album. It works a treat here, coming as it does after John’s ‘Imagine’ and Paul’s ‘Maybe I’m Amazed.’ Where John has invited his listener to imagine there’s no religion, and Paul has expressed his awe at the woman he loves, George serves up a powerful ode to the redemptive power of love both romantic and divine.
The band builds the song beautifully, giving it a closing intensity redolent of Abbey Road’s ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy).’ George Martin goes to town with the brass section, while John stumbles on a neat trick for the verses in which he makes slide electric guitar sound like ethereal violin…
‘Monkberry Moon Delight’
John, Paul, George… and now it’s Ringo’s turn. Yes, Ringo is assigned lead vocal duties on this demented Paul composition. Ringo sings the song an octave down from the version on Ram. Paul, lower in the mix, joins him in gravel-voiced unison on the upper octave.
On the chorus, John, George and Mal Evans have quite the lark singing harmony-rich skat in response to Ringo and Paul’s exclamations of “Monkberry Moon Delight!”
The honky-tonk-piano-driven arrangement is close to what we hear on the canonical version, only Paul’s meandering non-verbal vocal melody towards the end is assigned to clarinet.
At song’s close, we don’t get Paul chatting with himself (“Try some of this, honey”/ “What is it?”) but Paul and John going full-on Goon-show together à la ‘Hey Bulldog.’ John even throws in an arch “Try some, buy some!” along the way.
‘The Back Seat of My Car’
Paul first introduced this to the others during the Get Back sessions, and the version that gets proper studio treatment here cleaves closely, at first, to the original idea: an affectionate homage to The Beach Boys. Paul is in rare form as he takes off Brian Wilson’s California singing style (“back seat of my carrrrrr”). John and George harmonise mischievously on the backing parts (“Looking for a ride…”).
However, in a very un-Beach-Boys move that recalls the delicious McCartney-Lennon interplay on ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, John rescues the song from sliding into repetitiousness by contributing two rounds of what we know as the bridge of ‘It’s So Hard’: “But when it’s good/ It’s really good/ And when I hold you in my arms, baby/ Sometimes I feel like going down.” After the second such risqué bridge, we get a faux-outro section over George Martin’s orchestral surge: Paul and George singing “Oh, we believe that we can’t be wrong”, John raucously throwing out responsorial lines taken from the first and last verses of ‘It’s So Hard’(“You gotta live… You gotta love.. You gotta be somebody… You gotta shove… You gotta run… You gotta hide… You gotta keep your woman satisfied…”).
Then we get the real outro: fifteen glorious seconds of John, Paul and George singing a capella in rich harmony on the single repeated staccato word “Do do do do do…”. In present context, it sounds awfully like a suggestive imperative verb. (For a sense of the sonic vibe, think the ending of Paul’s 2013 song ‘New.’)
‘My Love’
This song has been kicking around in Paul’s head for a while. The version he records with The Beatles is very close to that which he would have recorded as a solo artist: cinematic orchestration (this time by George Martin) and warm harmony vocals (from John and George). There is, alas, no inspired guitar solo by Henry McCullough, but George delivers something that comes pretty damn close.
‘I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier Mama I Don’t Wanna Die’
This version of John’s blistering anti-war, anti-establishment song starts out with a reggae feel, like what we hear in (what would have been) Take 11 from the Imagine sessions:
It takes John a couple of verses to allow the timing of his vocal delivery to stabilise. At first he laconically sings just one word per line (“Well/ I/ Don’t/ Wanna/ Be/ A/ Soldier/ Mama…”) The band meanwhile keeps screwing with the time signature, all in an effort to push the song towards the vibe of the version familiar to us from Imagine. Paul, on backing vocals, keeps his harmony notes unpretty, as he had done in ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko.’ David Bowie makes a guest appearance on saxophone.
About four minutes in, guitars start nudging the song into what we know (from Get Back) as ‘The Palace of the King of the Birds.’ An overdubbed organ part from Paul creeps in. But John refuses to adjust his vocal line to the new instrumental progression, continuing his part with increasingly maniacal energy. As the song approaches fade, some seven minutes in, the organ gets louder, the guitars more and more distorted, and Ringo goes righteously nuts on drums. Listen closely on headphones, and you can hear John roar: “Cranberry Paul!”
When asked by a journalist about the jarring placement of this track right after Paul’s ‘My Love’, John shoots back: “They’re both anti-war songs!”
‘Heart of the Country’
This is pretty much identical to the version we know from Ram. Paul records it on his own late one night when the others have gone home. A nice little palate cleanser to ease the listener into Side B.
‘Jealous Guy’
John’s first rendition in front of the others of this reworked version of ‘Road to Rishikesh’ is quite a moment. As Paul immediately clocks, it has become an apology song to him. In ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, John had pleaded with him not to betray their friendship over his love for Yoko. In ‘Oh! Darling’, Paul had offered a coded reassurance on that score (“I’ll never let you down”) as well as an admission of the pain John’s coldness towards him had been causing (“When you told me you didn’t need me anymore/ Well you know I nearly broke down and died…”). Now, with quite a volume of water under the bridge, here is John serving up what is ostensibly a love song to a woman but in fact amounts to a confession to his friend: it was my insecurities that caused me to act out.
Musically, the chief difference between this version and the famous Imagine one is the absence of piano. It’s just the four Beatles playing their primary-colour instruments (John on rhythm electric, George on lead, Paul on bass, Ringo on drums), with legato-bowed violins courtesy of George Martin’s arrangement. John’s lyric for the third and final verse runs:
Whatever gets you through the night
I’m here to say that it’s all right
Don’t go swallowing my pain
Don’t go swallowing my pain
And John does no whistling on this version: it is supplied instead by a moved Paul offering wordless acknowledgement of his friend’s olive branch.
‘I Live For You’
Coming as it does right after ‘Jealous Guy’, this song sounds like George giving a gentle cough to remind his two fractious bandmates that he has long since transcended the mundane plane of personal squabbles: “All alone in this world of mine”, he lives for the nameless You. Yes, another love song whose primary addressee is not necessarily a woman.
The version here is much like the version we know from the re-issued All Things Must Pass (2001). Heavy on George’s pedal steel guitar, and with a strong country-folk flavour. Paul and John ooh their harmonic way in restrained (and, if truth be told, rather apathetic-sounding) fashion. But Paul’s bass part does deliver some brilliantly lateral subversion to George’s transcendal vibe.
Rehearsal of this song proves somewhat tense, not least because John keeps breaking into ‘My Sweet Lord’ in a hillbilly accent — with the words “My sweet lord,/ He’s so fine!”.
‘Watching Rainbows’
This one medleys a John song idea and a Paul one.
The John idea (‘Watching Rainbows’) was jammed in the Get Back sessions, as an off-shoot of ‘I’ve Got A Feeling.’ To imagine what it turns into here, we must play that jam at 1.5 speed and factor in stabbing lead guitar (a little like in ‘Getting Better’ on Pepper) and pounding drums.
The chorus is written and sung by Paul. It is the “Where will I run to?” section of what we know as his song ‘A Love For You.’ This reprises (in reverse) the ‘We Can Work It Out’ duality that had worked out so well a few years back.
The track’s outro has John and Paul singing not John’s original “Shoot me!” — that’s been used in the meantime on ‘Come Together’ — but Paul’s ambiguous lines, “When you met me/ Everything was rosy” (again from ‘A Love For You’). The pair are singing in unison, apart from the end notes, where Paul goes up. These lines are repeated to fade.
As a wry nod to 'I Am The Walrus,' whose “Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun” forms an obvious lyrical precursor to John’s verse, George Martin enjoys licence to go all Rite of Spring on the track, particularly in the closing section. The result is a memorable cacophany of band playing rock-heavy and orchestra going wild.
‘Oh My Love’
Perhaps John’s most tender love song since ‘If I Fell’, this version opens just as the Imagine version would have, with George’s unaccompanied electric guitar arpeggios. When George first plays this part, Paul raises an eyebrow but says nothing: it’s a straight lift from the opening of his ‘Man We Was Lonely.’
The song proceeds much like the canonical version, only Nicky Hopkins’ stellar piano playing does not feature. Instead, John plays along in more rudimentary style, à la ‘Hey Jude.’ Here too he sings unaccompanied.
Tonally, this version sounds like it could have made it on to Plastic Ono Band — spare, haunting, desperately vulnerable. And pure gorgeous.
‘Uncle Albert’
A rather awkward one, this. Paul wrote it ostensibly with his actual Uncle Albert in mind, but it was really conceived as a dig at the posh avuncular George Martin at a time when Paul needed a break from his oversight. Sorry, old chap, you’re surplus to requirements right now.
It matters not. The band (and the studiously hear-no-evil Martin) take to the song with an appetite. Lush strings, intricate vocal harmonies, even a touch of melancholy bugle.
There is no ‘Admiral Halsey’ section here, Paul instead devising a bridge section drawn from two other song ideas he’s been messing around with: ‘Ram On’, followed by a section of ‘Too Many People.’ The latter song was written in private anger at John and Yoko but here it is retooled to flesh out Uncle Albert’s backstory in evocative (and, in a nice little twist, accusatory) fashion:
That was your first mistake
You took your lucky break
And broke it in two
Now what can be done for you?
You broke it in two.
These extra elements lend the song an edge that enables Paul to avoid that dreaded look from John that says, “Uh oh, more granny music…” John himself is spurred to contribute some unsettling closing lines — based on an early version of ‘Oh My Love’ — where he turns Uncle Albert into a latter-day Harry Gill (“You feel a shivering all the time…”).
‘God’
This devastating John song receives much fuller band treatment here — and a Wagnerian orchestral accompaniment written by George Martin.
For the long climactic list, John recasts “I don’t believe in…” as wise counsel: “Don’t believe in…”. Paul chimes in on each noun, proper and common, but on a different harmony note each time — the choice of note becoming more dissonant and outré each time.
John does not, at the end of the list, disavow “Beatles” as such; instead he sings “Don’t believe in Fab.” It’s a cute solution: we’re still here, folks, but we’re not your lovable moptops anymore. A sentiment the other three can comfortably second.
John then closes proceedings with:
Just believe in you, little old you,
And that’ll do;
The dream is over [etc.]
We’re not fab, he’s telling a whole generation. And I’m not the Walrus. Grow the hell up.
Hidden Track: ‘Hail to the Thief!’
“So John and Yoko took you by surprise/ You should have seen right throu-ough Mother’s eyes.” Thus opens the album’s sting in the tail — which is the song we know as ‘How Do You Sleep?’, only directed not at Paul but at Allen Klein and featuring the hook line “Hail to the thief!” instead of “How do you sleep?”.
For a sense of where this vicious send-off might have landed lyrically, think a mix of the Imagine song and John’s later ‘Steel and Glass’ (which is generally taken to be an attack on Klein).
Thus, for instance:
Those suits was right when they said you were bent
The only thing you gave was money spent
Or (again to the melody of ‘How Do You Sleep?’):
Your phone don’t ring and no one takes your call
How does it feel, boy, to be off the wall?
The four boys have a splendid time turning John’s diatribe into a bruising studio track, with Paul taking especial pleasure in harmonising a third above John for the chorus. It represents quite the vindication.
The song closes with the band stopping suddenly and George Martin taking the strings into a mocking whole-tone chaos in the style of an inebriated Debussy. Compared to this, the woozy outro to ‘Glass Onion’ sounds like a warm-up
So there we have it, The Beatles’ first studio album release since Let It Be. It bears the title The Castle of the King of the Birds. It is instantly hailed as a classic.
The Beatles have found the formula that will allow them to stay together for years to come. One album per year, work on which will take up no more than a quarter of that year. Occasional live shows, but no touring.
George’s words to Howard Smith of WBAC-FM in New York City back in May of last year have been roundly vindicated:
Q: "You think the Beatles will get together again, then?"
GEORGE: "Uhh... Well, I don't... I couldn't tell, you know, if they do or not. I'll certainly try my best to do something with them again, you know. I mean, it's only a matter of accepting that the situation is a compromise. In a way it's a compromise, and it's a sacrifice, you know, because we all have to sacrifice a little in order to gain something really big. And there is a big gain by recording together — I think musically, and financially, and also spiritually. And for the rest of the world, you know, I think that Beatle music is such a big sort of scene — that I think it's the least we could do is to sacrifice three months of the year at least, you know, just to do an album or two. I think it's very selfish if the Beatles don't record together."
Source: George Harrison Interview: Howard Smith, WABC-FM New York 5/1/1970 - Beatles Interviews Database
About the author
Daragh Downes is a writer, critic and musician. He has written music features and reviews for The Irish Times and has discussed musical, literary and cultural matters on Irish national radio. For many years he taught at Trinity College, Dublin.