Video will appear as you scroll through the story
The Beatles · S9 E3
The Sessions
Abbey Road Studios, summer 1968. Thirty songs, four solo artists sharing a studio, Yoko at John's side, Ringo walking out for two weeks. The cracks are visible
August 22, 1968. Ringo Starr sets down his drumsticks in Studio Two at Abbey Road, tells the others he's leaving the band, walks out of the building, and doesn't come back for two weeks.
"Don't Let Me Down" (The Beatles, 1969). The rooftop concert at 3 Savile Row, January 30, 1969: the last time the Beatles ever performed live. By this point the White Album sessions had nearly destroyed the band, and this raw, desperate performance captures what was left. John is singing to Yoko, the wind is blowing through their hair, and the police are on their way to shut it down. Everything about this is the Beatles holding on by their fingernails.
Don't Let Me Down, The Beatles (1969)
John's vocal performance on the rooftop is one of the most emotionally exposed moments in the Beatles catalogue. He forgets the words partway through and improvises a line, and the band just keeps rolling. Billy Preston's electric piano fills the gaps between the vocals with gospel-flavored runs that hold the whole thing together. Listen for how George's guitar and John's vocal seem to lean on each other for support, two musicians who know this might be one of the last times they play together.
Sources
Lewisohn, Mark. "The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions." Hamlyn, 1988.
Sulpy, Doug and Schweighardt, Ray. "Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of The Beatles' Let It Be Disaster." St. Martin's Griffin, 1997.
Four Solo Artists
The White Album sessions run from May 30 to October 14, 1968, and they feel nothing like any previous Beatles recording. Instead of working together, the four members increasingly record alone, using the others as session musicians for their own songs. Paul overdubs entire tracks by himself while the others wait in the canteen. George brings in songs that get rejected or sidelined, and his frustration is mounting.
Sources
Lewisohn, Mark. "The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions." Hamlyn, 1988.
Emerick, Geoff. "Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles." Gotham Books, 2006.
“I felt I wasn't playing good, I felt the other three were really happy and I was an outsider. I went to see John, who said, 'I thought it was you three.' Then I went to see Paul, and he said, 'I thought it was you three.' I didn't even bother going to George.”
— Ringo Starr
TAP TO REVEAL: What did the Beatles do when Ringo quit?
Yoko
The elephant in the studio is Yoko Ono. Since May 1968, she is at every single session, sitting beside John, occasionally offering suggestions, sometimes lying on a camp bed in the corner of the studio. For a band that had an unspoken rule against bringing wives and girlfriends to recordings, this is a seismic shift. George Martin later said the atmosphere became so tense that he took a holiday in the middle of the sessions and let his assistant Chris Thomas produce several tracks.
Sources
Emerick, Geoff. "Here, There and Everywhere." Gotham Books, 2006.
Martin, George. "All You Need Is Ears." St. Martin's Press, 1979.
The White Album Sessions
Happiness Is a Warm Gun, The Beatles (1968)
The title came from a gun magazine cover that George Martin showed Lennon in the studio. The song shifts through at least four distinct sections: a quiet, finger-picked opening that builds into a distorted blues, a doo-wop parody, and a driving rock finale. It reportedly took over 70 takes to nail because the tempo and time-signature changes were so tricky that the band kept falling apart. Lennon called it his favourite track on the White Album.
Happiness Is a Warm Gun, The Beatles (1968)
"She's not a girl who misses much." The lyric reads like a collage of Lennon's obsessions stitched together without concern for logic: heroin references, sexual imagery, political satire, and a doo-wop love song all fighting for space within three minutes. The "bang bang, shoot shoot" refrain is both a gun metaphor and something far more intimate, and John never clarified which he meant. The song is the White Album in miniature: four different styles crashing into each other and somehow making something brilliant out of the wreckage.
Who played drums on 'Back in the U.S.S.R.' after Ringo walked out?
George Harrison is tired of having his songs rejected. He walks into Abbey Road with a composition he considers his best work, and to make sure John and Paul take it seriously, he brings an outsider: Eric Clapton, the best guitarist in England, to play lead on a Beatles record.
0 XP earned this session