The Album They Made After It Was Already Falling Apart
On the morning of 8 August 1969, a photographer named Iain Macmillan climbed a stepladder in the middle of Abbey Road in north London and took six pictures of four men walking across a zebra crossing. Paul McCartney had drawn him a rough sketch of the shot a few days earlier. It was the cover of an album that didn't yet have its band's name on it. It didn't need one.
The band making it was in bad shape. The Get Back sessions earlier that year had been close to a disaster, and the tapes were shelved. Then McCartney went to producer George Martin with a strange request: could they make one more album "the way we used to"? Martin's answer came with a condition — only if he could produce it the way he used to. Both got what they asked for.
Abbey Road came out on Friday, 26 September 1969. It wasn't the last Beatles record to be released — Let It Be arrived in May 1970 — but it was the last one they made. The final day all four of them were in the studio together was 20 August 1969, spent mixing "I Want You (She's So Heavy)." "The End," recorded over the summer, was the last song all four played on, and it holds Ringo Starr's only drum solo on a Beatles record. It closes with a line McCartney said simply arrived while he was looking for an ending: "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make."
Then, after a pause, comes "Her Majesty" — a joke of a song, tacked on after the ending.
The album sat at No. 1 in Britain for 11 weeks, lost the spot to the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed, then took it back for six more. In America it reached the top in its third week and stayed for 11 straight. On the cover, Paul is barefoot — he later said it was simply a hot day — which fed a rumour that he had died. In 2010, the crossing became the first zebra crossing in history to be given Grade II listed status.
The story had one more chapter. In 2023, "Now and Then" — built on a John Lennon demo that Yoko Ono had once given to Paul — was finished after Peter Jackson's team used AI-assisted stem separation to lift Lennon's voice off the tape, with new bass and drums from McCartney and Starr and guitar George Harrison recorded in 1995. In February 2025, it won a Grammy for Best Rock Performance — the band's first in 28 years.
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