Worst Beatles song on Abbey Road

It's compact and it's got everything you need from the Beatles.

It doesn't really sound like The Beatles though. Sure, it's a great pop album in its own right, and there is now way that I'd speak unfavourably of "Abbey Road" as a whole. It stands among my fave Beatles albums too, but for The Beatles, as in their typical trademark sound, you'll probably have to go back to 1966 or earlier. 1967 had some of it in it too, only it was another Beatles (the psychedelic Beatles), but from 1968 onwards they were so eclectic and fragmenting they didn't really have that typical Beatles sound anymore. They may have tried to go "back to the roots" in some of those songs, but mostly it was their Hamburg roots rather than the Merseybeat roots. The last Beatles song that really sounded like The Beatles was "All You Need Is Love".

"their Hamburg roots rather than the Merseybeat roots"

what the hell does this mean? they went back and forth between the two. they got good in hamburg but they hardly picked up on new roots.

Didn't George always have a twenty quid note in his shoe/sandal?

what the hell does this mean?

Plain 50s rock'n'roll minus the melody/harmony element that George Martin helped add from "Please Please Me" onwards.

Geir, you make The Beatles sound crap.

Maxwell cos show off-y Paul has always irritated me.

"the end" -- ponderous po-faced pretense.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Most wtf moment of all these threads.

THE DRUMS! THE GUITARS! THE BEASTIE BOYS!

"the end" -- ponderous po-faced pretense.

Yes... but it still works.

I can't see anything po-faced in The End at all.

Not voting in this one. There are no bad songs on this album. I can't even rate one subjectively "not as good."

I pissed everyone off on the remasters thread just by mentioning I don't like this album so I won't repeat.

My vote- Something. Something in a way I vomit everywhere, more like.

Also, the end of The End is spectacular! Ballsy rock-out to stripped down, quirky piano and voices (and those little cheeky guitar licks!) to big ballad finish out of nowhere, all in the space of thirty seconds. And it all works perfectly.

xposts

Oh Dalek
you make me stand up
you make me sit down daleks
sit down Daleks
etc...

http://s.bebo.com/app-image/7925666873/5411656627/PROFILE/i.quizzaz.com/img/q/u/08/04/01/teletubbies_po.jpg

?

o_0

"Also I've decided "I Want You" is one of my favourite Beatles tracks - it's so terrifically epic and towering and jazzy and heavy and crunchy and it just overwhelms. Sabbath, two years before the fact basically."

It sounds absolutely nothing like Sabbath. Nothing. Also it is a shit song and it has my vote.

Abbey Road came out four months before Black Sabbath s/t. Dont know where the 2 year timeframe comes from.

Know what you mean about 'Something', I always found it too saccharine and I hate the way Sinatra's verdict always gets cited as somehow conclusive - but I found Take 37 as a surrogate for not being able to afford the remasters and I love it now

The soaring middle eight in Something makes the song.

Hi. This is a wholly unfair poll. Wholly unfair.

can I vote for two? Maxwell and The Endy-poo (just the part from "...and in the end" forwards)

You know if "Faust Arp" had been added as an option, it'd win by miles!

(Nobody voting "Her Maj" ?)

"Also I've decided "I Want You" is one of my favourite Beatles tracks - it's so terrifically epic and towering and jazzy and heavy and crunchy and it just overwhelms. Sabbath, two years before the fact basically."

It sounds absolutely nothing like Sabbath. Nothing. Also it is a shit song and it has my vote.

Abbey Road came out four months before Black Sabbath s/t. Dont know where the 2 year timeframe comes from.

― Bill Magill, Friday, September 25, 2009 9:18 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

True, but that noise ending is DECADES ahead of it's time.

Voted "Maxwell's", though this bootleg recording from the sessions almost redeems it:

Maxwell's Silver Hammer (John Sings)

'Her Majesty' is the perfect way to sign off.

Would be amusing if IWY(SSH) won both the best and worst track polls

would also be a flaming disgrace and would necessitate the deletion of ILM XD

gonna go with 'Something', I have decided, because urgh

Adam, you've heard of The MC5, right?

Definitely "Oh Darling." Generally prefer flimsy-whimsy like "Octopus's Garden" and "Maxwell's MC Hammer" over Paul-in-late-60s-primal-scream mode.

Not a fan of Oh Darling, but this can really only be between Maxwell's and Octopus for me. The rest all is sublime.

Oh Darling was the song it took me the longest to love. The clincher is when Paul goes all shouty over the arpeggiated guitars.

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Adam, you've heard of The MC5, right?

Not much, do they have a track that has a lot of white noise over it?

Several, from 69. Jazz noise odysseys.

"the end" -- ponderous po-faced pretense.

― flying squid attack (tipsy mothra), Friday, September 25, 2009 1:59 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

don't think you have heard 'the end', friendo.

Sabbath, two years before the fact basically.

"Abbey Road" released September 1969
"Black Sabbath" released February 1970

this album rules and i like every song on it to varying degrees though 'maxwell's silver hammer' is a little repetitive and grating. 'i want you' is sick, you take away the vocals and it's a dope-ass jazz track.

i think the first side of this is remarkable, that said i voted for "maxwell's silver hammer" even tho i think it's a cool & buoyant song

this was the best of the reissues btw

Thanks Scik Mouthy, I will definitely look into them!

this album rules and i like every song on it to varying degrees

totally

i can't vote for any of these--a perfect album. can see why people hate Maxwells, though

voted octopus's garden, but for years I always skipped come together and here comes the sun. now i love come together, and at least appreciate here comes the sun. at one point i did go thru a "maxwell's is trite garbage" phase, but i'm over it

I hardly like any of this album. What was Lennon doing? Lazy bastard.

iirc "octopus's garden" was revelatory on the remaster

i also think that this is their best album

don't think you have heard 'the end', friendo.

the ponderous part is the vamp, which does almost nothing and for too long too. the po-faced pretense is the cutie-pie denouement. that couplet is maybe the dumbest lyric mccartney wrote for the beatles.

(and because of its title and placement in the catalog, it gets taken and used as this sort of epitaph for the whole band, which is an injustice.)

"Octopus's Garden" distracts me more than "Maxwell," because I've been to the House on the Rock.

So have I and I'm still voting for "Maxwell's," my choice for the worst Beatles song of all-time (to whatever extent it really is a Beatles song - so much of this sounds like tracks from early solo albums to come). It's the very definition of arch and no doubt influenced a lot of lesbian folk music (if you're wtfing at that line, you've never heard lesbian folk music). 2nd worst: "Oh Darling." John was right - he should've sang it instead of Paul (if it had to exist in the first place).

But yet again, he rights himself with "Golden Slumbers" vying with "She's Leaving Home" as his loveliest melody. "Golden Slumbers" into "Carry That Weight" literally stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it. Why the fuck couldn't he keep this up?

It's the very definition of arch and no doubt influenced a lot of lesbian folk music (if you're wtfing at that line, you've never heard lesbian folk music).

o__0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLSKNzT0Ve8

I like Mac II! Definitely filler on there tho (if "Secret Friend" was on the original running order in place of 10 minutes of lesser stuff, I'd certainly put it in the discussion for best Beatles solo LP)

John has a way more interesting solo career, including his collaborations with Yoko, the Plastic Ono Band stuff, and Yoko's solo albums that he worked on as well. many of the early Yoko Ono albums have songs with more Beatles playing on them then are on actual Beatles songs. very cool experimental stuff giving maybe an alternate history of the Beatles if they kept going into pre-punk. John's solo work is patchy but i really enjoy things on just about all of his records ("Mind Games" being a hidden gem imo) right up to his death.

Paul seems to do best when he is just doing DIY albums at home experimenting w multitracking. makes sense as this is how some White Album tracks were done!

in the aftermath of the Napster/pre-iTunes era (1999-2004) I had many friends burning CD-Rs of Macca comps. I got one I treasure because of the formidable consistency of those A-sides, album tracks, and B-sides sitting beside each other.

there's some really great stuff on Ringo's 70s + 80s solo albums

mind games is excellent except for a couple really shitty songs (tight ass and meat city come to mind).

we've definitely done many versions of this. and i guess "they sure needed each other as checks and balances" is basically part of canonical beatles lore at this point. which certainly beats "if only yoko hadn't ruined everything" as far as the sophistication of narratives carried around by the general listening public. but imo the biggest problem with almost all the beatles solo records is, following an initial or nearly-initial burst of "i'm free!" creative greatness, they get lazy. maybe in a totally typical and understandable way: you've been one of the kings of the world for 5-6 years. time to just chill out and do whatever you feel like. hey, it's the Me Decade after all. this plays out in different ways and maybe overlaps a lot with them getting so far up their own success that they can't really be constrained or challenged by any of their collaborators.

macca gets the best results out of this - if you're in the mood for what he does - because he's just more restless musically and wants to try each new toy that comes within earshot. he also generally retains a gift for melody that is able to carry him through all but the dudliest of dudly pointless lyrical conceits and tangents. nothing close to the masterpiece-after-masterpiece production of the beatles, but highly listenable and for a fan (like me and several others here) very very enjoyable. but he also is very clearly surrounding himself with people who don't challenge him, esp. denny laine for a decade's worth of "sure boss, sounds good!" his best records - save early flourish ram - are produced out of weird circumstances, constraints, or collaborators: martin for tug of war, costello for flowers in the dirt, travel woes and tight timelines for band on the run, starting from scratch on the two mccartneys, etc.

with john it's more what y'all have been describing - the songwriting rapidly gets just kinda boring, you don't feel like he's really laboring over these things; indeed you feel like he wears it as a point of pride that he's not. unfortunately the muse strikes infrequently. i honestly think that POB aside you really are okay with the greatest hits for his solo career. it's a great greatest hits! there just aren't that many killer album tracks in that discography. i've listened and tried to find them. the exception of course is pussy cats. whatever its flaws that's not a boring record.

iirc, Denny Laine was kicked out of Wings for standing up to Paul.

McCartney II is, at this stage, the most overrated McCartney solo record. Back To The Egg, though - underrated as fuck, and I quite enjoy the fact that I'm one of a handful of people that consider it one of his finest records.

So, Abbey Road guys

What about it?

It contained within it the seeds of "Spies Like Us."

back to the egg and mccartney 2 are my favorites (well, along with ram and band on the run and chaos and creation)

sad that Gone Troppo is always overlooked when people discuss the best solo Beatles album

― soref, Wednesday, October 12, 2016 2:16 PM (two hours ago)

soref, where were you in 2006? You have officially joined the club that I think previously only comprised myself and Geir.

I was gonna say!

The time is now.