The Long And Winding Road To Nowhere,,,

So today is February 9, and it’s the 50^th anniversary of The Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan, and I may have watched it, and if not I saw the one the week after or two weeks after. I remember, seriously. I was 7. But all that talk has got me thinking not of the beginning of their career, but of the end. That’s the way I am.

The Beatles recorded most of what would become Let It Be in January of 1969. It was a fiasco, and in the end they were left with tapes featuring hundreds of hours of musical chaos that nobody wanted to touch.

A few months later they got back together and recorded what would become Abbey Road. This was released in the fall of 1969 and took its rightful place in the canon of Beatles masterworks.

In January of 1970, George Harrison went back to the studio to put some finishing touches on one of the songs recorded the previous year. Then the whole mess was given over to Phil Spector to sort out and render presentable. This is an over-simplification of a complicated history. There was a promo version of the soon-to-be-released album, called Get Back, which I heard on the radio as a “CFRW Exclusive,” and which had the pre-Spectorized versions of some of the songs, but what ultimately hit the stores was an album called Let It Be, named for the song that became the first (of two) hit singles from the LP, though the single version was somewhat different from the album version. (That’s important; if you don’t know why, you probably shouldn't be reading this.)

The album came packed in a box, with a big book, which accompanied the film, also called Let It Be, that was released to cinemas at the same time as the LP, but by the time I got around to buying the album, which was in August of 1970, not a single copy of the book version was to be had, and I had to settle for the LP, sans book, but with a red apple label. (The film didn't do very well, and it’s on YouTube if you’re curious. I was.)

It was the last Beatles album. I emphasize that because I've read so many latter day discographies that put Let It Be before Abbey Road. They do this, presumably, because the tracks for Let it Be were recorded earlier than the tracks for Abbey Road. This may be so, but that doesn't make Abbey Road the last Beatles album, the poetic correctness of ending that album with The End notwithstanding.

Abbey Road was well ingrained in our minds before Let It Be made its public appearance, the neural pathways of our brains permanently altered by the bang bang of Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. This is important information for all the no-brains who insist that Let It Be came before Abbey Road.

But the most important part of this story is that I bought the album in Minneapolis. I was 13. My hair was short, much shorter than I wanted it to be. It did not feel right to be buying a Beatle album with such short hair, but there was nothing to be done about that. I had to buy it anyway, and I scoured the downtown area for a copy with the book, unsuccessfully. I bought the copy without the book, with the red Apple label. I was familiar with most of the songs from the CFRW exclusive, which I had surreptitiously taped on my Sanyo portable cassette recorder, but they had not played Dig It, Maggie Mae, One After 909, Across The Universe, or Two Of Us, though I had heard Two Of Us on the promo that the featured on Ed Sullivan earlier in the year, the last such appearance of the group on the show, on which Paul looked as if he hadn’t slept (or washed his hair) for a month.

I want to know who’s playing bass.

And The Long And Winding Road, which became The Beatles’ final hit single, sounded quite different from the version I’d heard, having all those strings and angelic voices added by Maestro Spector. Paul was, reportedly, incensed. Paul, though, not surprisingly, has had the last laugh. He has redone the song, changing the arrangement each time, and never quite scaling it back down to basics, on Wings Over America, Give My Regards To Broad Street, Tripping The Live Fantastic, Good Evening New York City, and Back In The USA, just in case we didn't get the point.

And then there was Let It Be Naked, consisting of remastered takes of the tracks from Let It Be, at the behest of Sir Paul, without M. Spector’s overdubs, released in 2003, and which seemed to take the world not exactly by storm.

If you want to hear The Long And Winding Road the way I heard it back in early 1970 coming from the promo copy of Get Back on the radio, listen to the version on Anthology 3; that’s it.  

So let’s hear it for Let It Be, the last Beatles album...