THE Walk

A 10-minute photo shoot. Four guys crossing a street. What could be less eventful? But the photograph taken for the last record the Beatles made, Abbey Road, has become a classic of album art — one of the best-known and most copied images in popular music.

It was Paul McCartney who came up with the street-crossing idea and worked out the details with photographer Iain Macmillan. The other Beatles liked the idea — ''with varying degrees of enthusiasm,'' says Macmillan — and agreed to meet at 10 a.m. on Aug. 8, 1969, outside their Abbey Road studio. A bobby held up traffic while the band walked back and forth across the street three times. Perched on a ladder in the middle of the road, Macmillan snapped six pictures from which McCartney chose the cover shot.

''It was nerve-racking,'' remembers Macmillan. ''Getting them to walk in the right way was difficult.''

The result was ironically eloquent, a jarringly mundane image of the larger-than-life Beatles. Even 28 years later, fans still flock to the site of the crossing and re-create the picture themselves.

Of course, not only tourists have been imitating the famous photo over the years. Booker T. & the M.G.'s ambled across a Memphis street for their 1970 album, McLemore Avenue, and alterna-funk band the Red Hot Chili Peppers cheekily parodied it on their 1988 The Abbey Road E.P., while the cover of rapper Chubb Rock's recent album, The Mind, also pays tribute. Even McCartney has joined the fun, digitally spoofing the famous scene for his 1993 album Paul Is Live (whose very title plays off the old rumors of McCartney's death, supposedly proven by evidence in the original photograph). Why is the cover so imitated? ''You can replicate it wherever you're making a record,'' says James Henke, chief curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. And hey, an association with the Beatles' best-selling album can't hurt. What band wouldn't want to carry that kind of weight? -EW.COM

John and George, Abbey Road session

a review from Rolling Stone, 1969

Simply, side two does more for me than the whole of Sgt. Pepper, and I'll trade you The Beatles and Magical Mystery Tour and a Keith Moon drumstick for side one.

So much for the prelims. "Come Together" is John Lennon very nearly at the peak of his form; twisted, freely-associative, punful lyrically, pinched and somehow a little smug vocally. Breathtakingly recorded (as is the whole album), with a perfect little high-hat-tom-tom run by Ringo providing a clever semi-colon to those eerie shooo-ta's, Timothy Leary's campaign song opens up things in grand fashion indeed.

George's vocal, containing less adenoids and more grainy Paul tunefulness than ever before, is one of many highlights on his "Something," some of the others being more excellent drum work, a dead catchy guitar line, perfectly subdued strings, and an unusually nice melody. Both his and Joe Cocker's version will suffice nicely until Ray Charles gets around to it.

Paul McCartney and Ray Davies are the only two writers in rock and roll who could have written "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," a jaunty vaudevillian/music-hallish celebration wherein Paul, in a rare naughty mood, celebrates the joys of being able to bash in the heads of anyone threatening to bring you down. Paul puts it across perfectly with the coyest imaginable choir-boy innocence.
Someday, just for fun, Capitol/Apple's going to have to compile a Paul McCartney Sings Rock And Roll album, with "Long Tall Sally," "I'm Down," "Helter Skelter," and, most definitely, "Oh! Darling," in which, fronting a great "ouch!"-yelling guitar and wonderful background harmonies, he delivers an induplicably strong, throat-ripping vocal of sufficient power to knock out even those skeptics who would otherwise have complained about yet another Beatle tribute to the golden groovies' era.

That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite, as they've done on side two, seems potent testimony that no, they've far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying.

No, on the contrary, they've achieved here the closest thing yet to Beatles freeform, fusing more diverse intriguing musical and lyrical ideas into a piece that amounts to far more than the sum of those ideas.

"Here Comes the Sun," for example, would come off as quite mediocre on its own, but just watch how John and especially Paul build on its mood of perky childlike wonder. Like here, in "Because," is this child, or someone with a child's innocence, having his mind blown by the most obvious natural phenomena, like the blueness of the sky. Amidst, mind you, beautiful and intricate harmonies, the like of which the Beatles have not attempted since "Dr. Robert."
Then, just for a moment, we're into Paul's "You Never Give Me Your Money," which seems more a daydream than an actual address to the girl he's thinking about. Allowed to remain pensive only for an instant, we're next transported, via Paul's "Lady Madonna" voice and boogie-woogie piano in the bridge, to this happy thought: "Oh, that magic feelin'/Nowhere to go." Crickets' chirping and a kid's nursery rhyme ("1-2-3-4-5-6-7/All good children go to heaven") lead us from there into a dreamy John number, "Sun King," in which we find him singing for the Italian market, words like amore and felice giving us some clue as to the feel of this reminiscent-of-"In My Room" ballad.

And then, before we know what's happened, we're out in John Lennon's England meeting these two human oddities, Mean Mr. Mustard and Polythene Pam. From there it's off to watch a surreal afternoon telly programme, Paul's "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window." Pensive and a touch melancholy again a moment later, we're into "Golden Slumbers," from which we wake to the resounding thousands of voices on "Carry That Weight," a rollicking little commentary of life's labours if ever there was one, and hence to a reprise of the "Money" theme (the most addicting melody and unforgettable words on the album). Finally, a perfect epitaph for our visit to the world of Beatle daydreams: "The love you take is equal to the love you make ..." And, just for the record, Paul's gonna make Her Majesty his.

I'd hesitate to say anything's impossible for him after listening to Abbey Road the first thousand times, and the others aren't far behind. To my mind, they're equatable, but still unsurpassed.