On the Road Again

Thanks go out to Lazy Thoughts from a Boomer for reminding me that it was 40 years ago this week that The Beatles finished recording the songs for Abbey Road, their final album before the band broke up in 1970. Beatles fans have been congregating on London’s real Abbey Road lately to celebrate this anniversary and have their photos taken crossing the thoroughfare, just like John, Paul, George, and Ringo did for their iconic album cover.

Oddly, it was my father who introduced me to Abbey Road. I was a callow pubescent at the time it was released, and had just heard about the album, when suddenly my historically unhip architect progenitor returned home from his office one night, bearing a plastic-wrapped copy of Abbey Road. It seems he’d caught John Lennon’s quirky lead song, “Come Together,” on the radio, and had promptly gone out to buy the full record in hopes of figuring out what the hell Lennon’s lyrics meant. I remember him playing that song over and over again on our home stereo, much louder than he would ever have played his preferred Mantovani or Jimmy Witherspoon, and no doubt puzzling the neighbors. Yet he remained confused. “He wear no shoeshine he got toe-jam football/He got monkey finger he shoot Coca-Cola”? “He say ‘One and one and one is three’/Got to be good-looking ’cause he’s so hard to see”? Try as we might, my younger brother, Matt, and I couldn’t help explain, because, well, we didn’t understand the words either. But we dug the tune.

Listening to it now still brings back fond memories of my dad.