I have many mem­o­ries grow­ing up of gin­ger­ly plac­ing my father’s Abbey Road LP on the turntable and spend­ing the after­noon lying on the floor and peer­ing at the pho­tos inside the album cover’s gatefold—trying to wrap my head around what kind of hairy genius­es could make music like this. I had no inkling that this was their final record­ing togeth­er, that the band was about to come apart. None of that mat­tered to me. I didn’t quite grasp how this band evolved from the teen pop sen­sa­tions in iden­ti­cal suits and hair­cuts with their legions of flail­ing school­girl fans and goofy com­e­dy troupe ban­ter. This seemed like an entire­ly dif­fer­ent entity—and the par­tic­u­lar sub­lim­i­ty of the med­ley on side 2 (lis­ten to it here) had me lift­ing up the nee­dle and drop­ping it back at the intro to “You Nev­er Give Me Your Mon­ey” over and over.

That med­ley is such an impres­sive demon­stra­tion of The Bea­t­les’ range of voice and sen­si­bil­i­ty that it almost func­tions as a cap­sule for the sound of their whole lat­er career—all the weird nar­ra­tives, blues, bal­lads, and gor­geous­ly lush hymns and lul­la­bies. What remains con­stant through­out every Bea­t­les’ record—even before George and Ringo’s song­writ­ing contributions—is the vocal and lyri­cal inter­play of Lennon/McCartney, and it’s all on fine dis­play in the med­ley.

George Har­ri­son described side 2 in 1969 as “a big med­ley of Paul and John’s songs all shoved togeth­er.” Lennon gave George and Ringo more cred­it for the med­ley in an inter­view that same year:

We always have tons of bits and pieces lying around. I’ve got stuff I wrote around Pep­per, because you lose inter­est after you’ve had it for years. It was a good way of get­ting rid of bits of songs. In fact, George and Ringo wrote bits of it… lit­er­al­ly in between bits and breaks. Paul would say, ‘We’ve got twelve bars here– fill it in,’ and we’d fill it in on the spot. As far as we’re con­cerned, this album is more ‘Beat­ley’ than the dou­ble (White) album.

How­ev­er it all came about, it’s the med­ley’s strange lyri­cal twists, mélange of vocal styles, and pow­er­ful har­monies that stay with me, and that I find myself singing soft­ly, even after hav­ing gone sev­er­al years with­out hear­ing the album in full. Per­haps you do this too. Now we can hear what The Bea­t­les’ them­selves sound­ed like in the stu­dio sans instru­ments with the iso­lat­ed vocal tracks for the side 2 med­ley at the top of the post. Hear the full album ver­sion here and see the Med­ley track­list below.

You Nev­er Give Me Your Mon­ey

Sun King

Mean Mr. Mus­tard

Poly­thene Pam

She Came in Through the Bath­room Win­dow

Gold­en Slum­bers

Car­ry That Weight

The End

via Eric Alper

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Short Film on the Famous Cross­walk From the Bea­t­les’ Abbey Road Album Cov­er

John Lennon’s Raw, Soul-Bar­ing Vocals From the Bea­t­les’ ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ (1969)

The 10-Minute, Nev­er-Released, Exper­i­men­tal Demo of The Bea­t­les’ “Rev­o­lu­tion” (1968)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Sep­tem­ber hav­ing begun, let us lis­ten to its song. Rather, let us lis­ten to 38 of its songs. Or, speak­ing even more pre­cise­ly, 38 ver­sions of one of its songs: “Sep­tem­ber Song,” orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Ander­son for the 1938 musi­cal Knicker­bock­er Hol­i­day, which has since made its way into the Amer­i­can pop song­book. A few Sep­tem­bers ago, Ken Freed­man of famed inde­pen­dent radio sta­tion WFMU tried to spin every ver­sion of “Sep­tem­ber Song” he pos­si­bly could on his show. Toward the end of the month, he post­ed on WFMU’s Beware of the Blog a roundup of the 38 finest ver­sions he found. “Noth­ing beats the James Brown ver­sion from his 1970 LP Soul on Top,” says Freed­man, ”on which he was backed up by the Louis Bell­son Big Band, with arrange­ments by Oliv­er Nel­son.” You can hear it just below:

Some of these 38 only broad­ly count as a ver­sion of “Sep­tem­ber Song,” which, of course, only makes the col­lec­tion more inter­est­ing. Take, for instance, John Lennon’s “cov­er,” which occurs acci­den­tal­ly in the course of an unre­lat­ed record­ing. Freed­man describes it as “a work in progress called ‘Dear John,’ report­ed­ly one of the last songs Lennon was work­ing on before his death. It’s includ­ed here only because his melody and lyrics stum­ble into ‘Sep­tem­ber Song’ mid-way through the tune, elic­it­ing a chuck­le from Lennon.” Lis­ten to it, and con­tin­ue your month’s true musi­cal begin­ning, below: