Beatles The Love You Make Is Equal
Gene Cryder
McCartney said, "I wanted [the medley] to end with a little meaningful couplet, so I followed the Bard and wrote a couplet."[3] In his 1980 interview with Playboy, John Lennon acknowledged McCartney's authorship by saying, "That's Paul again ... He had a line in it, 'And in the end, the love you get is equal to the love you give,' which is a very cosmic, philosophical line. Which again proves that if he wants to, he can think."[4] Lennon misquoted the line; the actual words are, "And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make..."[5]
Recording began on 23 July 1969, when the Beatles recorded a one-minute, thirty-second master take that was extended via overdubs to two minutes and five seconds. At this point, the song was called "Ending".[6] The first vocals for the song were added on 5 August, additional vocals and guitar overdubs were added on 7 August, and bass and drums on 8 August, the day the Abbey Road cover picture was taken.[7] Orchestral overdubs were added on 15 August, and the closing piano and accompanying vocal on 18 August.[8][9]
All four Beatles have a solo in "The End", including a Ringo Starr drum solo. Starr disliked solos, preferring to cater drum work to whoever sang in a particular performance,[10] and in fact this is the only drum solo Starr recorded with the Beatles.[11] His solo on "The End" was recorded with twelve microphones around his drum kit; in his playing, he said he copied part of Ron Bushy's drumming on the Iron Butterfly track "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida".[12] The take in which Starr performed the solo originally had guitar and tambourine accompaniment,[6] but other instruments were muted during mixing, giving the effect of a drum solo.[13]
The first two bars are played by McCartney, the second two by Harrison, the third two by Lennon, and then the sequence repeats twice.[2][17] Each has a distinctive style which McCartney felt reflected their personalities. Immediately after Lennon's third solo, the piano chords of the final line "And in the end ..." begin. Then the orchestration arrangement takes over with a humming chorus and Harrison playing a final guitar solo that ends the song.
"The End" was initially intended to be the final track on Abbey Road, but it ended up being followed by "Her Majesty". Although "The End" stands as the last known new recording involving all four members of the Beatles during the band's existence, one additional song, "I Me Mine", was recorded by three members of the group (Lennon being absent due to having privately left in September 1969) in January 1970 for the album Let It Be.
The 1996 compilation album Anthology 3 contains a remixed version of "The End", restoring tambourine and guitar overdubs mixed out of the original, and edited to emphasise the guitar solos and orchestral overdub.[9] The track is followed by a variant on the long piano chord that ends "A Day in the Life", concluding the compilation.[9] The drum solo was later used at the beginning of "Get Back" on the 2006 album Love.
Paul opens with a characteristically fluid and melodically balanced line that sounds a high A before snaking an octave down the scale; George responds by soaring to an even higher D and sustaining it for half a bar before descending in syncopated pairs of 16th notes; John then picks upon the pattern of George's 16ths with a series of choppy thirds that hammer relentlessly on the second and flattened seventh degrees of the scale. The second time through, Paul answers John's bluesy flattened 7ths with bluesy minor thirds and then proceeds to echo George's earlier line, spiraling up to that same high D; George responds with some minor thirds of his own, while mimicking the choppy rhythm of John's part; John then drops two octaves to unleash a growling single-note line. On this final two-bar solo, Paul plays almost nothing but minor thirds and flattened sevenths in a herky-jerky rhythm that ends with a sudden plunge to a low A; George then reaches for the stars with a steeply ascending line that is pitched an octave above any notes heard so far; and John finishes with a string of insistent and heavily distorted 4ths, phrased in triplets, that drag behind the beat and grate against the background harmony.[20]
Richie Unterberger of AllMusic considered "The End" to be "the group's take on the improvised jamming common to heavy rock of the late '60s, though as usual, The Beatles did it with far more economic precision than anyone else."[25] John Mendelsohn of Rolling Stone said it was "a perfect epitaph for our visit to the world of Beatle daydreams: 'The love you take is equal to the love you make.'"[26]
In the early days of this blog, I published a series of posts ranking every Beatles song from worst to first. Ten years on, I figured it was time to consolidate those old posts into one comprehensive list, and make a couple minor edits along the way.
Another example of White Album bloat. This one is a perfectly fine little song with a nice guitar riff (one of their best, actually. The Beatles never really were that much about guitar riffs), but not a heck of a lot else.
When I was very very young, this was among my favorites. Then, for a very long time I more or less forgot about it and it was relegated to the bottom of the list. Listening to it closely again for this project, I was reminded of how solid a song it really is. Great vocals by Paul, great drumming by Ringo, lovely background vocals. A devastating little song about betrayal.
Great background vocals is what sets this song apart for me. Paul and George follow closely behind John, echoing his lyrics, kicking in on each line a second or two before John finishes to create a lovely layered effect.
Their first serious foray into a folk-inspired sound, but the heart of this song is John at his cuttingly bitter best. Unlike some of his other unhappy-love songs, this one is not an attack on the woman who hurt him, but is almost entirely directed inward. He noted that this was of his first truly introspective songs, and it comes through clearly.
And here was the magic of the 12-string guitar made clear. That opening chord! The fadeout! The solo! And throughout the song, the guitar and a virtual wall-of-sound brought to life by Ringo and his drums.
1. The Abbey Road Medley (You Never Give Me Your Money/Sun King/Mean Mr. Mustard/Polythene Pam/She Came In Through The Bathroom Window and Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End) from Abbey Road
If they had ended at this point, it would have been perfectly adequate. Still, it finishes rather abruptly, suggesting that we are meant to read this ending as a false climax. Many of the loose ends have been tied up, but the final chapter is still to come.
Props to Ringo's awesome drum solo with the constant bass drum. I think Abbey Road was the Beatles best rock album and it was the hright of the Beatles popularity and inspiration to countless artists. George Harrison has very good tone on his guitar and has soem sick solos in this song. The meaning of the last line is the more you give the more you get. (as Paul mentions when he was a guest on SNL) "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" - JFK
The message here is that what goes around comes around. Create Love and you will get love in return(in time). What you give is what you get. It also makes you think positive and shows that it can work in the negative too.
At the same time it's a look into how much the groups growing differences effected Paul. He loved everything about making music with these guys and he knew that they couldn't keep their differences from ripping them apart any longer. Lots of people blame Paul for the break up because he was the one that officially called it off but I think he was just following through on what they were all feeling at the time...
yeah it is, weezerific. Basically what I think this song is saying is that after you've lived your entire life and made many mistakes and had many successes, the only thing that you'll really see is the love that you've recieved and the love that you've given.
is used in the same way as Shakespeare used rhyming couplets to finish off acts of his plays (although, as an aside, most will correctly argue that William Shakespeare did not actually write his plays. That was Thomas Bowdler's job, as Shakespeare put lots of naughty stuff into his plays...)
Both this book's title, and its author's name, represent powerful fragments of Beatles lore. Peter Brown was best man at John Lennon's wedding to Yoko Ono - in fact he had previously filled the same role for Paul McCartney - and was immortalised by Lennon, in 'The Ballad of John & Yoko', as the man wo "called to say, you can make it ok, you can get married in Gibraltar near Spain". The book's title is taken from the appropriately named Beatles song 'The End', quoted in the frontispiece:
Peter Brown, meanwhile, may not have been so much of an 'insider' as either his appearance in Lennon's self-mythologising ballad, or the subtitle of his book, suggest. He certainly can't claim to have been a member of the innermost circle of Beatles intimates - the so-called 'Liverpool Mafia' - such as, say, Neil Aspinall. This has led to some criticism, and it's true that Brown sometimes 'makes up' dialogue or thoughts for events and situations at which he was not a first-hand witness; but he was enough of an insider that he has an immensely interesting story to tell, and lucky for us he tells it in a brisk and entertaining way.
Similarly, this book can't be placed in the top rank of Beatles books, in terms of renown. While not obscure, it's nowhere near as well known as Philip Norman's 'Shout' or Albert Goldman's 'The Lives of John Lennon', for example. This is a pity, because while it may have its faults, this is a hugely enjoyable book, and an essential read for anyone interested in the Beatles.
This is not a conventional biography. Brown doesn't bother the reader with potted personal histories of the various Beatles' forbears, and in fact begins his narrative in May 1968, as Cynthia Lennon returns from holiday to find Yoko Ono sitting in the kitchen of the Lennons' Weybridge mansion, wearing Cynthia's dressing gown, and sporting an expression which is simultaneously inscrutable and unmistakably post-coital. This is a refreshingly grabby way to begin the book, and Brown keeps up this pacy style all the way through.
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