If you look past the growly vocal from Paul McCartney, there’s a sense of age evident in the final three tracks from the final Beatles album (Except, in both cases, not really; although recorded last, Abbey Road was followed by Let It Be in terms of release, and “Her Majesty” follows “The End” on the album, anyway); it’s in the grandiose orchestral arrangement of “Carry That Weight,” with the horns parping their importance before the song segues into an unbilled reprise of “You Never Give Me Your Money” from earlier in the album, or the strings surrounding the band as they sing “You’re gonna carry that weight, a long time” afterwards, like some John Barry Bond theme gone wrong. There’s a syrup-y sound here, something that feels at odds with the way the band had treated their arrangements before this point.
The age thing makes itself apparent in the lyrics, too; “Once there was a way/To get back homewards/Once there was a way/To get back home,” McCartney sings, with the clear implication that that’s not there anymore. Everyone joins in to remind themselves that they’re gonna carry that weight a long time, and McCartney goes on to admit, “In the middle of the celebrations/I break down…”
(That the “Boy! You’re gonna carry that weight” part is a group vocal has always made me wonder whether it’s meant to be supportive or taunting, the sound of the Beatles talking to Paul with disdain or understanding. Chances are, even McCartney himself didn’t know when he wrote it, so complicated were his relationships with the band at the time.)
And then, before everything gets too maudlin – because this is a sad suite, a collection of melancholy and loss, of the bad kind of nostalgia where you look back with regret that things aren’t the way they used to be – “The End” kicks in. Oh yeah! Alright!
Here, let’s listen to the track as released on the Anthology album decades later, without the “Oh yeah!” introduction, just to hear the band jam their little hearts out, but also with the orchestral elements more noticeable (And, yes, the final chord from “A Day In The Life” added at the end):
I love “The End,” in either version. Again, it’s very un-Beatles in a lot of ways, because when did they do solos like this? Because, at its heart, that’s what “The End” is: A collection of solos, whether it’s Ringo’s drum solo to start off, before John, George and Paul trade lead guitar lines as the race to the vocal pay-off. There’s a sense of playfulness, of trying to outdo each other with the music, of fun, in “The End” that almost balances out the sense of loss in the earlier two chapters of this medley; despite everything, they can still communicate through song. And then, the lyrics, again the work of someone feeling old, addressing a conclusion. What makes the end of “The End” so emotional for me, though, isn’t the “And in the end/The love you take/Is equal to/The love you make” by itself, but the harmonies immediately following, soaring upwards. It’s so sad, and so optimistic, at the same time.
I love that above animation (from the end of the Beatles Rock Band videogame); it’s very informed by the iconography of the ’60s and of the Beatles themselves, but it’s also… I don’t know. Empty enough, silent enough, to get something about the melancholy present even in those final notes across in a beautifully subtle way.