'COME TOGETHER'
"Come Together" heralds the more song-focused first side on Abbey Road, as Lennon transformed an idea he'd originally written for Timothy Leary's failed gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan. Leary, who was name-checked while attending Lennon's bed-in for peace earlier in the summer, ended up in jail on possession charges. That opened the door for Lennon to take back his song. He originally envisioned it as a Chuck Berry-style rocker, even directly referencing "here come old flat-top" from his 1956 hit "You Can't Catch Me." Paul McCartney suggested they slow things down as a way of differentiating things, leading the way with a swampy, mixed-forward bass line. Unfortunately, that didn't mollify Berry's publisher. Morris Levy sued, saying the two songs were still too similar. They settled out of court, with Lennon agreeing to record a batch of Levy-owned songs that became 1975's covers-focused
'SOMETHING'
The original studio version of this George Harrison song ended up stretching to nearly eight minutes, before a four-chord coda led by Lennon at the piano was excised. Lennon later sped up the same pattern to create the foundation on "Remember" for his 1970 solo album Plastic Ono Band. By then, Harrison had scored his first-ever A-side chart-topping single, a sign that the Beatles' other songwriter had officially come into his own. "For the first time," engineer Geoff Emerick later told Music Radar, "John and Paul knew that George had risen to their level." Joe Cocker – who'd already had a U.K. No. 1 hit with the Beatles' "With a Little Help from My Friends" – actually made the first pass at "Something," based on Harrison's original demo. His version wasn't released until after Abbey Road was already on store shelves. "Something" went on to became the second-most covered Beatles tune, after "Yesterday."
'HERE COMES THE SUN'
Harrison had endured a brutal winter marked by the collapse of the Let It Be project, a drug bust and increasingly contentious business meetings; then suddenly the first signs of spring arrived. "'Here Comes the Sun' was written at the time when Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: 'Sign this' and 'sign that,'" Harrison said in his autobiography I Me Mine. "So, one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton's house. The relief of not having to go and see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric's acoustic guitars and wrote 'Here Comes the Sun.'" They'd grown close over the previous months, as Clapton sat in on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and Harrison returned the favor on Cream's hit "Badge." Harrison completed that skeletal arrangement with more sounds from the then-new Moog synthesizer; Lennon, who was recovering from a car accident, isn't featured on this song.