Heaviness incarnate possesses The Beatles. weighs it up.
N THE MORNING OF AUGUST 8, 1969, THE FOUR Beatles spent 10 minutes walking in both directions across the zebra crossing on Abbey Road. Just enough time for photographer Iain Macmillan to take six shots of the group, three one way, and three the other. After the final frame, they headed directly whence they had come: Studio 2 at EMI Studios, to try to finish a song they had started almost six months earlier by recording 35 takes in one 10-hour overnight session at Trident. I Want You (She’s So Heavy) was the first song The Beatles began on their Abbey Road quest, and upon final completion on August 20 it would be the last song that George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr ever recorded together. Clearly, something in the way it moved would not let them be.
The Beatles kept coming back to I Want You (She’s So Heavy) in spite of the turbulence that whirled among and around them during this period. And it definitely was all four Beatles (plus keyboardist Billy Preston) who found the song compelling, albeit for different reasons. John Lennon, its author, was driven by his sexual fixation on Yoko Ono – whom he married shortly before recording began and had bedded down in EMI Studio 2; this was him letting it all hang out. Key aspects of Lennon’s performance, notably his mantric guitar riff and the way his vocals surge from falsetto pleas to animal moans, prefigure his primal therapy
of a year later, mapping his violent emotional outbursts.
While not personally invested to the same visceral degree, the others were clearly fascinated by what John had delivered them. Starr got to swing jazzily in the verses and bludgeon the “she’s so heavy” section on its upward spiral towards oblivion. Harrison brought the noise, in the unwieldy futuristic shape of his newly purchased Moog synthesizer, which bedrocks the song’s simulation of the mania in Lennon’s head (or his desire to have the song obliterated by noise). McCartney was so enthused that he breaks out his most outlandish bass runs, surpassing even his performance on Come Together. Such was the mutually combative work ethic that drove the pair to the highest highs right to the end.
The end of I Want You (She’s So Heavy) was a moot point. The taped performance would have run out at 8:04, where the original edited take ended, without conclusion. So producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick had anticipated a fade. Lennon’s decision to literally cut the tape at 7:37 has a lasting shock value apt for a song which represents The Beatles at their most literal yet also opaque.
Its weight is a given: that repetitive arpeggiated riff, that Lennon and Harrison devoted so much time to maxing out, would be echoed two decades later in the D-tuned component of grunge. At their emotionally wracked 1995 Reading Festival appearance, Soundgarden encored with a version that lasted 10 minutes. Yet for the real heavy heavy sound, The Beatles’ original belongs to infinity.