My Life As an Air-Guitarist - Chapter 6: #3 "The End" - The Beatles


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Chapter 6: #3 "The End" - The Beatles

The Beatles. Only the Beatles could make their end one of the greatest masterpieces of all time. Abbey Road from front to back is incredible. In my opinion, their best work — hands down. This one final jam session to close out their final-recorded album is an emotional moment, to say the least. And at 2 minutes and 21 seconds, it is the shortest song on this list of my all-time favorite songs to air-guitar to. Unlike Peter Jackson's film "Get Back", it is short, concise, to the point, and leaves you wanting more. 

While this one has less opportunity musically than many of the others on this list to strut my stuff, it more than makes up for it in heavily weighted emotion. 

Like many of the songs you're reading about in these chapters, getting to the main event, aka, the guitar solo, is half the fun. And let's be honest. Not ever have I pulled out Abbey Road and decided to just put on "The End." 

Abbey Road is an intricately sequenced collection of songs that must be listened to in its entirety whenever possible. If you know you don't have the time to invest in a complete listen of Abbey Road, sometimes it's best to wait until you do. If nothing else, at least give side two its due with an entire play-through. In fact, some high school friends and I used to have a saying about Abbey Road which was, "Number 2, then 6 through." Meaning, start at track 2, "Something", then skip to track 6, "She's So Heavy," and from there let the album play through to the end. No one ever argues with this suggestion for an abbreviated listen. 

"The End" and the guitar solos in it are just genius parts that I celebrate every time I listen to this gem, along with the hand claps in "Here Comes the Sun," the bass playing in "She's So Heavy," the piano parts in "You Never Give Me Your Money," the horns in "Carry That Weight," and pushing the limits of my vocal range making every effort to match Paul as he belts out "She came in through the bathroom window!" among many others. All that to say, this should be viewed as a whole, and "The End" is just something that merely happens along the way.

But before any of the guitar playing, at first, one must join in with Ringo on the kick drum and get ready to partake in the rarest of rare on a Beatles album...a drum solo. 

Keep the kick going, pound the toms, and then get into the groove (Ringo has admitted he was partly copying Ron Bushy's drum solo in Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", and there's one to grow on.)

Even when the rhythm guitar kicks in, it's hard to pull me off of Ringo's hi-hat playing as he lays the beat down, I follow along with his open hits that quickly close out as he steps on the foot pedal. Fucking Ringo. And then he eventually loosens his foot, as the background vocals of "Love you, Love you!" join in, just letting the hi-hat ring out openly.

But then it begins, Paul, John, and George come together to exchange guitar solos. The final jam session before calling it quits for the greatest rock-n-roll band of all time. So why not take part? Three of the fab-four trade measures of solos, and I take on the persona of each Beatle as I play along with their parts, and of course, call out their names when they kick in..." Paul! Now George! Here's John!..." and so on.

The threesome goes around three times for a total of nine different solo parts by my count. I'm no Berklee grad, but I think I'm relatively accurate here. The 9th guitar lick, nothing but a crunchy, aggressive, jam on the same chord 13 or 14 times, comes to an abrupt halt. 

Listeners are left teetering on the edge of suspense, barely keeping their balance from falling off the ledge, held steady by nothing more than the piano notes of A, C#, and E, as they wait wondering exactly what is going to happen next... 

At this point, I've put down my air-guitar and am intensely jabbing at imaginary ivory in mid-air with my thumb (A), middle finger (C#), and pinky (E), fighting back tears as the Beatles are telling us all, it's over.

And through a harmony of "aaaaAAAAHHHHHH," George fights through with a guitar line that's as perfect for Abbey Road as it could have been for the ending credits to your favorite Thursday night sitcom back in the late 80s.

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