Fab Four lore... The Beatles were falling apart in 1969. During the disastrous 'Let It Be' sessions, the working title for their LP was 'Everest', for engineer Geoff Emerick's favourite brand of cigarettes, with plans initially called for the band members to charter a private jet to the Himalayas and shoot the cover photo there. With EMI desperate for product, and the group fanning its last few creative embers, they settled on a far simpler and closer concept: a shot of the quartet (George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and John Lennon) strolling through the crosswalk outside their studio on Abbey Road. Around 11:30AM on August 8, 1969, with traffic blocked, and photographer Iain Macmillan toting a ladder into the middle of the street, they got the photo shoot done in roughly 10 minutes... but no one noticed the fifth Beatle in the background...
"I remember we hired a policeman to hold up traffic while I was up on the ladder taking the pictures," Macmillan later told The Guardian. "The whole idea, I must say, was Paul McCartney's. A few days before the shoot, he drew a sketch of how he imagined the cover, which we executed almost exactly that day. I took a couple of shots of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road one way. We let some of the traffic go by and then they walked across the road the other way, and I took a few more shots. The one eventually chosen for the cover was number five of six. It was the only one that had their legs in a perfect 'V' formation, which is what I wanted stylistically."
The Abbey Road cover design was kept simple by not including the band's name or the album's title, which ironically fuelled more interest in the LP: fans focussed on the incidental details of the shot (i.e. Paul McCartney wasn't wearing shoes; the license plate on a car in the background reading 'LMW 281F'; the shadowed pedestrian eyeing the Beatles' stroll from the distance).
Post Note: Paul McCartney celebrated his 77th birthday on June 18, 2019
QuotaBillsMusic is the shorthand of emotion. - Leo Tolstoy
Where words leave off, music begins. - Heinrich Heine
Music is the soundtrack of your life. - Dick Clark
Music is the strongest form of magic. - Marilyn Manson
Music is to the soul what words are to the mind. - Unknown
The earth has its music for those who will listen. - George Santayana
Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life. - Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory. - Percy Bysshe Shelley
Making music should not be left to the professionals. - Michelle Shocked
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end. - Igor Stravinsky
Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician. - Kurt Vonnegut
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. - Ludwig van Beethoven
Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable. - Leonard Bernstein
Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail. - Luciano Pavarotti
One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain. - Bob Marley
The sweetest music in the world to every person is his own name. - Unknown
Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense. - Joseph Addison
Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune. - Kin Hubbard
Country music has always been the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy. - Dierks Bentley
Music is the tool to express life - and all that makes a difference. - Herbie Hancock
You can run out of garlic, but you can't really run out of music. - Jace Wayland
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music. - William Stafford
Each soul is tuned to a different pitch. Music is about harmonizing the soul. - Wu-Tang Clan
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. - Aldous Huxley
I'm a producer for fun. I'm not a professional schooled musician or anything. - Afrojack
The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie. - Agnes De Mille
Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide. - Pat Conroy
The greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make. - Truman Capote
Music Lover: A man, who upon hearing a soprano in the bathroom, puts his ear to the keyhole - Daffynitions joe-ks.com
If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up. - Anna Akhmatova
Great music is as much about the space between the notes as it is about the notes themselves. - Sting
Just as Jesus created wine from water, we humans are capable of transmuting emotion into music. - Carlos Santana
It is simply my life, music. I live it, breathe it, talk with it. I am almost unconscious of it. - Arthur Rubinstein
I think Paul McGuinness and U2 created the Irish music industry. It certainly wasn't there before that. - Van Morrison
All is beautiful and unceasing, all is music and reason, and all, like diamond, is carbon first, then light. - Jose Martin
What's the earth with all its art, verse, music, worth -
Compared with love, found, gained, and kept? - Robert Browning
Music is by far the most wonderful method we have to remind us each day of the power of personal accomplishment. - Chris S Salazar
Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. - Robert G Ingersoll
Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory. - Thomas Beecham
I've seen whales calving in the waters off Maui, and I've watched my children being born. But music is the most beautiful thing of all. - Steven Tyler