The End (Beatles song)


"The End" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1969 album Abbey Road. It was composed by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon–McCartney. It was the last song recorded collectively by all four Beatles, and is the final song of the medley that constitutes the majority of side two of the album. The song features one of the few drum solos recorded by Ringo Starr.

Composition and recording

McCartney said, "I wanted to end with a little meaningful couplet, so I followed the Bard and wrote a couplet." In his 1980 interview with Playboy, John Lennon acknowledged McCartney's authorship by saying, "That's Paul again... He had a line in it, 'And in the end, the love you get is equal to the love you give,' which is a very cosmic, philosophical line. Which again proves that if he wants to, he can think." Lennon misquoted the line; the actual words are, "And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make..."
Recording began on 23 July 1969, when the Beatles recorded a one-minute, thirty-second master take that was extended via overdubs to two minutes and five seconds. At this point, the song was called "Ending". The first vocals for the song were added on 5 August, additional vocals and guitar overdubs were added on 7 August, and bass and drums on 8 August, the day the Abbey Road cover picture was taken. Orchestral overdubs were added 15 August, and the closing piano and accompanying vocal on 18 August.
All four Beatles have a solo in "The End", including a Ringo Starr drum solo. Starr disliked solos, preferring to cater drumwork to whoever sang in a particular performance. His solo on "The End" was recorded with twelve microphones around his drum kit; in his playing, he said he copied part of Ron Bushy's drumming on the Iron Butterfly track "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida". The take in which Starr performed the solo originally had guitar and tambourine accompaniment, but other instruments were muted during mixing, giving the effect of a drum solo.
McCartney, George Harrison and Lennon perform a rotating sequence of three, two-bar guitar solos. The idea for a guitar instrumental over this section was Harrison's, and Lennon suggested that the three of them each play a section. The solos begin approximately 53 seconds into the song. Geoff Emerick, the Beatles' recording engineer, later recalled: "John, Paul and George looked like they had gone back in time, like they were kids again, playing together for the sheer enjoyment of it. More than anything, they reminded me of gunslingers, with their guitars strapped on, looks of steely-eyed resolve, determined to outdo one another. Yet there was no animosity, no tension at all – you could tell they were simply having fun."
The first two bars are played by McCartney, the second two by Harrison, and the third two by Lennon, then the sequence repeats. Each has a distinctive style which McCartney felt reflected their personalities. Immediately after Lennon's third solo, the piano chords of the final line "And in the end..." begin. Then the orchestration arrangement takes over with a humming chorus and Harrison playing a final guitar solo that ends the song.
"The End" was initially intended to be the final track on Abbey Road, but it ended up being followed by "Her Majesty". Although "The End" stands as the last known new recording involving all four members of the Beatles, one additional song, "I Me Mine", was recorded by three members of the group in January 1970 for the album Let It Be.
The 1996 compilation album Anthology 3 contains a remixed version of "The End", restoring tambourine and guitar overdubs mixed out of the original, and edited to emphasise the guitar solos and orchestral overdub. The track is followed by a variant on the long piano chord that ends "A Day in the Life", concluding the compilation. The drum solo was later used at the beginning of "Get Back" on the 2006 album Love.

Musical structure

The song commences in A major, with an initial I–IV–II–V–I structure matching the vocals on "Oh, yeah, all right!" This is followed by a iv dim–I pattern on "dreams tonight." During this, the accompanying bass and one guitar move chromatically from A to B and D, while the second guitar harmonises a minor third higher to reach F. An eight bar drum solo as a final statement of recognition to their "steady, solid drummer" ends with a crescendo of eighth notes and bass and rhythm guitar in seventh chords to the chant "Love you." The sequential three guitar solos rotate through I7 –IV7 changes in the key of A in a mix of "major and minor pentatonic scales with slides, double-stops, repeated notes, low-bass string runs and wailing bends". Gould terms these live studio takes "little character sketches":
Paul opens with a characteristically fluid and melodically balanced line that sounds a high A before snaking an octave down the scale; George responds by soaring to an even higher D and sustaining it for half a bar before descending in syncopated pairs of 16th notes; John then picks upon the pattern of George's 16ths with a series of choppy thirds that hammer relentlessly on the second and flattened seventh degrees of the scale. The second time through, Paul answers John's blusey flattened 7ths with bluesy minor thirds and then proceeds to echo George's earlier line, spiraling up to that same high D; George responds with some minor thirds of his own, while mimicking the choppy rhythm of John's part; John then drops two octaves to unleash a growling single-note line. On this final two-bar solo, Paul plays almost nothing but minor thirds and flattened sevenths in a herky-jerky rhythm that ends with a sudden plunge to a low A; George then reaches for the stars with a steeply ascending line that is pitched an octave above any notes heard so far; and John finishes with a string of insistent and heavily distorted 4ths, phrased in triplets, that drag behind the beat and grate against the background harmony.

The final "Ah" is in C with a spiritually evocative Plagal cadence IV–I on piano while the voices do an F to E shift. "And in the end the love you take" is in A major, but the G/A chord supporting the word "love" begins to dissolve our certainty that we are in A, by adding a VII. The next line shifts us to the fresh key of C, with a iv chord that threatens the dominance of the departing A key's F: "Is eq-ual" –iii "to the love" –vi –ii7 "you make". The final bars in the key of C involve a I–II–III rock-type progression and a IV–I soothing cadence that appear to instinctively reconcile different musical genres.

Critical reception

of AllMusic considered "The End" to be "the group's take on the improvised jamming common to heavy rock of the late '60s, though as usual The Beatles did it with far more economic precision than anyone else." John Mendelsohn of Rolling Stone said it was "a perfect epitaph for our visit to the world of Beatle daydreams: 'The love you take is equal to the love you make.'"
In 2007, "The End" was ranked at number 7 on Q magazine's list "The 20 Greatest Guitar Tracks".

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