I love The Beatles and I’m most certainly not ashamed of it. A blog composed mainly of stories about embarrassing favorite songs would therefore seem like the wrong space to write something about them. And honestly, there’s not much left to say about the four lads from Liverpool, but please bear with me here.
My favorite Beatles album is Revolver. Have AI write you an essay on why it’s a masterpiece.
My second favorite is Abbey Road.
***
When Thanksgiving has passed and we have that tiny sandwich of time before full-bore Christmas overload, usually only a week or two, when college football has wrapped up (usually in some shade of disappointment) and the lull before the bowl games begins, the weather in Denver cannot decide what it wants to be. We generally get chilly dawns and sun-drenched middays. High cirrus clouds bring muted, cool afternoons. The low southern sun draws its shadows over freshly dead trees, a novelty. Traffic rumbles through scattered, darkened leaf remnants and black street dust deposited by the most recent minor snowstorm.
It’s in these hours of low light, in the afternoon after the sun has done its work for the day but is still giving slight effort as it loafs behind occasional, inert cloud cover, when traffic is snarled as people adapt to driving in dusk, that Abbey Road finds its sweet spot.
***
The Beatles were just always kind of there. I think “Love Me Do” is the first song I remember knowing with any certainty (and I was familiar with “Band on The Run” even before that. Sacrilege.) I never actually listened to the Beatles. I knew my parents liked them; they had all the records but rarely played them. And while the classics were on the radio here and there, I don’t recall them being a big part of my life, at least until my sophomore year in high school.
My tall, slender, elegant, blonde, fetchingly eccentric English teacher was a Beatles fan. The subject came up in class one day. I don’t recall the circumstances, but I do remember getting home from school that afternoon and diving headlong into my parents’ Beatles collection. In my room over the next few weeks, I listened to all they had; the two compilations, 1962 to 1966 and 1967-1970 were soon worn out on my turntable.
I’d go into English class early if I could, or stay a little late, and discuss The Beatles with my teacher–what songs I liked the most, what I thought the meanings were, whatever. Anything to hang out for a little while. At fifteen, life was expanding rapidly and falling apart at the same time due to myriad issues at home and elsewhere. I found that spending time with an adult like her, outside the vortex, provided me with a bit of calm sanity. Our conversations made me feel like her peer, her friend, and like a person—not just a teenager with a shitty attitude.
As the school year faded out, my crush on my teacher, and on the Beatles, faded with it.
***
A strange thing happened once I got to college. I absolutely loathed the Beatles. I never took the time then to examine exactly why, but I think in retrospect I associated them with my parents, and, still in rebellious teenager stage, I lumped a lot of things in there with the anger I felt about God-knows-what. Everything.
In my fraternity house on campus, I lived across the hall from a Jedi-level Beatles fan. Walking by his room I’d hear Beatles 24/7…Early, late, classic, obscure, whatever. He had multiple t-shirts—the classic black and white logo shirt, Yellow Submarine, the Let it Be cover…I think he even had a Vox bass like Paul’s.
His obsession drove me nuts. I had obsessions of my own (REM, The Replacements) but was, naturally, unaware of the glass house I inhabited. One hungover morning, in an unprompted fit of stupidity, I found a permanent marker and wrote probably the nastiest, most juvenile and cruel sentences of my life on his door regarding the death of John Lennon. I thought it was funny. I was the only one in the house who found it funny. I was the only one on the planet who would have found it funny. It did irreparable harm to our burgeoning friendship, and I earned points for being a world-class asshole among the other denizens of our house.
Then a strange thing happened. A year or so later, a VHS copy of (the now tragically out-of-print) The Compleat Beatles documentary ended up on the coffee table in an apartment where I was living. Somebody popped it in one afternoon and I found myself transfixed. Malcom McDowell’s grave narration rumbled with gravitas; the footage was edited perfectly into one dramatic arc after another. Transfixed, I lived and died my way through this saga of The Beatles.
At one point in the doc, the band is in crisis. A series of missteps has marred their seeming invincibility. Marianne Faithfull comes on screen, blasé and serious all at once, and says something like, “Things were not going well for The Beatles at that time…people didn’t know if they could still do it. Then suddenly, there was a party, somewhere, a club opening I think, and Paul had an acetate of a new song…”
The camera cuts to Paul’s face behind a mic, sitting at a piano. He looks directly into the camera and sings,
“Hey, Jude, don’t make it bad…”
The moment reduced me to nothing. The clip was the filmed version of “Hey, Jude,” a kind of precursor to a music video, with people dancing and singing all around the band (which I found out later the band hated. Beside the point.) The scene knocked the wind out of me and along with it, the last of my vitriol and anger; I felt only astonishment, awe, and love.
I watched The Compleat Beatles four or five times over the next week and ended up absconding with the VHS (long-overdue apologies to whomever the owner was.) Then, I sought out my former housemate and told him about my revelation. He knew Marianne Faithfull’s dialogue word-for-word. He smiled and nodded. He wasn’t spiteful or mean, even though I deserved him to be. I apologized repeatedly and far beyond his patience. But after that, we were friends, tenuously. We had some good times together, but he never trusted me enough to talk Beatles, even though I tried.
He’s gone now. But if he was still around, I’d still be apologizing to him.
***
Like Revolver, I won’t waste your time discussing the brilliance of Abbey Road. But here’s the point:
One of my daughters, to her misfortune, asked me a Beatles question one afternoon back in early 2020. We were coming home from her music lesson. I don’t remember the question, but I remember driving with her and listening to the back end of Abby Road. I orated on how the song “The End” features the only drum solo Ringo ever recorded with the band, followed by guitar solos by Paul, George, and John. All four got their moment on this very last song.
This particular car ride occurred within a few months after I’d gotten sober. My emotions were beaten, bloodied, and tenderized. I was prone to unpredictable highs and lows and was living in a state of maddening confusion. All the shit I had suppressed for my entire adult life was swimming around right under the surface; at any moment, any form of any emotion could breach like those South African Great White Sharks on Discovery.
And so it was, as we turned from Havana Street to Florence, that the final lyrics of The End, and of The Beatles, came through the stereo:
And, in the end, the love you take
Is equal to the love you make.
I had heard it a thousand times. It’s the last thing you hear on The Compleat Beatles. It’s been beaten to death like it’s a Christmas song. It’s embossed on weathered, discarded coffee cups at your local thrift store. It’s a simple, unambiguous line; there’s nothing to it. Yet I had to turn my head, my whole body, in the driver’s seat so my daughter would not see me coming apart at the seams.
Thankfully, we were a block from the house. And this particular coming-apart-at-the-seams was all internal. Like my ribs were being cracked open and Tabasco generously applied, but internal, nevertheless. Once in the driveway, she hopped out to go into the house. Holding my voice steady, I told her I had to make a quick call and would be in in a few.
“Okay,” she said, smiling, then grabbed her bass guitar from the back seat and trotted through the open garage door.
I stared at the stereo, I glanced at the garage. I looked down into my lap; the palms of my hands met my forehead with a thud.
Is that it? Could that possibly be it? Have I missed it this whole time, this whole life? It can’t be that fucking simple. “The love you take is equal to the love you make?” It can’t be that fucking simple.
Turns out, it is that simple.
***
These last pre-dusk afternoons of November seem hushed, like the city is crawling around under the blankets, fishing around for the sheet that’s in there somewhere. Sounds and voices are muffled, whispered, personal. The trees have little left to say. Some leaves crackle and shift, but most have moved on in their process of decay. Christmas isn’t being pounded into our heads yet.
And Abbey Road, just for now, a week and a half each year, is the sheet we’re looking for, the one that covers us between the blanket and the bed. No anger, no hatred, no analysis–just pure, beautiful music.
And the love you make.
Joseph D Trussell 
Your writing is so immersive. I always feel like I
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