As the story goes, after the fragmented, acrimonious, and fragmented sessions that yielded The White Album, Paul McCartney, longing for the old days, suggested the band come together for one last show, writing an album together with guitars instead of with tape reels. The show in question was the infamous unannounced rooftop concert in London (which was beset by party-pooping policeman), which was their final public appearance. The concert was recorded, and then spliced together with studio songs for an album, which was shelved, due to the group’s dissatisfaction with the project, until restraint-less producer Phil Spector got his hands on it. The album that resulted is…a mixed bag. Like The White Album before it, it contains some of the Beatles’ greatest material (see: Across The Universe, pop ballad among pop ballads Let It Be), but it’s wildly uneven (see: Dig It, The Long And Winding Road).

More than anything, the record shows the different directions the Beatles would take in their solo careers, George railing against materialism and selfishness, John strumming his acoustic guitar and waxing philosophic, and Paul writing great pop songs (see: The Long And Winding Road). The live numbers from the rooftop concert, especially I’ve Got a Feeling, Dig A Pony, and Get Back, are generally successful, but when they attempt to recapture the energy of their pre-Rubber Soul output, their effort is too bogged down by the years separating them from the early days of the British Invasion, and all of the ego tripping that had taken place therein.

Many people have tried to make a federal case out of Phil Spector’s treatment of the final product–there’s even an official release that’s stripped of his overdubs. It certainly doesn’t give the album any more cohesiveness than it already lacked. Public Enemy No. 1 here is The Long And Winding Road, to which Spector felt the need to add a 34 piece orchestra and choir to. According to Wikipedia, Paul McCartney was so incensed over this treatment that he cited it as one of the six reasons as to why the Beatles needed to dissolve as a legal entity, calling it “intolerable interference.” Spector’s intrusion is much less noticeable elsewhere, to the point where most of the rooftop songs are completely untouched (Let It Be’s production is even tasteful). To quote George Martin, the overdubbed version of Long…is just “so uncharacteristic” of the Beatles that when heard in the context of the rest of the album, it hurts the tracks around it. Phil Spector, as it stands, has been characteristically unapologetic.

Controversial overdubs and Across the Universe (my favorite John song) aside, it doesn’t stand up at all as a follow up to Abbey Road–it’s too fractured and flawed an effort, and its delayed release undermines the brilliant final statement of the group’s swan song.