ABBEY ROAD
[size=9]Abbey Road - Iain MacMillan[/size]
At first the album was going to be called Everest, after the brand of cigarettes smoked by the engineer Geoff Emerick.
It was suggested to make a photograph with the Mount Everest in the background. But none of the Beatles could be bothered to travel that far for an album cover.When asked how far they wanted to go, the reply came: "Why don't we just do it in the street?"
Paul immediately made a rough drawing and freelance photographer Iain Macmillan, a friend of John and Yoko, was asked to make the picture.
[size=9]Paul's drawing[/size]
On Friday August 8. 1969, at 11.35 am, Iain stepped on a small ladder in the middle of Abbey Road, while a police officer stopped the traffic. The Beatles walked up and down the zebra crossing in front of the EMI Studio and Iain took six pictures. The fifth being the best. Not only was it the only photograph on which all four were in step, but also they walked away from the studio. A matter which seemed important to some of them at the moment.
Thanks to the research of Mark Lewisohn we know now that Macmillan used a Hasselblad camera, with a 50 mm wide-angle lens, aperture f22, at 1/500 sec.
Linda Eastman took some extra pictures of the Beatles, while they were waiting for the session.
This time the album came without a title on the front cover, and no lyric sheet ... being quite simple, it just had one photograph on the front, and one on the rear. For the back cover Iain Macmillan took a photograph of one of the many old-style tiled street signs.
[size=9]Abbey Road back cover photo - Iain MacMillan[/size]
On the original cover, the Beatles deliberately did not list 'Her Majesty' at the end of side 2. But no one informed the industry moguls in the US. As a result, the song was added to the eight track's listing and to some of the albums. It was eventually removed again from the cover. Thus, the album again differed ever so slightly from the British release.
A few months later every detail of this and the previous Beatles sleeves were studied the world over to search for clues for the dead of Paul McCartney. "I started to get letters and cards from people outlining how obvious it was that Paul was dead," recalled George Martin. "They said that they understood all our clues on the covers over the past few years years and, you know, I started believing it myself."
Peter Blake too was almost fooled: "We went to visit Paul. We talked about the rumors and he said, "You know I
