A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Abbey Road

The album is 50-years-old this year; the crosswalk older than that though its paint is always fresh.

Ann and I stood beneath the Empire industrial canopy of Victoria Station. I kept peering upward, admiring the soaring iron and arching brickwork. There were pigeons fluttering in the rafters. Each of us held an empty coffee cup; there are no trash bins in the immense concourse because they make handy receptacles for timed explosives. We wandered outside through the grand wide-open portal to smoke cigarettes in London’s silver rain.

Ann unfolded a pocket Tube map with impossibly small print. She studied it. I was struck by its linear elegance; few of us appreciate the role clever graphic design plays in our lives, from distorted, off-scale yet clear paper route guides to directional signage. Ann said, “We can take the Victoria line one stop to Green Park and then change to the Jubilee line and go a few stops to St. John’s Wood. Do you want to go to Abbey Road?”

Did I want to go to Abbey Road? This was my third visit to London and I’d yet to make the Beatles pilgrimage. Previously time or circumstance had intervened. For instance, marching through the British capital in 2005 with my older and dominant brother who always believed the Dave Clark Five were better than the mop-tops declared any such hair-brained suggestion on my part unspoken and moot. Now naturally there was the cringe-worthy bloody tourist aspect of this pop culture hadj to cope with. About ten years ago I signed up for the Magical Mystery Tour bus ride through Liverpool. It was an enjoyable albeit excruciatingly embarrassing experience. I felt like a colonial yokel paraded on display for the locals: God, people actually lived in the house where George Harrison was born and they didn’t need nor want me and 50 others slack-jawed in their front garden; I remember a stocky fellow tumbling from the Empress, the pub on the cover of Ringo’s first solo album Sentimental Journey, waving a pint and a lit cigarette, laughing like a maniac, conducting us through the chorus of some song in his head.

I said, “Yes.”

There is a framed, candid photograph of the Beatles downstairs in the Crooked 9. They’re sitting on the front steps of Abbey Road Studios waiting to walk the eponymous cover shot. The enlarged glossy print cost less than the matting and framing. I don’t know how many digital generations old the reprint is, but Paul’s suit registers blue instead of the charcoal on the album sleeve. He’s examining his fingernails, picking at them. John is smoking, contemplating the sky. George is wearing sunglasses and gazing to the side, frame right. Ringo’s on the far left, smoking and maybe clocking what George is looking at. They are bored, perhaps with one another and all alone together.

Atop the Underground’s WAY OUT is a coffee kiosk called Helter Skelter. Bootleg Chinese merch. Of course there is. St. John’s Wood is a ritzy neighbourhood, old world money, incalculable pounds of it. Ann and I turn right and walk through the light drizzle toward the memorial statue in the middle of the roundabout. And suddenly there it is: that zebra crossing we all know. And there’s traffic running all over it, lots of it, motorized and pedestrian. A corner of cameras and chaos. A conspiracy-minded, alternative facts tour guide is lecturing his motley gaggle: “Paul was left-handed but on the sleeve he’s holding his cigarette in his right hand.”  There’s no obvious street sign to photograph or steal. As with Liverpool’s Penny Lane, the local council got wise: Don’t install them, sell them!

Ann and I walked up the wrong side of the street and turned and doubled back. One fine, humid fourth of July morning I stood outside 2120 South Michigan Avenue and thanked God for my self-loathing and sub-clinical depression, the blues as a happy chronic case. Abbey Road Studios is Chess Records, a place of aural illumination where the gospel is writ in a few universal chords. There once was a note pure and easy. And Abbey Road Studios, still operating, is so much more than the Beatles; there is Pink Floyd, Bowie, the Stones, the Clash… You can’t go inside unless you’re a client but there’s a gift shop.

I watched a greasy guy with an ample flaccid belly shamelessly stripping down to try on Dark Side of the Moon t-shirts. I averted my eyes and muttered “Jesus” to the face of an Aladdin Sane greeting card. People disgust me. Another card showed Paul Simonon smashing his bass, the London Calling homage to the first RCA Elvis LP, black and white photo, pink and green type and perhaps the advent of the rock album era. Ann touched my arm. I complained we were surrounded by trinkets and all kinds of trash. “Try to picture everything here in the context of our home and not this store,” Ann said. “Step away and then buy what you want.”

Well, who doesn’t need an Abbey Road Studios fridge magnet and a couple of coasters? Ann spotted the real prize. We purchased a colourful, highly stylized rendering of the studio and the crosswalk. The angular print bends space because it is impossible to fit the white bars of the crossing into the same frame as the white façade of the studio. If you study the actual album cover, you can just make out the pillars of the studio’s gate by the Beetle.

To catch the Tube back to Bloomsbury we were compelled to walk in the footsteps of giants, same direction too. Ann asked me if I wanted my picture taken. I declined. I wanted Ann and me to cross Abbey Road together and not hold up traffic. I wanted the two of us to be the only baby boomers on Earth who traversed Abbey Road and were not photographed doing just that. Then again, given that we were in London I suspect there’s CCTV footage of us somewhere.       

      

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