Here Comes the Sun King

You are tuned to THE ZOO, where the deep cuts still get the needle and the liner still tells you why the tape mattered. Pull Abbey Road off the shelf and you will find two suns sitting on the same side of the record, written by two different Beatles, recorded weeks apart in the same building, and almost given the same name. The one we are talking about is Sun King, the quiet doorway into the long medley on side two. For a short stretch in the summer of 1969 it carried the working title Here Comes the Sun-King. John Lennon later said the title was trimmed because it sat too close to George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun. That little collision of titles is the whole story of Abbey Road in miniature: four men who could barely stand in the same room still finishing each other’s sentences on tape.

Sun King is Lennon-McCartney on the label and Lennon in the room. It is the second piece of the suite that runs from You Never Give Me Your Money through The End, the stretch Paul McCartney had been pushing as a way to use up song fragments that would never stand alone. Lennon’s fragment is barely a song in the verse-chorus sense. It is a slow sway, a three-part vocal stack, a bass line that walks like a man half asleep, and a handful of nonsense words that sound like Portuguese and Italian and are neither. John, Paul and George lean into one microphone and sing “quando para mucho” and the rest of that mock-Latin lullaby as if they had rehearsed it for a carnival that never existed. The joke is gentle. The blend is not. Those voices, stacked the way they had been stacked since Please Please Me, still lock. Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald caught it in Studio Two at EMI on Abbey Road. George Martin sat at a Lowrey organ and painted the soft chords underneath. Ringo Starr kept the pulse with drums, tambourine and maraca, never rushing a bar that was supposed to float.

The basic track went down on 24 July 1969, tagged to the next fragment, Mean Mr Mustard, so the two pieces were cut as one piece of tape. They ran thirty-five takes. Take seven wandered off into Ain’t She Sweet, the old Gene Vincent number they had cut in Hamburg years before, and that stray take later turned up on Anthology 3. Take 35 was the keeper. Paul put the bass on track one of the eight-track, Ringo the drums on track two, John a guitar on track three, George a guitar on track four, John’s guide vocal on track six. Overdubs followed on the 25th and the 29th. By the time the medley was crossfaded, Sun King no longer had a hard start or a hard stop. It rises out of the last chord of You Never Give Me Your Money and sinks into Mustard without a breath. That is why it feels longer than its two minutes and twenty-six seconds. You are already inside the suite before you notice the title.

The other sun on the album belongs to George, and the radio has played it so often that people forget it was a private complaint set to music. Here Comes the Sun was written in Eric Clapton’s garden at Hurtwood Edge while Harrison ducked another round of Apple business meetings. The riff is in seven, then drops into the straight groove, the kind of metric shrug he had picked up from Indian time cycles and from simply being bored with four-on-the-floor. The backing track was cut on 7 July 1969, which happened to be Ringo’s twenty-ninth birthday. John Lennon was in the control room and not on the floor. He had cracked up the Austin Maxi in Scotland with Yoko, Julian and Kyoko aboard, and he was still stitched. George taught the song to Paul and Ringo, they cut thirteen takes, and George announced the best one as take twelve and a half because nobody in that room wanted to say the number thirteen out loud. He played a Gibson J-200 acoustic. Paul played the Rickenbacker bass. Ringo played the kit. Later came handclaps, a harmonium that was wiped, an eight-piece string and woodwind chart from Martin, and finally the Moog synthesizer George had installed at Kinfauns and then hauled into EMI. The Moog line that glides over the last verse replaced an earlier woodwind part. A varispeed tweak lifted the whole master by about a quarter tone. The unused guitar solo sat in a box until the anniversary tapes.

Put the two suns next to each other and you hear the last workable version of the band. Harrison’s song is open air, capos, a capoed seventh-fret brightness, a man glad to be out of the office. Lennon’s Sun King is indoor weather, reverb, a slow three-part haze, a man writing a postcard from a country he had never visited. Both were finished while the partnership was already in probate. Abbey Road was recorded from February into August 1969 and released in Britain on 26 September, in America on the first of October. It was the last album they made together, even though Let It Be, older tape cleaned up by Phil Spector, came out the following spring. Martin produced. Emerick engineered most of the heavy lifting after walking out of the White Album and the Get Back sessions and then coming back because the music, this time, was worth the room.

The band that walked into that room had already done the impossible twice. John Lennon and Paul McCartney met in 1957 at a Woolton church fete, Paul showing John how to tune a guitar and how to play Twenty Flight Rock. George Harrison, younger and already a serious guitarist, was auditioned on the top deck of a Liverpool bus. Stuart Sutcliffe and then Pete Best filled the early holes. Hamburg forged them: eight-hour nights, Preludin, leather, and the star club roar that turned a skiffle group into a rock and roll band. Brian Epstein cleaned them up. George Martin signed them to Parlophone when nobody else would, heard Please Please Me as a hit, and became the fifth ear in the room. Ringo Starr replaced Best in August 1962 and gave the records their backbeat. From Love Me Do through Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band they rewrote what a pop single and then what an album could hold. Rubber Soul and Revolver opened the door. Pepper walked through it. The White Album proved they could fill a double LP with four soloists who still shared a name. By the time they reached Abbey Road the business was a mess, the marriages were public, and Yoko Ono was in the studio because John would not record without her. They still made the best-sounding record of their lives. McCartney’s bass on that album is a masterclass. Harrison’s two songs, Something and Here Comes the Sun, are the ones Frank Sinatra and every classic-rock jock have never been able to retire. Lennon’s Because, I Want You, and this Sun King are the strange, beautiful leftovers of a writer who was already halfway out the door.

Sun King owes a nod to Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross, the instrumental that had been on the British charts, and Lennon said as much. The suspended chords, the tide of reverb, the way the guitars seem to breathe rather than strum: that is the Mac record translated into a Beatles vocal blend. It also owes a nod to the old BBC light-programme habit of fake continental romance, the same instinct that gave us the cod-French of Michelle and the circus collage of Mr. Kite. On the Love remix, George and Giles Martin lifted Sun King into a new frame with Octopus’s Garden, proof that the piece was sturdy enough to be moved. On the 2019 Abbey Road anniversary set you can hear take 20 of the Sun King and Mean Mr Mustard pairing, looser, with the studio talk still on the tape, and you can hear how little separation there was between a joke and a master.

If you are building a show around this record, play Sun King into Mean Mr Mustard into Polythene Pam and do not talk over the crossfade. That run is the last great edit of the analog era, done with razors and chinagraph pencils, not with a playlist. Then, later in the hour, give George his sun. Tell the listener the working title, the superstition about take thirteen, the Moog in the barn, the garden at Hurtwood Edge, the birthday kit part. Tell them the four of them never toured this album. The rooftop on Savile Row in January 1969 was the last public stand, and Abbey Road was the last studio stand. The zebra crossing photograph, shot on 8 August by Iain Macmillan while a policeman held the traffic, became the cover nobody has improved on. Paul is out of step. That is the only fact the cover needs.

The catalog still lives where Apple Corps keeps it. The official home is thebeatles.com, the page that carries the reissues, the films, and the long memory of the partnership. Their official Facebook page is facebook.com/thebeatles, the Instagram is instagram.com/thebeatles, and the X account is x.com/thebeatles. Apple Corps and Universal run a moderated fan room at the Beatles Official Fan Group, which is the closest thing to a living fan club the current office endorses. For session dates, personnel and the paper trail on both suns, the long-running fan archive at The Beatles Bible remains the reference desk serious listeners actually use. And when you want the song played by people who still care about the space between the notes, you are already in the right place: THE ZOO, commercial-free, album-minded, and still willing to hold a medley together instead of skipping to the single.