The Long And Winding Road Ends

I thinks this makes officially makes me old . . . 

Fifty years ago tomorrow, May 11, 1970, The Beatles released their final single, The Long And Winding Road (for you kids, singles once had a physical manifestation).  Like most of its predecessors it became #1 in the United States.  It's one of my least favorite Beatles songs, suffering from Phil Spector's post-production layering on of strings and other instrumentation and much preferring the more stripped-down original version recorded (below) in early 1969 during the abortive Get Back recording sessions.  The prior release, the classic Let It Be, should have been their farewell.


The Beatles hold and influence on pop music over a more than six-year period was phenomenal.  The first six months of 1964 saw Beatlemania explode across the U.S. - in April, 13 of the top 100 singles were by the band and 65% of all records sold were by The Beatles.  They had four #1's in that time frame (She Loves You, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Can't Buy Me Love, Love Me Do) along with two at #2 (Twist & Shout, Do You Want To Know A Secret) and Please, Please, Me reached Number 3.  After that initial flurry of releases things calmed down to a more steady pace for the singles.

Though I'd seen their Ed Sullivan appearances in February and March of 1964 and occasionally heard them on our car radio, it was only in February 1965, when home sick, my parents gave me a radio to have next to my bed, that I became an avid listener, so the first single I distinctly remember debuting was Eight Days A Week, released on the 15th of that month.   From then through the release of Get Back in April 1969 I still have memories attached to most of the singles though by the time Abbey Road was released that fall I was in college and my taste had turned to the rougher sound of the Stones who were reaching their peak (on December 5, Let It Bleed was released).

Of fifteen Beatles albums released in the U.S. between 1964 and 1970, thirteen topped the charts, the others being Something New (1964) which got to #2 but was blocked from the top spot by the soundtrack album for A Hard Day's Night, and the soundtrack for the movie Yellow Submarine, which also reached #2 in early 1969, blocked by the White Album, released only seven weeks earlier and which topped the charts for 9 weeks (and spent 186 weeks on the Billboard 200).  The Beatles still hold the record for most cumulative weeks at #1 on the album chart with 132 weeks; second is Garth Brooks with 52.  Since the beginning of the Billboard charts in the early 1950s the Beatles have more #1 albums than any other artist.

From July 13, 1964, with the release of A Hard Day's Night, through May 11, 1970, The Beatles released twenty U.S. singles of which 16 (including the final three) hit #1.  The only exceptions were Nowhere Man (#3), Yellow Submarine (#2, though its B-side, Eleanor Rigby reached #11, so probably a #1 if you counted both sides), Lady Madonna (#4), and The Ballad of John & Yoko (#8) - released while Get Back was still #1, with only John and Paul appearing on the song.

The B-sides of four #1 singles were also hits - She's A Woman, the flip side of I Feel Fine, which was #4; Day Tripper, flip of We Can Work It Out, reaching #5; Strawberry Fields Forever the #8 flip of Penny Lane; and Revolution, hitting #12 as the flip of Hey Jude, The Beatles' best-ever selling single which topped the charts for eight weeks in the fall of 1968.

An oddity was the single released as a double A side in October 1969; Something and Come Together.  At the time, Billboard counted each side of a single separately in reporting sales and charting but several weeks after its release Billboard announced it would start counting both sides of singles in calculating chart positions and The Beatles had another #1 as a result.  It was also one of the few times the band released a single with songs appearing on an already released album (Sgt Pepper, Rubber Soul, and the White Album contained no singles).

The longest intervals between single releases were the 7 1/2 months between Hey Jude (8/26/68) and Get Back (4/11/69) and six months from Yellow Submarine (8/5/66) to Penny Lane (2/13/67).  As teenagers we were well aware of both gaps, wondering what was up with the boys, and if Paul was dead.

During the 32 months between Yellow Submarine's release and that of Get Back, The Beatles released only five singles but finished with a flourish, releasing five more singles from April 1969 through May 1970.

As for staying power, 1, the Beatles album released in 2000 and containing all of the group's #1 singles in either the U.S. or U.K. was the best selling album of the first decade of the 21st century worldwide and the 4th best selling album in the U.S. over the past thirty years, with 31 million copies purchased to date.

And now our daughter plays lullaby versions of Beatles songs to help our 5 month old grandson fall asleep.