
It’s maybe the iconic image connecting music with an era. Abbey Road in 1969 was the gold standard. Like, were you in the crosswalk, on that day, at that time? It was an exclusive group, and a high bar. Fast forward to 2022, and what remains of that exclusive group is Paul and Ringo, and then there’s all the rest of us.
She came in through the bathroom window. I always pictured a smallish window, four feet by four feet, and about five feet off the ground. Curtains? I don’t know if there were curtains. But I saw it as a swing-out casement window, opening to the back yard. How she fit in through my mind’s version of the bathroom window, I don’t know. Maybe it was a conjured vision of the bathroom window in our house when I was a kid. Or it could be something to do with the window Robert Redford used to get away in The Sting.
The thing about a great image, in a song or in written word, is that everyone gets to see it their own way. If you don’t get people to see their own personal version of that image in their head, then whatever it is you were trying to do, it’s not such a great image.
When you hear “the pump don’t work cause the vandals broke the handles”, do you see one of those old-fashioned water pumps you find sometimes, rarely, in the country? You’ve seen that pump. I’ve seen that pump. Bob Dylan knew his way around imagery.
The Abbey Road image is a Volkswagen Beetle parked on the sidewalk, and green leafy trees on a city street. Crosswalk stripes, jeans, bare feet, black, and white, the line down the middle of the street behind them. For me, the sound that accompanies the image is “Because” and “The Medley”. The joke of it is the image was almost accidental.
Photo: Abbey Road, Photographer: Iain Macmillan