Who's in the Background of the Beatles Abbey Road Cover?
Some interesting things can be found in the background of one of the most iconic album covers ever released.
Whether you’re a Beatles fan or not, you’re probably familiar with the band’s most iconic album cover, Abbey Road. This cover, of course, is the one with the four members of the Beatles strolling across a street in London. While the group is the main focal point of the photograph, there are some interesting things to be noted in the background.
Abbey Road was the 11th Beatles album, the last they recorded together, even though Let It Be was the final album for the band (it had been mostly recorded prior to Abbey Road). The Abbey Road cover was unique in that the band’s name or album title didn’t appear anywhere on the cover. It simply showed the four members–Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison–walking across a street at a crosswalk, or zebra crossing, as it is known in the United Kingdom and other places around the world.
The photoshoot took place in a convenient place for the band — right outside their studio on Abbey Road. Initially, their preliminary title for the album was going to be Everest, which was from their engineer’s favorite cigarette brand. A shoot in the Himalayan mountains was going to take place, but it was scrapped for a much easier photo shoot in London.
On the morning of August 8, 1969, a policeman held traffic on the road so photographer Iain Macmillan could get the iconic shot. He climbed a ladder to take the photographs, and the whole thing only took around 10 minutes. Macmillan credited McCartney with coming up with the idea as he had drawn the plan out a few days before. Macmillan took only six pictures and picked the one where the men’s legs were spaced about the same.
Because of the shoot’s quick nature and the cover’s simplicity, fans could see exactly what was going on that day. Paul McCartney wasn’t wearing anything on his feet, opting to take off the sandals he was wearing after the first two shots. There was a group of people in white standing farther up the street, and a Volkswagen Beetle was parked on the curb with a license plate that read “LMW 281 F.” But there is another figure caught in the photograph watching the group, standing on the sidewalk at the right of the picture, who had a story all his own.
The man was an American tourist named Paul Cole. He wasn’t there because he wanted to get a glimpse of the Beatles. He actually didn’t want to follow his wife on their next tourist stop, opting to spend his time outside. He struck up a conversation with the police officer holding up traffic for the photoshoot and saw the four men walking across the street.
Cole had no idea who the men were or what they were doing, only thinking that they looked like, as he said in an interview, a bunch of “kooks.” Months passed until Cole’s wife, who was a church organist, got a copy of the album to play at a wedding. It was then that Cole discovered he was on one of the most famous album covers of all time.
Other rather strange things also spawned from the Abbey Road album. The white Volkswagen Beetle in the picture was stolen multiple times since it was owned by a person who lived in the flats across from the recording studio. It eventually sold at an auction in 1986 for £2,530 and was put on display in a German museum in 2001.
Several rumors and urban legends also surrounded the cover. Most revolved around the rumor that McCartney was actually dead because of a car accident and that an imposter had replaced him. The picture was said to be of a funeral procession because of the clothes Lennon and Starr were wearing and because McCartney was barefoot. McCartney being barefoot was somehow linked to people being buried without shoes in certain cultures. Even more far-flung theories began to surface about the album cover that had to do with McCartney’s fictional demise.
The Abbey Road crossing continues to be a huge draw for tourists, and they travel to the site to imitate the pose the Beatles put on in 1969. It even has its own webcam, where if you watch for just a little while, you’ll see someone stopping traffic or standing in the road striking the same pose the Beatles did.
Sources: The Beatles Bible, Ultimate Classic Rock, Whizzpast, Biography, The Guardian, Buzzfeed