Someone recently gave me the Beatles’ Abbey Road on CD and upon listening to it, I was reminded of the odd way the Her Majesty song suddenly ends.
“…Someday I’m gonna make her mine <guitar note>, [abrupt end]”.
Does anyone know why it ends this way?
Was it some weird artistic expression thing?
Did they run out of tape?
Did someone stop recording too soon?
I believe that song originally occurred as part of the medley on side 2. I’m having trouble right now placing where in the medley it occurred, but there’s a succession of beats somewhere in the medley (I think at the end of Polythene Pam, but I’m not sure offhand), the beat beginning Her Majesty would have been the last beat in that succession. I think the song was stripped out, then replaced at the end. Had it been left in, it wouldn’t have ended abruptly, the medley would have continued immediately after.
Here’s a nice little web page with some interesting notes about the song Her Majesty
My WAG is that Paul wanted that song in there somewhere, but they/he never got a really good track down. The Beatles by then were known for their little LP eccentricities, so the just threw in a section of whatever track they had that was the best recording of the song. According to the above site, the song was arrange at over 2 minutes, but The Beatles in their genius realized that the clip they did include was a perfect irreverent ending to a great album.
According to Mark Lewisohn’s “The Beatles Recording Sessions,” and confirmed by George Martin and Paul McCartney, the song originally appeared as part of the side 2 “medley,” right in between “Mean Mr. Mustard” and “Polythene Pam.” They decided not to keep it, as it sort of dulled the momentum, and excised it from the tape. Their tape engineer (I believe Geoff Emerick), knowing the band rarely threw anything away for good, spliced it back in to the completed master after the end of “The End” and several seconds of leader tape. Consequently, it appeared on the test pressings, and the band thought it was a great little joke coming after the dramatic chord that ends “The End,” so they kept it.
The loud chord heard at the beginning of “Her Majesty” is really the final chord of “Mustard,” and those abruptly truncated three notes at the end are a climb up A-B-C# to the opening D of “Pam.” (“Her Majesty” is in D, so they also would have resolved to the tonic if it was a self-contained song.) If you have an editing program on your PC, or access to reel-to-reel tape, you can splice it back in where it went. It sounds pretty cool.