“Come Together” by The Beatles

"Come Together" opens Abbey Road, the Beatles' 1969 album, and it's the sound of John Lennon at his most slinky and cryptic. He wrote it, though it carries the usual Lennon-McCartney credit, and it went out in Britain as a double A-side with George Harrison's "Something", reaching number 4 there and going all the way to number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

Everything about it is low-slung. Paul McCartney's bass line is the star, a sly, sliding growl that walks the whole track, while Ringo Starr's drums tumble and thud around it and he shakes maracas. Lennon sings lead and plays electric guitar, electric piano and tambourine and even adds handclaps; Harrison's guitar snakes in around him, and McCartney chips in backing vocals. The groove does all the talking.

George Martin produced it, with Geoff Emerick and Phil McDonald engineering, and the finish is clean and heavy at once, a swampy, bluesy crawl that sounds like nothing else on the album. Plenty of other acts have taken a run at it since, but the Beatles' own version is the one classic rock radio keeps coming back to.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.