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Se quedaron de ver en el departamento de McCartney media hora antes, ubicado a escasos metros de la famosa calle y cada quien decidió vestirse como mejor le pareciera. <anchor>El fotógrafo fue Ian McMillan</anchor> quien prácticamente hizo esta fotografía con muy poco tiempo de preparación, pero con toda la confianza depositada pues era amigo de la pareja Yoko-Lennon y alguien de fiar para el director creativo de la banda.
The Man Behind The Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road’ Cover Reflects On Its Icon Status
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# The Man Behind The Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road’ Cover Reflects On Its Icon Status

David Chiu
Contributor
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

David Chiu is a freelance music writer based in New York.

Sep 24, 2019,08:21am EDT

Updated Sep 24, 2019, 08:21am EDT

This article is more than 4 years old.

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The famous cover design of the Beatles' 1969 album 'Abbey Road,' by John Kosh, with the iconic photo ... [+] taken by Iain Macmillan.

Credit: © Apple Corps Ltd.

Had it not been for a very tight deadline, the now-iconic cover design for the Beatles' classic album Abbey Road might have appeared quite differently today, according to John Kosh, the former creative director for the band's label Apple Records. Back in 1969, he was conceiving the look for the next Beatles album titled Get Back when he later found out that it was being replaced on the release schedule by a new record called Abbey Road. Now Kosh had to quickly come up with a brand-new design before the record hit the shops. “I suddenly found myself, 'By God, I've got to do this and get it out on Wednesday?’” he recalls today. “That's how it all happened.”

Featuring Kosh's understated yet groundbreaking design and the famous photograph by the late Iain Macmillan, Abbey Road is one of the most recognizable album covers of all time alongside the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beatles (a.k.a., The White Album). On its 50th anniversary this year, Abbey Road is being reissued this Friday in a number of configurations—including a super deluxe edition set containing a newly-remastered version of the album on CD and Blu-ray along with previously unreleased music from the sessions.

“This was my first album cover,” Kosh says, “not really knowing what I was doing. The fact that it's turned into an icon, and possibly the most parodied album cover of all time, is really thrilling to me.”

Before working at Apple Records, Kosh—then in his early 20s—was freelancing for a magazine called Art and Artists, which he later took over from the previous editor. According to Kosh, John Lennon and Yoko Ono—who had wanted to get their flexi disc record inserted in the publication—were impressed by his work. One day Kosh received a phone call from someone purporting to be Lennon, who requested a meeting with the designer at a hospital of all places.

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“I had to go and ask for ‘Mr. Winston,’ which was John Lennon's middle name,” says Kosh.  “I went up in the elevator, I pressed the doorbell. The door opened, and it was John Lennon! He said, ‘Come on in.’ He got me a space at Apple to look after the various artists they had at the time–it was Mary Hopkin, Billy Preston, Jackie Lomax, James Taylor. All of a sudden I found myself thrusted into this mad house of creativity, great fun, and hard work.”

As Apple's creative director, Kosh envisioned the design for the next Beatles album to be the opposite of The White Album. “At the time they were working on an album called Get Back,” he explains. “So therefore, we should have a Black Album. But in the middle of all of this, they put that on hold and Abbey Road came in.”

Kosh says the urgency of getting the Abbey Road cover design on time was paramount. Fortunately for him, he had at his disposal the photographs that Iain Macmillan took of the Beatles walking on Abbey Road on August 8, 1969. The idea for the shoot was conceived by Paul McCartney, as Macmillan later recalled; the photographer took six images of the musicians from a stepladder and then selected the fifth shot. “It was the only one that had their legs in a perfect “V” formation, which is what I wanted stylistically,” Macmillan said in 1989, as quoted in the new boxed set.

“I was under the impression it was for publicity—'we needed pictures,'” Kosh says of Macmillan’s photos. “Iain, however, would probably tell you a different story—it was going to be an album cover. The whole thing was such a rush because I was working on other projects. And all of a sudden, it was like, 'Okay, these are the photographs, we need an album cover, bang!' And that's it.”

Kosh was one of the first people who heard the Abbey Road album before it was officially released. It happened while he was in the office of Derek Taylor, the band's publicist. “Lennon came up and he had under his arm an acetate, which had come from the lathe down in the basement,” Kosh recalls. “Very few people had ever heard this album. He put it on the turntable, and I nearly died. By the time it got to “I Want You (She's So Heavy),” I actually had died, I think ( laughs). I had already been working on the pictures, I didn't know what the record really sounded like. It was stunning.”

Perhaps Kosh’s biggest contribution to the Abbey Road cover design is what he omitted: the name of the group and the title of the record. His rationale for that decision is quite understandable, and a bold move at the time. “I thought, ‘Here are the four Beatles walking across the street. If you do not know who they are, you have definitely been in a cave somewhere.’ It was not necessary—not to mention the fact that there was enough publicity about the Beatles' new album coming out. They are the Fab Four. I just knew it didn't need any explanation whatsoever.”

Yet the decision also got him into trouble, particularly with Sir Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of Apple Records’ parent company EMI. From Kosh’s recollection, Lockwood called him in the middle of the night and read the riot act. “It was projected at me that I was ruining the Beatles’ careers,” Kosh remembers of that conversation.  “As a 23-year-old, my knees were trembling ( laughs). I didn't know what to do. So you can imagine I had a very bad night.

“I went to Apple Records in the morning,” he continues, “and George Harrison was there, which is also very unusual for a Beatle to show up before 3 in the afternoon. I told him the story. George looked at me and said, ‘Oh [forget] it. We're the Beatles.’ So that was the end of that. George was such a sweet man. All the Beatles were fun to work with.”

Kosh’s design for the postponed record, Get Back, was later released in 1970 as Let It Be, the Beatles’ final album of original material; he also worked on Lennon and Ono’s War Is Over campaign. His subsequent album cover design work after his time at Apple included the Eagles’ Hotel California, Electric Light Orchestra's A New World Record, and James Taylor’s JT. Of where Abbey Road stands in his professional career, Kosh admits: “It's very difficult for me to rank it because it was never quite how I wanted to finish designing it. There was no time–whereas things like Linda Ronstadt's Simple Dreams and Hotel California were totally planned out way in advance. As an art director, you have to communicate with photographers and all the people you're working with.”

Five decades later, Kosh characterizes what led to the Abbey Road cover design as “serendipitous.” Since then, the design and the image of the four Beatles crossing Abbey Road has been imitated on album covers by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kanye West and Paul McCartney. “We didn't know we were creating an icon,” says Kosh. “And it was until I saw the hundreds of parodies coming up, that it was an icon.”

If there is one regret that Kosh has about the Abbey Road experience, it was that he cashed his check — worth 300 pounds — for his work on the record. “Apple sent me a check for that cover,” he says, “and it was signed by ‘John Lennon and Paul McCartney.’ What did I do? I had to pay the rent and I cashed it. Idiot! ( laughs). Otherwise I'd be phoning you from Bali right now.”