“Come Together” is a song by the British rock band the Beatles, written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon-McCartney. In July 1969, during sessions for the Beatles’ album Abbey Road, Lennon used the phrase “come together” from the Leary campaign song to compose a new song for the album. Based on the 1956 single “You Can’t Catch Me” by the American guitarist Chuck Berry, Lennon’s composition began as an up-tempo blues number, only slightly altering Berry’s original lyric of “Here come a flattop / He was movin’ up with me” to “Here come ol’ flattop / He come groovin’ up slowly”. When Lennon presented the composition to his band mates, his songwriting partner Paul McCartney noticed its similarity to “You Can’t Catch Me” and recommended they slow it in tempo to reduce the resemblance. The band biographer Jonathan Gould suggested that the song has only a single “pariah-like protagonist” and Lennon was “painting another sardonic self-portrait”.
The group taped eight takes of “Come Together”, with take six marked “best”. The line-up consisted of Lennon singing lead vocal, McCartney on bass, George Harrison on rhythm guitar and Ringo Starr on drums. Starr placed tea towels over his tom drums to further dampen their sound. Without needing to use his hands to play guitar, Lennon added handclaps each time he sang “Shoot me!”, also adding tambourine over both the solo and coda. Taped on 4-track recording equipment,at the end of the session, take six was copied over to 8-track tape in Studio Two, allowing for both overdubbing and the easy manipulation of EQ.
Lennon later referred to “Come Together” as “one of my favourite Beatles tracks. It’s funky, it’s bluesy, and I’m singing it pretty well.” Martin said of the song: If I had to pick one song that showed the four disparate talents of the boys and the ways they combined to make a great sound, I would choose ‘Come Together’. The original song is good, and with John’s voice it’s better. Then Paul has this idea for this great little riff. And Ringo hears that and does a drum thing that fits in, and that establishes a pattern that John leapt upon and did the [‘shoot me’] part. And then there’s George’s guitar at the end. The four of them became much, much better than the individual components. In May 2021, Ringo Starr said it was his favourite Beatles song in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Apple Records, the Beatles’ EMI-distributed record label, released Abbey Road in September 1969, with “Come Together” sequenced as the opening track. The song was issued as a double A-side single (as Apple 2654) with Harrison’s “Something” in October in America. Commercially, the single was a massive success, staying on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart for 16 weeks, and reaching No. 1. It was released on 31 October 1969 in the UK (as Apple R5814) and reached No. 4. The first take of the song, recorded on 21 July 1969, with slightly different lyrics, was released in 1996 on the out take compilation Anthology 3, and take five of the song was released on the Abbey Road 50th Anniversary release.
“Come Together” has frequently appeared on numerous publications’ lists of the Beatles’ best songs. In 2006, Mojo magazine placed it at No. 13 in their list of the Beatles’ 101 best songs. Four years later, Rolling Stone ranked it No. 9 on their list of the band’s 100 greatest songs. Meanwhile, Entertainment Weekly and Ultimate Classic Rock ranked it at No. 44 and No. 20, respectively. In 2015, NME and Paste placed it at No. 20 and No. 23 in their respective lists of the band’s best songs. Rolling Stone ranked “Come Together” at No. 202 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004, re-ranking it No. 205 in the 2010 revised list. In 2024, Consequence ranked the song’s bassline as the best of all time.
