The Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road’ album is turning 50. Here’s the story behind the iconic cover

John Kosh was all of 23 when he submitted the cover he’d designed for “Abbey Road” to Apple Records.

It was two days in the making, Kosh recalls. And no, he did not view it as iconic on arrival.

“I was working on other projects at the time, like Mary Hopkin, Billy Preston and the ‘War is Over’ project for John Lennon,” he says.

“So all this stuff was going on. And I had actually prepared a package with a book for the album ‘Get Back’ before it was retitled ‘Let it Be.’ So because that was slotted in for a certain time and then postponed, ‘Abbey Road’ was all of the sudden ‘Oh, it’s Monday. You need a cover Wednesday.’ I’m actually kind of making that up. But it was that sort of urgency.”

The Beatles crossing Abbey Road

The cover image shows the Beatles crossing Abbey Road outside the studio where they’d recorded nearly all their most enduring contributions to the history of rock and roll.

“The photographer, the late Iain MacMillan, was a dear friend of mine, because we were working on other things like (Lennon’s) ‘Plastic Ono Band,’” Kosh says. “And this was kind of thrust upon us. It wasn’t until the parodies started coming out later, with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and a thousand parodies, that you realize, ‘Oh, we inadvertently created an icon.’ Which is terrific, but at the time I just had to pay the rent.”

By Kosh’s estimation, he was paid 300 pounds for “Abbey Road,” an album whose 50th anniversary will be celebrated Friday with a series of reissues — including a super-deluxe edition spread out over three CDs, a Blu-Ray Audio disc, and straight CD and vinyl packages.

“The check was signed by Paul and John,” Kosh recalls with a laugh. “And I had to cash the check. How dumb is that?”

Kosh’s job at the time was creative director at the Beatles’ label, Apple Records.

“So all of a sudden, the courier turns up with Iain,” Kosh recalls.

“In those days, you sent off the film to the processing house. And then they processed it and the courier would get on a motorbike and deliver the pictures. I would have a light box – which I still keep, by the way, because it’s a huge memento with fluorescent tubes and all this sort of stuff. And we’re poring over these pictures with a Loupe, trying to decide which is going to be the best one for this particular job because we’ve got to get it out to the printer tomorrow.”

He and MacMillan, he says, were “kind of” worried.

“We’re following ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ following ‘The White Album,’ following ‘Rubber Soul,” he says. “And all we’ve got is this, you know? And EMI, the parent company, was determined that we had to deliver this new album on time to fit in with all the other schedules, because if you’re working in August and September, we’re really talking about Christmas. It’s not instant like today, with computers and things. It’s all done by retouching and cutting things out.”

“It was such a rush,” he says. “I mean, the album originally was going to be called ‘Everest’ because Geoff Emerick, the engineer, smoked Everest menthol cigarettes. There was talk of them flying to the Himalayas for the photograph, which obviously is not gonna happen.”

With a laugh, he adds, “You can’t get all four Beatles in one room sometime anyway, let alone crossing a street.”

He had no idea they were working on another album, Kosh recalls, until one fateful day at Apple, when the Beatles’ famed press officer Derek Taylor and Lennon himself turned him on to the album.

“They came up with an acetate cut from a lathe down in the basement,” Kosh recalls. “It’s ‘Abbey Road.’ And when it came to ‘She’s So Heavy,’ I’m almost on my knees crying. Because I can’t believe it. This, to my opinion, was the Beatles’ best album ever.”

Adding to the impact of what Kosh was hearing on that acetate was that he never expected the Beatles to make another album after “Let it Be” (or “Get Back,” as they knew it at the time), given the tension that was captured in the filming of that project.

“But I guess contractually, they had to come together to make ‘Abbey Road,’” he says. “And listen to it! They are working so well together. I was thinking that this empire was not gonna crumble. But then it became painfully obvious that the empire was gonna crumble.”

‘Ballad of John and Yoko’ (and Paul)

He recalls the joy he witnessed in the studio in April 1969 before that empire crumbled, seeing Lennon and McCartney come together to work on “The Ballad of John and Yoko.”

“They’re not supposed to be even talking to each other,” he recalls. “And Paul is filling in happily on Ringo’s drums in studio B. John is strumming away. Then they’re swapping instruments and Paul’s playing bass and John is playing lead. I’m sitting there in awe because these guys are not even supposed to be in the same room. They were bantering, you know? It was just really up. And I came out thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t believe this.’ Then, of course, you know....”

Kosh pauses, then says, “Let’s don’t talk about it.”

The scene at Apple Records in 1969

To fully understand how Kosh could work at Apple Records and have no idea “Abbey Road” was in the works, you have to understand the scene at Apple Records.

“It was a madhouse,” Kosh says. “It was mayhem. It was fun, you know, the Apple Scruffs outside, the groupies upstairs in the kitchen making sandwiches. There’s music coming from every floor. And James Taylor’s up there. But when you’re that young, it’s not that difficult to keep up that sort of level. You just do it because you don’t need too much when you’re 23.”

It was only so much of a madhouse, though, he’s quick to clarify.

“It may have been chaotic,” he says. “But it was a controlled chaos. Everyone enjoyed the process. But it always went out on time. You can’t have a blown deadline. Otherwise, Christmas is gone.”

Kosh came to Apple Records from the Royal Opera House and the Royal Ballet.

“I can neither dance nor sing,” he says. “I pretend I can sing. But I was also moonlighting as the art director for a magazine called Art & Artists. And because John and Yoko wanted to insert one of their floppy disks into the magazine, I get the phone call. In the evening. At home. From John Lennon saying, ‘Is this Mr. Kosh?’ and ‘Can you come and see me?’”

At first, he was convinced that someone was just messing with his head. But he went to the meeting, asked to speak to Mr. Winston (Lennon’s middle name) and a couple of days later, Lennon asked him, ‘Why don’t you just sort of find yourself a corner at Apple and start working for us?”

The ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy

“Abbey Road,” of course, would come to play a huge role in the “Paul is Dead” conspiracy. The cover photo is said to be a funeral possession, with Lennon, in white, as a heavenly figure; Ringo Starr, in black, as the undertaker; George Harrison, in denim, as the gravedigger; and McCartney, barefoot, as the recently deceased, a passing further underscored by the licence plate on a Volkswagen Beetle, “28IF,” that seemed to reference how old he would be had he survived.

As to why he was actually barefoot?

“Well, it’s no reason at all really,” Kosh says. “Paul used to wear his suit and he always used to wear Converse sneakers. But at this particular point, for some reason, he was wearing sandals. And he kicked them off. So there’s all sorts of serendipitous stuff that’s going on.”

The cigarette, for instance. At a certain point, McCartney’s cigarette was airbrushed out of Beatles history. Now, it’s back.

“I was really upset when they had to take the cigarette out of his hand,” Kosh says, “which meant that someone had to airbrush it. The only airbrushing I did on the cover was to make the sky more blue, because it was kind of dirty English gray, you know.”

MacMillan did his best to make the photo perfect, Kosh recalls.

“He had to hold the traffic up. Or the local bobbies held the traffic up. And he was on his ladder. But the sky was not that great. It was I who changed the color of the sky just a little bit. It’s like ‘Hotel California,’ that sunset was a little bit not quite as bright as that.”

‘We’re the Beatles.’

Other than making the sky the most amazing shade of blue, his greatest contribution to the album cover may have been deciding not to use the Beatles name, an artistic choice that earned a late-night phone call from the parent company.

“The chairman of EMI was definitely miffed,” he recalls with a laugh. “I got the phone call at three in the morning and the stream of invective that sort of frightened the pants off a 23 year old. But luckily, I went to Apple the very next morning, humbly thinking ‘What am I gonna do?’ And George was there, which is kind of weird, because why was a Beatle there in the morning? I do not know. Unless he’d been there all night. I told him the story. And he said, ‘Ahh, screw it. We’re the Beatles.’”

By that point, Kosh says, it was far too late to change the course of music history.

“When there’s like half a million album covers coming off the press, what am I gonna do?” he says. “Say ‘Sorry, you’ve gotta stop and put the new title on?’ There’s no way as a humble little designer that I could possibly have stopped the presses. Maybe the Beatles could have done it, but they didn’t care. Because they were the Beatles.”

Given that he says he had two days to work on “Abbey Road,” you may be wondering whether he’s given any thought to how he may have done things differently given more time.

“Yes,” he says, emphatically. “Do we need a border around this? Do we need something like this? Should we print it in day-glo colors? All that sort of thing. The point is when I look at it now and I look at the reprint – which they’ve done a fabulous job – I think ‘Give it a rest, Kosh.’”

Read more at USAToday.com.

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