John and Paul don’t agree on much these days, except that the song is indeed George’s best work yet. Frank Sinatra elevates the praise for “Something,” calling it “the greatest love song in the past fifty years” and covering the song in his own live performances.

Musically, it is a fine farewell. The big valedictory comes, fittingly, on “The End,” with John, George, and Paul trading guitar solos (after an unprecedented Ringo drum solo) before landing on the line “And in the end / The love you take / Is equal to the love you make.”

From his vantage point in the control room, engineer Geoff Emerick observed, “John, Paul, and George looked like they had gone back in time, like they were kids again, playing together for the sheer enjoyment of it. More than anything, they reminded me of gunslingers, with their guitars strapped on, looks of steely-eyed resolve, determined to outdo one another. Yet there was no animosity, no tension at all—you could tell they were simply having fun.”

But that’s all in the past when, on October 20, Apple releases the single “Cold Turkey.” John’s testament is uncomfortably received. “‘Cold Turkey’ talks about thirty-six hours rolling in pain,” says the music coordinator of Detroit’s WKNR-FM. The BBC bans its airplay.

“They thought it was a pro-drugs song,” John later tells BBC1 radio DJ Andy Peebles. “To some it was a rock ’n’ roll version of The Man with the Golden Arm,” a 1955 Frank Sinatra film showing his character suffering from drug withdrawal.

That same day, Apple releases John and Yoko’s Wedding Album in the United States (it comes out a few weeks later in the UK, on November 7). They’d recorded it in April and, during a break on the afternoon of the twenty-second, had gone up to the Apple rooftop to take part in a quick ceremony in front of a commissioner for oaths, ratifying John’s formal name change from John Winston Lennon to John Ono Lennon. “Yoko changed her name for me. I’ve changed mine for her. One for both, both for each other,” John declares.

Wedding Album, side 1 of which offers John and Yoko pronouncing each other’s names for almost twenty-three minutes over a backing track of their heartbeats, marks the third of a trio of experimental albums that started with Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins and continued with Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions (which also included a recorded heartbeat, that of their miscarried son).

The album is a critical and commercial dud, but John shrugs it off. “We didn’t expect a hit record out of it,” he later tells the BBC. It was more personal than that.

“When people get married they usually make their own wedding albums,” John says, something to “show to the relatives when they come round. Well, our relatives are the…what you call fans.”