MEET THE BEATLES
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the release of “Love Me Do,” the first official single by an up-and-coming young band called the Beatles. This landmark comes only a year after Peter Jackson’s three-part documentary on the recording of what would become their last official recording. In the space of less than a decade and 13 studio albums, the Beatles managed to reinvent not just music, but also recording technology, design, fashion, and nearly every other facet of popular culture. Critics who dismissed them during the height of Beatlemania as merely a fad would be stunned to discover just how much they’re still in the conversation more than half a century on.
And so, in their honor, we’d like to offer up an album of our own: a collection of eight diverse puzzles, each inspired by the title or cover of a different iconic Beatles album, all connected to a central riddle. Every puzzle in this collection will lead to a single final answer in the form of a song title from the Beatles catalog, not necessarily from the album that the puzzle represents. (Don’t worry, the final answers will be clear even if you don’t have the Beatles catalog memorized.) Once you have all eight song titles, you’re ready to tackle the final challenge.
To solve the metapuzzle, first remove any spaces or punctuation from your eight final answers, and position them in the first grid below using the letters we’ve already placed for you, one title per row. Titles won’t necessarily start in the first square of the row nor end in the last square, and it’s up to you to determine which title goes in which row. When all have been correctly placed, fill each square in the second grid by copying over the corresponding letter in the first grid, using the row and column labels to guide you. For example, if the second grid asks for C6, you’ll enter whatever letter appears in row C, column 6. Sometimes the space will be empty, in which case you should leave that square blank. At long last, if all has gone well, you’ll be left with a quote from John Lennon’s last full-length interview in 1980. Good luck!
ABBEY ROAD
1969’s boasts a cover showing the band strolling across the titular street outside EMI Studios, so for this puzzle we’ve built a street for you to cross crossword-style. Each row of the grid is a crosswalk containing two entries, one starting on the shaded sidewalk on the left, the other ending on the one on the right. Clues for these crosswalks are clued in left-to-right order (except for the last, which only has one entry that ends on the right sidewalk). Usually the pair of answers will meet somewhere in the middle, exactly filling the space, but sometimes there will be a one-square gap between them. Circle these gap squares as you find them; to fill them in, you’ll need the columns, each consisting of entries entered consecutively and clued in order. When you’re all done, the sidewalks will certainly seem relevant,
