ABBEY ROAD
Abbey Road is the eleventh studio album by English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969 by Apple Records. Although Let It Be was the final album that the Beatles completed before the band’s dissolution in April 1970, most of the album had been recorded before the Abbey Road sessions began. Abbey Road is a rock album that incorporates genres such as blues, pop and progressive rock; and it makes prominent use of the Moog synthesizer and the Leslie speaker. Side two contains a medley of song fragments edited together to form a single piece. Although Abbey Road was an immediate commercial success and reached number one in the UK and US, it initially received mixed reviews, some critics describing its music as inauthentic and bemoaning the production’s artificial effects. Many critics now view the album as the Beatles’ best and rank it as one of the greatest albums of all time. (More from Wikipedia)
In July 1967, the Klubs were given a recording test at EMI’s famed Abbey Road Studios, renamed for the Beatles’ penultimate album, Abbey Road in 1970. Staff producer Alan Paramor oversaw a marathon recording session, where the Klubs worked on covers of Cream’s “NSU”, and “Desdemona” by John’s Children (back when Marc Bolan, later of T. Rex was a bandmember), plus a new recording of their own song “Livin’ Today”. Paramor called the band “unrecordable” and sent them on their way.
(July 2013)
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It is natural for any band to evolve over the course of their career; though their core sound was intact, the Beatles who recorded Please Please Me in 1963 are quite different from the band who released Abbey Road in 1969. (The Beatles released one more album, Let it Be after Abbey Road; but most of this music was actually recorded earlier). Some bands change more than others, however.
(June 2014)
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Following the break-up of the Beatles, George Harrison released a mammoth two-record album in 1970 called All Things Must Pass that also included a third disk called Apple Jam. Clearly Harrison was creating a lot of music that wasn’t winding up on the Beatles albums. By the time “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” showed up on Abbey Road, nearly all rock critics were acknowledging that George Harrison was a songwriter equal to John Lennon and Paul McCartney; but I had noticed that at least as far back as Revolver, where his songs were “Taxman”, “Love You To” and “I Want to Tell You”.
(September 2014)
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Despite the fact that Sgt. Pepper is far from being the unanimous choice by rock critics as the greatest Beatles album, no one can dispute that it made the biggest impact on the rock music scene – rather amazing, considering that they had already been the leading rock band in the world for over three years. In a career that is loaded with superlatives, the Beatles still have 3 of the 20 biggest selling albums in history nearly a half-century after the music’s creation, with Sgt. Pepper at #13 (having an estimated 32 million in worldwide sales), 1 at #18 (a collection of the band’s Number One songs), and Abbey Road at #20.
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On Revolver, which I bought after Sgt. Pepper actually, George Harrison wrote the lead-off song, “Taxman” plus “Love You To” and “I Want to Tell You”. George wrote the first song on Side 2 of Abbey Road, “Here Comes the Sun” – whose title is reflected in a later song on the album, “Sun King” in the lyric, “Here comes the sun king” – as well as “Something”, perhaps George Harrison’s finest composition for the Beatles. As a double-A–sided single with “Come Together”, “Something” is the only song Harrison wrote that the Beatles took to the top of the charts. Also, “Something” has been recorded by about 150 other artists, making it the second most covered Beatles song (after “Yesterday”).
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The Beatles also includes “Don't Pass Me By”; other than “Octopus’s Garden” (from Abbey Road), this is the only song written solely by Ringo Starr (listed under his real name, Richard Starkey as is normal in songwriting credits) that appears on an official Beatles album. Starr also shares a songwriting credit with John Lennon and Paul McCartney on “What Goes On” (from Rubber Soul), and the instrumental “Flying” (on Magical Mystery Tour) shows all four bandmembers as the writers.
(June 2015)
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Continuing the overview of Iggy Pop and his seminal proto-punk band the Stooges from earlier in the year, here is a band that (until the present century) left behind just three studio albums, with a total of only 23 songs. By comparison, the Beatles’ Abbey Road album alone has 17 songs. For those who are fans, that can be extremely frustrating – and I know that all too well as someone who writes about Under Appreciated Rock Bands who often (though not always) don’t have a recorded output that is even that large. Iggy Pop started his prolific solo career quickly enough, but Iggy’s solo albums are as different from his work with the Stooges as Elvis Presley’s music after he got out of the Army is from his early rockabilly sides at Sun Records and RCA.
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Anthology 3 includes numerous Beatles tracks from the Let it Be sessions that (as I remember) are likely the corresponding songs on Kum Back; in all, 12 of the 23 songs on the second CD are identified in Wikipedia as “Savile Row Sessions”, with recording dates ranging from January 22 through January 29, 1969. Among these songs are “Teddy Boy”, but with a much shorter running time of 3:18. Other performances on Anthology 3 from the Savile Row Sessions that have no connection to the Let it Be album are two of the Abbey Road songs, “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window” and “Oh! Darling”; a song called “Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues” that had been recorded by Buddy Holly in 1957 and was part of the Beatles’ live repertoire until 1962; and a medley of three rock and roll classics – “Rip It Up”, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and “Blue Suede Shoes”.
(September 2017)
