Abbey Road, the Best Non-Beatles Album Made by the Beatles

By |2019-08-24T14:45:13-07:00June 19, 2019|Uncategorized|

To me, Abbey Road is one of the least-dated-sounding Beatles albums—possibly the least dated—but it also sounds the least like the Beatles. Oh, there are Beatles playing on it, I’ll grant you that. The generally impeccable songwriting—that melding of optimism, expression, rawness, craft, and pure joy—could only have come from three particular songwriters. And that’s unquestionably John, Paul, George and Ringo strutting across the cover. But to me there’s always been something about this album that doesn’t sound like the Beatles, and it’s not just the super-slick production or the fact that Ringo’s drums sound a little thicker than they do on [...]

Thank God for Abbey Road

By |2015-01-14T18:17:51-08:00January 14, 2015|1969, Abbey Road|

The Beatles, not worrying about global warming, 1969. In the midst of a comment thread, I stumbled on an interesting thought which I wanted to open to the group: how do you think The Beatles' legacy would've been different if they'd never returned to the studio after Let It Be? My initial, instinctual thought is that the group's demise would've been even more mythic, even more shrouded by "what might have been." The rich sprawl of White seems to invite a follow-up of the quality of Abbey Road, and had the wet firecracker of Let It Be been The Beatles' [...]

The Beatles and Gettysburg: Forward into the past

By |2013-08-13T22:37:53-07:00July 31, 2013|Abbey Road|

DEVIN McKINNEY  • Our town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, recently hosted festivities and commemorations around the sesquicentennial of the Civil War battle that occurred in the fields all around us. Tourists, there were many; and where tourists gather, chatchkis will be sold. Among them, this arresting item: Lincoln, Pickett, Lee, and Meade crossing a road made famous little more than a century after the battle that brought them together. Figures of the past are called forth to recreate a tableau, utterly independent of themselves, that to us is itself an image from, and of, the past; yet the combination propels both a bit [...]

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