Album cover for Abbey Road
Please Note: As of February 24, this program's location is updated (originally Ripley Center).
Was it their greatest album? Maybe. Was it their most musically innovative? Definitely.
Released in Sept. 1969, Abbey Road was the last album the Beatles—by then, coming apart amid internal strife and bitterness—recorded together. Its tracks included such classics as “Come Together,” “Something,” and “Here Comes the Sun.” With the band’s peerless producer George Martin at the controls in London’s Abbey Road recording studio, the album introduced innovative recording techniques and technologies, such as the Moog synthesizer, and featured music as compelling today as it was 50 years ago.
Acclaimed Beatles historian Kenneth Womack draws on rare clips and videos to show how Martin and the band broke rules and innovated work-arounds to achieve the album’s unique sounds, especially in the song cycle known as the Abbey Road medley, which brought the album—and a musical era—to “The End.”
Womack’s book Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles (Cornell University Press) is available for purchase and signing.
More About the Speaker
Kenneth Womack, Ph.D. is the dean of humanities and social sciences at Monmouth University.
