Opinion | Kenneth Womack: 50 years later, the Beatles' 'Abbey Road' remains the greatest mic drop in pop music history. - NBCNewsTHINK
George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, cross Abbey Road in London, Britain, Aug. 8, 1969.Sept. 26, 2019, 7:13 PM UTCFifty years ago this week, arguably the world’s most celebrated and inarguably the mostdelivered its final studio album “Abbey Road” to the masses. But within a matter of weeks of the LP’s completion in August 1969, the group had disbanded in a spate of bitter acrimony.
Save for the 1970 release of the “Let It Be”soundtrack, “Abbey Road”was effectively the Beatles’ final achievement as a foursome. The editors of Rolling Stone magazine were so uncertain about the quality of “Abbey Road” that they commissioned two separate reviews of the LP. Up first was Ed Ward, who disparaged the record for traversing “a rather tenuous line between boredom, Beatledom, and bubblegum.” And unlike Cohn, Ward couldn’t stand the songs that comprised the medley, describing them as “so heavily overproduced that they are hard to listen to.
Indeed, it is the relative swiftness with which the Beatles recorded “Abbey Road” that belies its complexity and power, even 50 years later. By that fabled summer of 1969, the Beatles were at the top of their game — as songwriters, musicians, artists. The medley that concluded the album — and, fittingly, their career — was chock-full of unforgettable musical drama and wordplay, including heartrending numbers such as “Golden Slumbers” and “Carry That Weight.
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