The Beatles "Abbey Road" 50th Anniversary - 1st Seating

TICKETS GO ON SALE August 24th!

We will be listening to the brand new 50th Anniversary pressing remastered and overseen by Giles Martin (the son of late original Abbey Road producer George Martin) and Sam Okell with the help of audio engineers and restoration specialists at Abbey Road Studios.

Abbey Road, the 11th studio album by the Beatles, was released 50 years ago on September 26, 1969.  This is the last album where all four Beatles participated in the recording sessions together.  The single "Something" backed with "Come Together", released in October, topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US.

Abbey Road incorporates genres such as blues, pop, and progressive rock.  It made prominent use of the Moog synthesizer and the Leslie speaker. Side two contains an experimental exercise of editing song fragments together to form a single piece.  By the time the album was released, John Lennon had privately left the group, with Paul McCartney publicly quitting the following year (1970).

Abbey Road was an immediate commercial success, selling four million copies in its first two months of release.  In the UK, the album debuted at number 1, where it remained for 11 weeks before being displaced for one week by the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed. The following week (which was Christmas), Abbey Road returned to the top for another six weeks (completing a total of 17 weeks) before being replaced by Led Zeppelin II. In all it spent 81 weeks on the UK albums chart.

In the US, the album spent 12 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart.  It was the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) best-selling album of 1969 and was number four on Billboard magazine's top LPs of 1970 year-end chart. Abbey Road was certified 12× platinum by the RIAA in 2001. In Japan, it was one of the longest-charting albums to date, remaining in the top 100 for 298 weeks during the 1970s.  Initially, the album received very mixed reviews, with many critics deriding the music as inauthentic and complaining about the avant-garde production values and effects. Since then, Abbey Road is seen as one of the Beatles' best albums, with many critics and magazines ranking it one of the greatest albums of all time.  

George Harrison's contributions, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun", are considered by many to be some of the best Beatles songs in their catalog.  The album's iconic cover features the four band members walking across a zebra crossing (crosswalk) outside of the Abbey Road Studios.  It has become one of the most famous and imitated images in history, and is synonymous with the Beatles as a band.

"Abbey Road" has sold over 40 million copies worldwide and it has remained in print in one format or another continuously since its first release in 1969.