Would ABBEY ROAD be more revered if it was by another band?

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band - the movie soundtrack

Still at least he wasn't shy about owning up to his own laziness.

I don't think I'd trade in the solo albums 69-74 for three more Beatles albums anyway.

Anyone who's actually heard the album want to comment?

Okay, that was the genre's classical pretentions. Those dopes didn't know any better.

Actually the preferred term was opuses.

1. Carry on wayward son (5:13)
2. The wall (4:47)
3. What's on my mind (3:27)
4. Miracles out of nowhere (6:29)
5. Opus insert (4:26)
6. Questions of my childhood (3:38)
7. Cheyenne anthem (6:50)
8. Magnum opus (8:27)

Abbey Road was easily in my top few Beatles albums when I first got into them as a teenage lad, often claiming the #1 spot. It's gradually fallen off into the category of albums I almost never put on. Not sure why - when I do, it never really fails to entertain, although I'm definitely in the camp that's very ehhh on "Come Together."

One of the reasons why Abbey Road fascinates, I think, is that we know it was made by a nearly-broken-up band with the barest of enthusiasm for what they were doing...and yet it sounds more complete, more joyful, more Beatles than anything put out since Magical Mystery Tour. Some of that can be put down to studio wizardry (especially the completion of the medley) and letting George Martin take the helm (where he was left out of Get Back and apparently not much consulted on the white album), or Paul burning the midnight oil to get it all put together, but still, it's an album that completely doesn't match its storyline. If Lennon was so over the Beatles at this point, why did he give them "Come Together," which, even though we hate it, certainly is a classic rock staple and would have done fine (though sounded shittier) on any of his solo records. To him perhaps they were all bullshit, trifles, contract-fillers. But the same can arguably be said of Harrison - if the established story is that he was always repressed and that he finally got to share all his great songs on All Things Must Pass, why didn't he hang on to his two brilliant tracks here and turn in a reworked version of "For You Blue" or something to round this one out?

Rarely has an album of people fulfilling professional commitments sounded so not like what it is. The story isn't complete; the songs are too good, even the ones that project the Beatles into "70s rock" and worse. Does it not excite me now because it's rotten at the core, a triumph of style over substance? Is Band on the Run in fact the better Paul McCartney production showpiece record???

Oh! HERE's the thread I was looking for! Construct a worthy follow-up to Abbey Road by using solo material from ex-Beatles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJKor34b8iY

Going back to the original question, from 2005, it strikes me that if Pink Floyd or the Jimi Hendrix Experience had squirrelled themselves away in Abbey Road studies and then released Abbey Road in September 1969 the album would have been panned. It would have been dismissed as a waste of talent. If a completely unknown band had released it as a one-off, along the lines of United States of America or The Silver Apples, it'd either be a curiosity nowadays, or one of those one-off hits along the lines of Boston's one and only album. If it had been released by one of The Beatles' pop contemporaries... I have to admit I have no idea if The Beatles had any contemporaries in 1969. I have the impression that the division between pop and rock had become too great by that point for a single band to straddle it. Abbey Road is in the odd position of being slightly too complex and weird to be straightforward late-60s light pop but nowhere near weird enough to be what John Peel would have called "Progressive".

The medley is vaguely prog, but it's also the kind of thing you could imagine happening on a TV light entertainment show when the band has to squeeze several songs into five minutes. I'm actually struggling to picture early-70s pop. Regular pop. Not glam rock, or bubblegum pop, or power pop. What was "regular pop" in the early 1970s? Did it even exist? At least in the UK the charts were full of Slade, early reggae acts, T-Rex etc. Reading through Wikipedia's list of "top-selling singles of 1970" I'm confronted with a mass of songs that I don't recognise at all from bands I've never heard of. Fair Weather. Gerry Monroe. Christie. Mr Bloe. The Cuff Links. White Plains. Etc.

I think the album benefits immensely from the context, the fact that there's a story behind it, the cover photo, the fact that it was by a well-liked band who were falling apart, at the end of a decade where humanity had just walked on the moon while simultaneously torching Hanoi, so there was both sadness and hope for the future. The Beatles were getting sick of each other, but it was a lovely summer so they saddled up for one last raid and then there was a huge fight with a machine gun and squibs going off everywhere and it was awesome.

No, sorry. I'm thinking of The Wild Bunch. Which also came out in 1969. I remember seeing that film for the first time a few years ago, and thinking "blimey". It's a weird outlier. It has the squibs and bullet impacts of something from the 1980s, the downbeat attitude of something from the late 1970s, but it came out in 1969, the same year as Abbey Road. When they got hold of the machine gun I remember thinking "this is awesome". It has the kind of numbing, orgiastic carnage I associate with Hong Kong action films or Doom slaughter maps. Whereas The Beatles feel staid in comparison. But that was their thing, they were skilled pop musicians in a world where Black Sabbath and Slade were just around the corner.

I think of Abbey Road as more than the sum of its parts. "You Never Give Me Your Money" and "The End" have this collision of happiness and sadness that's rare in pop music. "Oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go". The rest of it feels like a compendium of pop songs, but it's less disjointed than The White Album if only because the major songs feel like band efforts.

But as others have pointed out above, if the band had continued it would have turned into ELO. There would have been a Beatles disco record. A Beatles punk record, but by The Beatles, e.g. it would have had angry blues piano. A Beatles record with scratching.

You don't know the "Groovin' With Mr. Bloe"? Or "Yellow River"?

this is, while not their best album, the beatles record i'm most likely to put on in the 2020s

there are almost no circumstances that would prompt me to play sgt peppers