Album Review

Abbey Road is the eleventh studio album by English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969 by Apple Records [in the UK]. The recording sessions for the album were the last in which all four Beatles participated. Although Let It Be was the final album that the Beatles completed before the band's dissolution in April 1970, most of the album had been recorded before the Abbey Road sessions began. A two-sided hit single from the album, ''Something'' backed with ''Come Together'', released in October, topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US.

Abbey Road is a rock album that incorporates genres such as blues, pop, and progressive rock, and it makes prominent use of the Moog synthesizer and the Leslie speaker. Side two contains a medley of song fragments edited together to form a single piece. The album was recorded amid a more enjoyable atmosphere than the Get Back/Let It Be sessions earlier in the year, but there were still frequent disagreements within the band. John Lennon had privately left the group by the time the album was released and McCartney publicly quit the following year.

Although Abbey Road was an immediate commercial success and reached ?No.1 in the UK and US, it initially received mixed reviews, some critics describing its music as inauthentic and bemoaning the production's artificial effects. Many critics now view the album as the Beatles' best and rank it as one of the greatest albums of all time. In particular, George Harrison's contributions, ''Something'' and ''Here Comes the Sun'', are considered to be among the best songs he wrote for the group. The album's cover, which features the four band members walking across a zebra crossing outside Abbey Road Studios, has become one of the most famous and imitated images in the history of popular music.

About This Pressing

This is considered Cover version #3 (pasted slick over cardboard).

Label has ''MFD. BY APPLE RECORDS, INC'' in green print at the bottom perimeter of side 1.

''Her Majesty'' is listed on the label but NOT on the cover.

Cover photo is enlarged/cropped so that the manhole cover is NOT seen at the bottom of the photo, as it is in other printings of the cover.

Abbey Road was the only Beatles album to have print-on-board covers upon initial release. When Capitol's pressing plants ran out of the print-on-board covers, Apple hired Queens Litho to print slicks for these THIRD (and final) BATCH Covers (SC2A, Spizer).

The back cover slicks were made from the album's original artwork and accordingly do not list Her Majesty on the back cover. The front cover image was enlarged to allow for the front slick to be wrapped around to the back cover. Thus, the picture on the front shows less of the trees and crosswalk (the square sewer in the road is missing) and has a larger image of the Beatles.