Abbey Road by the Beatles is 50 years old today. This is my favorite album by The Beatles. The first time I heard it was the day I took the ACT test as a senior in high school. We had to drive an hour to Emporia State University to take the exam. After the exam my Dad took me to a record store in town and told me I could buy a cassette. He recommended Abbey Road since I had been getting into The Beatles due to a guitars class I was taking that year in high school.
I still remember putting that tape in the tape deck of our 1979 AMC Concord, rolling with the windows down since the A/C didn't work, and Here Comes the Sun starts playing. What I didn't know then was that the cassette had the first song on the A side and the B sides swapped from the original album order. Come Together should have been track one and Here Comes the Sun the first track on the B side. On the cassette those two songs were switched with one another.
That cassette became one of my favorite listens. Here Comes the Sun became one of my favorite songs. I remember making that trip from Emporia to Severy, Kansas for trumpet lessons many times and listening to that record with the wind blowing through the car. Years later my Dad sent me a postcard with the Abbey Road album cover on it. I just found that postcard recently and I treasure it.
This past July my son and I found an original vinyl pressing of Abbey Road at a second hand bookstore. I assumed the record was just a re-print. But after researching the printing number and cover label I realized we had lucked into a 1969 copy of Abbey Road LP.
I love this album. Although Let it Be would be the last Beatles album released, Abbey Road was the last record the group actually recorded. And what a way to end a band's run.
