The Beatles Abbey Road History And Live Abbey Road Web Cam

 (I dust this post off and represent it ever so often because I like it)

England Web Cam Of The Crossing At Abbey Road

Abbey Road Studios Live Web Cam

The Beatles last album as a group had a picture of them crossing here. Today you can see people crossing there still...you get live video feed of the tourist taking pictures of themselves on a very busy street. A bonus is you can see if it is raining or sunny or night or day as opposed to where you are located. Don't know why it is so fascinating to watch, but it is...

http://www.abbeyroad.com/Crossing

Update:
They are redoing their website so until they get it right you can still view the cam here.

 Guess what the original name of the album was supposed to be - Everest.  As in Mt. Everest.  They were supposed to fly to Nepal and have their photo taken there. "So Ringo said, 'Why don't we just shoot the cover outside and call it Abbey Road?' Like many a Ringo suggestion, it won out."

 Rather than go to

all the trouble, they just decided to go outside, have their photo taken in the street, and call it Abbey Road.

During the recording of what was to be their swan song, The Beatles toyed with several titles, and Everest, a reference to the brand of cigarettes their chief engineer, Geoff Emerick, smoked, was the favorite.

The cover photo was one of 6 taken by Scottish photographer Iain Macmillan, friend of John and Yoko Lennon, who had previously worked with Yoko on some of her off beat art projects.  The police blocked the street while the Fab Four walked back and forth across the street during mid-day break on August 8, 1969.  It was over in a few minutes, but the resulting photograph made the "zebra walk" the most famous in the world and a major tourist attraction in London. The picture was taken outside the Abbey Road recording studios at 11.35 am on August 8, 1969 for the cover of the Beatles final album.

http://artnectar.com/2010/07/funny-photo-beatles-iconic-abbey-road-album-cover-spoof/

It was the first Beatles album to use 8 tracks in the recording process – when you look at what was created before Abbey Road – Let It Be, Sgt. Pepper’s, the White Album, you can see why this album was sonically and acoustically superior. "The group was disintegrating before my eyes. It was ugly, like watching a divorce between four people" Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, on the mood before Abbey Road, After a while, I had to get out."

"Oh, it was a nightmare. I was becoming physically sick just thinking of going to the studio each night. I used to love working with the band. By that point, I dreaded it. Getting out was the only thing I could do."

A year later, however, he was drawn back to work with Martin and The Beatles with the promise that the band would be on their best behavior. Emerick missed a few sessions for the album that would eventually rename EMI Studios, but in the end, he says, "I'm glad I came back for the final bow. To have missed being a part of the Abbey Road album, I'd still be kicking myself."

"After Let It Be, which I understand was not very pleasant for anybody, Paul was very keen to make a record the way the band used to. He wanted George Martin and I behind the console and everybody working together. He said things would be better than what they had been."
Did you take Paul at his word, that there would be a spirit of harmony?
"Yes, I did take him at his word. And John said the same thing to George Martin. In the back of my head I might have had some reservations, like, 'Well, we'll see…' But I was surprised and pleased at how everybody got along."

Did you have any idea while you were cutting Abbey Road that it would be The Beatles' last album? Was anything said to that effect?
"I didn't think it would be the last one. And nothing was said to indicate that, at least not to me. As far as I understood it, we'd be working on another record in the new studio I was building at Apple. The band was getting along better. The mood wasn't bubbly and fun all the time, but it was a hell of a lot better than during the previous year.
"The only hint they gave me or anybody was on the album cover, where they're walking across the street. For people who don't know the geography, they're actually walking away from the EMI Studios - or Abbey Road, as everybody knows it now. This was intentional on their part - they didn't want to be seen as walking toward the studio. When I saw that photo, I did think to myself, 'They're sending a message.'
"By that time, they'd been literally incarcerated at EMI. They grew to truly hate the place. It certainly wasn't the most luxurious studio in the world. It was cold and quite uncomfortable, and EMI was always quite slow to embrace new technologies - we were the last to get four-track and eight-track recording decks. In fact, Abbey Road was the first album where I got to use an eight-track console."

I'm curious: The Beatles were the biggest band in the world - still are, really. Couldn't they have told EMI, "We want a better consoles, better accommodations"?

"No, it was against the rules at EMI. I remember at one point they wanted some covered lights in Studio Two, a bit of mood lighting, and the word they got back was 'We can't do that sort of thing.' So the band ended up setting up their own little area in Studio Two, with little lamps of their own and things to make it more homey."

"You could really see the joy in their faces as they played; it was like they were teenagers again. One take was all we needed. The musical telepathy between them was mind-boggling."

The question, though, is who would want to buy Abbey Road? It's no secret that competition for studio bookings is now fierce - let's not forget that it's now possible to make a decent-sounding record in your bedroom with Garage Band etc - so making money from the studio could be difficult.

Whoever does take ownership of Abbey Road, though, will be getting their hands on a sizeable slice of recording history, and that's got to be worth something...

Let it be.

While musical Easter eggs really shined during the CD era, there were plenty of examples that predated the introduction of lasers to music-playback devices.

The world first cottoned to the idea thanks to the Beatles, whose sound engineers used the form to override the wishes of the musicians themselves.

 An act of quiet defiance by one of those engineers gave Abbey Road listeners a little surprise at the end—and the world its first "hidden track."

Little, literally: "Her Majesty," the song that closes out the second side of the record, was just 23 seconds long.

A simple acoustic ditty by Paul McCartney, the song was basically a loose end from the medley that defines the back half of that album.

 It was a nice enough song, but there was nowhere to put it in the midst of all the other songs on the record, so McCartney ordered engineer John Kurlander to remove it from the album.

He did, but later added it to the end of the album after a few seconds of silence.

“The Beatles always picked up on accidental things. It came as a nice little surprise there at the end, and he didn’t mind," Kurlander later recalled.

Another recording engineer with ties to the Beatles is responsible for at least two other types of vinyl-era Easter eggs.

George Peckham, who worked at Abbey Road on many of the band's records, helped the comedy troupe Monty Python figure out a clever vinyl-pressing trick they had batted around for a while but failed to figure out on their own: The three-sided record.

Peckham pulled off the trick on the band's The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief, which came out in 1973.

 The record featured a concurrent groove, which made it so that it would play different music based on where you placed the needle.

The goal was confusion—something assisted by the fact that both sides of the record are labeled "Side 2." The comics basically wanted listeners to trip upon the third side by accident.

“We had these visions of stoned fans, of which there were a lot in the early '70s, having the shock of their lives when brand new material was playing on a record they had had for months," Python's Michael Palin recalled.

 "Some people thought there was an alternative version because they would hear talk of these mysterious sketches that they had never heard on their record. It drove people mad.

 This was precisely why we did it, of course."

 http://shekinahfellowship.blogspot.com/