The Beatles: Rock Band / 09.09.09

Imagine a stately London building in November 1931, with the London Symphony Orchestra playing the grand British anthem “Land of Hope & Glory” – with its composer, Edward Elgar, at the podium. That was how Abbey Road Studios celebrated its opening. At the time, nobody dreamed that a group called The Beatles would revolutionize English music and make the studio a permanent landmark.

Even before there was rock & roll, Abbey Road was home to a lot of musical activity. The spacious Studio A hosted many notable classical sessions during the ’40s and ’50s, but American jazz artists recorded there as well. Big band great Glenn Miller made his final recordings at Abbey Road in 1944. The rise of rock & roll also hit the studio, as Cliff Richard & the Shadows made 1958’s “Move It” – widely considered England’s first rock & roll record, ever.

The studio also produced some popular comedy and spoken-word records – notably a series of discs from The Goon Show, a beloved radio program whose cast included comic greats Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. Overseeing those sessions was a young producer who came to Abbey Road in 1950 and soon earned a reputation for handling slightly quirky projects: George Martin. He was also behind a novelty record by Max Bygraves, “Cowpuncher’s Cantata” – the first chart record ever to come out of Abbey Road.

It was Martin who told Brian Epstein that he’d take a chance on The Beatles when another label had already turned them down. Beginning with “Love Me Do,” Martin and The Beatles proceeded to make history. With a few stray exceptions (like “Can’t Buy Me Love,” recorded while the group was on tour in Paris), nearly all The Beatles’ recordings were made at Abbey Road. The more compact Studio Two was their homebase, though they used Studio One for more ambitious sessions like the orchestra on “A Day in the Life.”  If your band records there today, you may still find yourself leaning against the grand piano that Paul played on “Lady Madonna,” or singing into the same microphone where Paul and John fine-tuned their harmonies.

Plenty of non-Beatles classics were made at Abbey Road too. The associated EMI label had a stable of great ’60s groups, so the Hollies (with and without Graham Nash), Manfred Mann, and fellow Mersey-area lad Billy J. Kramer all made hits there. During the ’70s, many of the engineers who’d cut their teeth on The Beatles sessions would oversee landmarks of their own. In particular, Alan Parsons, who made his official debut as an engineer on the Abbey Road album, was again behind the boards two years later when Pink Floyd visited The Dark Side of the Moon. A more recent pop masterpiece, Radiohead’s OK Computer, was partly recorded there.  And when U2 and Green Day got together to record “The Saints Are Coming” as a Hurricane Katrina benefit, that too was done at Abbey Road. The two bands even had themselves photographed crossing Abbey Road, as The Beatles did on their famous album cover – and as thousands of tourists still do each year.