Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles

Kenneth Womack is arguably the premier Beatles scholar on the planet, having written no fewer than nine books on the Fab Four, including an exhaustive two-volume biography of the Beatles’ legendary producer, George Martin. I do not use the word “scholar” lightly. Womack’s books are extensively researched, and are attributed with literally hundreds of detailed footnotes. He also writes for the on line magazine Salon.com, typically on the anniversaries of an album release or other noteworthy event in Beatles history. It was at the end of one of these, an article celebrating the anniversary of the Beatles November 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, that his two latest Beatles books were mentioned. The title of the first intrigued me: Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles.

 

Abbey Road has long been my favorite Beatles album, and I would have likely read it anyway, but it was the “Solid State” that really got my attention. From the book I learned that before Abbey Road, all of the Beatles albums were recorded on a 4-track tape recorder, with the genius George Martin creating the intricate multi-instrumental and vocal stylings of albums like Sgt. Pepper using track bouncing and countless other innovative studio tricks. Abbey Road Studios was seriously behind the times in studio mixing and recording technology, so in the months before the Beatles started working on Abbey Road, they had upgraded to a more modern 8-track recorder. This also necessitated a new mixing console, as the one they had used for years was a custom-built deck that had only four outputs, whereas the new recorder would require eight. In designing the new mixing board, the engineers decided to use all transistors in the board’s electronics, rather than the vacuum tubes (“valves” in Brit-speak) that were in the old board. This gave the recordings a very different sound, with tighter, deeper bass notes and far less distortion, lending the music a more open, clear tonality. The change is starkly apparent from the opening notes of Come Together on side one.

 

When Abbey Road was released, it did not meet with universal praise. Quite the contrary. Many reviewers panned it, not only because they didn’t like the song compositions (they didn’t) but because of the sound of the recording. “There's just something odd about the sound of this record” opined one reviewer, while another put it even more directly: “It just doesn’t sound like the Beatles.” It was the sound of the new fully transistorized (Sold State) mixing console.

 

Womack’s Abbey Road book is a fascinating song-by-song look at the Beatles creative process on this, their final effort. They went to sometimes astonishing lengths to achieve perfection, or as close to it as possible. There are too many examples to list here (read the book!), but they include Paul spending two full weeks getting the vocal to Maxwell’s Silver Hammer to his satisfaction, George re-recording his overdubbed multiple guitar parts on Here Comes the Sun over fifty times, and the literal weeks of rehearsal of the three-part harmonies that grace the famous side-two medley, painstaking taught by George Martin.

 

The over 100 pages devoted to a detailed description of the recording and assembling of that famous medley are, to me, the most interesting of the book. I vowed not to listen to Abbey Road until I had finished reading Solid State, and when I finally put it on the stereo I was simply blown away. I immediately listened to it a second time, through very good headphones, and was doubly impressed.

 

Read this fantastic book, and put on Abbey Road. You’ll never hear it the same way again.

March 18, 2021

Portland, OR