In article <19991117180123.11458.00000352@ng-fs1.aol.com> feveryone@aol.comatose (F Everyone) writes:
>>No way can Abbey rd be as low as 7. are you mad ?
>
>   Why does everyone in RMB put Abbey Road on a pedestal? Granted, it is a
>great LP but I personally think they have many other albums that are better..

I suppose everyone has his or her favorite. Whether it's better or
greater than all the rest...an awfully difficult task! Imagine choosing
which child of yours is the best.

I was noticing over in rec.music.rock-pop-r&b.1960s, where original chart
listings are regularly published for each week of the sixties, that "Abbey
Road" seems to have been number one in November 1969 *on the singles
chart*. Here was an album that had such a profound effect on music, it
created its own place in the waning realm of the 45 r.p.m. record.

I'm not sure I'd classify "Abbey Road" as the Beatles' best-ever LP, but
it was unique in its own right as a sort of psalm to the end of an era.

Maybe there's some undefinable magic left in an album that still provokes
arguments over whether it was or was not a product of personal and
professional fragmentation. I'm not sure that's a debate that can ever be
settled, but it's fun to try.

I do think that it's the paradox "Abbey Road" communicates---the group on
the edge of a break-up, the persistent illusion of indivisibility---that
makes the mind resonate to its internal creative counterpoise.

If you take one song and extract it from its brethren, you might not 
perceive this communique, but taken as an irreducible whole, "Abbey Road"
reflected the Beatles' past cohesion as well as their future alone...and
our future more or less without the foursome, save for their legacy. 

It showed how even shards of songs---when written and performed by the
Beatles, and arranged with care in-studio---could recombine into such a
glittering musical treasure.

"Abbey Road" stands alone in the Beatles' output as the harbinger of an
epoch's consummation, its gentle glow from start to finish accelerating by
album's end to a furious terminal flame. 

Why is it considered to be so brilliant? Here's one thought. This is music
that relumines the men whose artistry we thought we'd fully understood.
They could go no further, create nothing new. And then there was this last
LP. 

Here were artists who were each so desperate to get on with their
independent lives...yet were ultimately entwined in perpetuity by the
passion and perception of their music. 

And we were entwined with them. Still are, by all accounts.

-- 
"Right now I think I'm gonna plan a new trend, because the
line on the graph's getting low and we can't have that...."
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saki@evolution.bchs.uh.edu