The final days of the Beatles. Has there ever been a more overly detailed account of a breakup in the annals of print? Yet, Kennth Womak has written a wonderful new book, Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles, which comes on the fiftieth anniversary of the classic album’s release. Womak uses the backdrop of the Beatles final musical statement to provide new insight into the events surrounding the disintegration of the world’s most popular rock and roll band and its refusal to go away quietly.
What makes Solid State stand out from previous “end of the Beatles sagas” is as the title hints, it concentrates on perhaps the most crucial instrument on Abbey Road, the then brand-new solid state mixing board introduced to the studio whose name the record bares as its title. Abbey Road was indeed recorded in the place where nearly all the band’s legendary music was realized, but in the winter of 1969 there was one major difference: The studio moved away from its trusty BTR four-track machine for a new solid state board and an eight track deck, something the Beatles and many of its contemporaries clamored for since its introduction a year earlier. The very sound of the band was altered, the smoother and deeper Paul McCartney bass runs, the crunchier John Lennon rhythm guitar riffs, the sweetly resonant slide guitar of George Harrison, and the silky groove of Ringo Starr’s drum rolls. It is as if the band of the Sixties was heralding the Seventies. This, among other pressing issues within and without is what captivated the Beatles enough to rekindle previous magic with producer George Martin to make one final brilliantly sonic profession of their mystical talents.
If you are a studio nerd or a Beatles aficionado you will love this book, but for the mildly curious, or those learning about this seminal period in the final days of an historic run of musical success, there is plenty to cull here. For me, perhaps the coolest nugget is the transcript of a meeting between three of the Beatles (taped because Ringo was absent due to tests for stomach pain) that starkly reveals the problems each of them were harboring with the music – beyond the lawsuits and backbiting, drug issues and other nagging elements that finished them off. Their personalities, the years of crushing fame and stellar artistic output coming tumbling forth to expose their truest personalities beyond the Fab Four that were soon to be no more.