The Crossing of Abbey Road
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Is a cool bootleg I received yesterday from Germany. It's basically four CDs with multiple takes, mixes, and studio chatter from the making of Abbey Road. It also contains some tracks from Let It Be: Ballad of J&Y, Old Brown Show, as well as Macca versions of Come And Get It, a John Lennon take of Ain't She Sweet, and some naked mixes of various song. The Come Together tracks are especially interesting with different lyrics, jokes, as well as the song being dissected in the studio by engineers. Disc 1 came up in iTunes as "Abbey Road Sessions" so maybe it's a bootleg of a bootleg? Also came with quite a nice glossy booklet with many pages including some rare photos, especially from the Abbey Road cover shoot. I got those Pear bootlegs today in the mail as well as a bunch of other Beatle related stuff that I have yet to check out. Over all the sound quality of the AR bootleg was quite good, with only one track being noticeably louder than the rest. Cool stuff to be able to hear the creative process. I get the impression from the bootleg that the Beatles were much more interactive on this record than I was led to believe from reports of them laying down their tracks alone on different days. Lots of banter and jokes which is nice to hear! Amazing what they were able to accomplish with just 8-track equipment and some supplemental 4-track machines.