How much is Abbey Road worth?

If reports are true that EMI is putting the famed London recording studios up for sale to ease its debt problems, the world could find out soon.

The Financial Times reported Tuesday that EMI is, indeed, putting Abbey Road, one of the most hallowed studios in music history, on the market. The Beatles, of course, named their final album after the street of the same name, and after the LP’s release, the studio was renamed Abbey Road.

So far, according to the Financial Times, EMI is being tight-lipped about the possible sale of the St. John’s Wood property. Muddying the waters further is the question of whether EMI would sell the Abbey Road brand with it.
In 1929, EMI purchased the house at number 3 Abbey Road for £100,000 ($160,000), and it would later house the world’s first custom-built recording studios, according to the Financial Times.

Long before The Beatles entered the picture, Sir Edward Elgar recorded “Land of Hope and Glory” in Studio One in 1931 with the London Symphony Orchestra. During World War II, the British government and BBC Radio used the facilities for propaganda recordings.

However, it was The Beatles who made the studios famous, recording almost all of their records there between 1962 and 1969. And when it came time to remaster the entire Beatles catalog for release in 2009, EMI used Abbey Road studios.

After The Beatles broke up, Abbey Road didn’t sit dormant. Pink Floyd recorded its seminal Dark Side Of The Moon LP there, and in more recent years, Radiohead, Oasis and Blur have used the studios to record many of their albums.

Reportedly, the reason EMI is considering selling the property is to alleviate some of the debt the company was saddled with as a result of Terra Firma’s 2007 leveraged buy-out. That’s according to the Financial Times, which also reports that Terra Firma wants $188 million from investors by June to avoid breaching covenants on $5.17 billion of loans from Citigroup. Chances are, however, that any sale of Abbey Road would not happen soon enough or bring in the kind of money needed to have a great impact on EMI’s debt problems.

Abbey Road’s significance as a recording studio has waned in recent years as technological advancements have allowed artists to record more cheaply on their own using  laptap computers. The same goes for a lot of record labels who, in the past, have used their own expensive recording infrastructure to record acts.

Still, Abbey Road does have one advantage: It has the facilities to accommodate full orchestras, and that’s made it attractive for producers looking to score films like “Lord Of The Rings.”

Four Beatles in a row, crossing the black-and-white zebra crossing on Abbey Road, one be-denimed and so serious-looking, one barefoot and smoking; one simply looking to keep up with his friends and the fourth in white, hands in pocket and his face swathed in hair.

No matter that they were making their way to exactly the same studio they had been using their entire career, they had come a long way from the four smartly smiling Moptops who waved out of the cover of their first LP, and a long way, too, from the all-for-one unity that bound them together back then. Abbey Road, as they titled their latest LP, would not be the last new Beatles album to be released — that honor would fall to the soundtrack to the “Let It Be” movie. But it was the last LP they would ever record together, and if the word “together” hangs awkwardly at the end of any sentence involving the latter-day Beatles, that is because it’s the last word that could describe them.

Yet, amid all the gloom and recriminations that flew around the end of The Beatles, and the sheer finality of a track listing that concluded with a song called “The End,” Abbey Road stands as perhaps the most cohesive of all The Beatles albums since Revolver. Yes, the White Album is more atmospheric, Sgt. Pepper is more lauded and Magical Mystery Tour is more mystifying. But from the opening warning, “Here comes old Flat Top,” to the closing chord that edges onto the label, Abbey Road not only features some of the group’s most ambitious songwriting and arrangements, it also offers a summation of everything the band had been striving for throughout the previous three years. Everything, that is, apart from the reconciliation that would allow John, Paul, George and Ringo to continue working together.

In terms of chronological taping, the first sign that there might be a new Beatles album gelling around the chaos of the Get Back sessions, as Let It Be was originally known, came Jan. 2, 1969, the very first day of the sessions, when John introduced a new song, “Sun King,” to the proceedings.

That early in the process, of course, its presence was meaningless — every song that was brought to the movie set was a new one, and that same day had already seen George’s “All Things Must Pass” and John’s “Dig A Pony” unveiled to the watching cameras and tapes. But as time passed and the final shape and nature of the movie’s contents started to make themselves apparent, it was clear, too, that The Beatles had far move useful material on hand than Get Back could accommodate.

“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Oh Darling,” “Octopus’s Garden,” “Mean Mr. Mustard” and “Polythene Pam” (both of which Lennon originally wrote during The Beatles’ visit to Rishikesh the previous year), “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window,” “Golden Slumbers” (whose lyric McCartney borrowed from the 17th century poet Thomas Dekker), “Carry That Weight” and “Her Majesty” were all roughed out during the Twickenham Studio sessions, which themselves stretched throughout the month of January.

The sessions themselves were, John Lennon later sighed, “hell … the most miserable sessions on earth.” In the history of The Beatles, added George Harrison, they represented “an all-time low.” But the songs that the quartet brought to the sessions, and which they were now to take out of them again, could not help but benefit from their exposure to this harsh environment. For the first time since they gave up touring, The Beatles — or at least some combination of the individual members — were playing together live, and no matter that the audience was largely made up of cameramen and technicians, their songs were taught to breathe and grow.

Of course, it was in an attempt to recapture that “in concert” feeling that Paul McCartney hatched the movie scheme in the first place; he wanted the band to return to their roots, a rock ’n’ roll combo that kicked ass in concert, with Get Back, both on record and film, capturing that ass kicking for all time — remember, there were no truly listenable recordings of the “live” Beatles in existence at that time; either the shows were drowned out by screaming, as with the long-since mothballed Hollywood Bowl tapes, or were captured in the lowest of lo-fi, as was the case with the Star Club tapes. The fact that future generations would find both of these acceptable for release is immaterial. They were not a sound that The Beatles wished to be remembered by.

Neither, as it turned out, was Get Back, which was why the project was subjected to so many delays and disagreements before the bulk of it was handed over to Phil Spector for remixing; the so-called “naked’ version of Let It Be that was released in 2003 shows what a mess The Beatles themselves had left the album in. That was not a fate that their next LP could be allowed to share, and so The Beatles did the other thing that a great rock ’n’ roll band should do. They broke in the songs in the live environment, then took them into the studio to perfect. The result is the most natural and positive-sounding record they had made again since Revolver.

Despite the acrimony that was slowly devouring The Beatles during the first half of 1969, the group remained busy. In April, John and Paul alone recorded “The Ballad Of John And Yoko” and proved that their friendship could survive the problems that were consuming their professional relationship. True, some people balked at the self-serving nature of Lennon’s lyric (and title), but the performance itself was exemplary, and “The Ballad Of John and Yoko” remains one of The Beatles’ greatest latter-day achievements. Interestingly, it was also destined to become their final U.K. #1 hit single. Neither “Something”/“Come Together,” which followed toward the end of the year (#4) nor “Let It Be” (#2) would taste such heights.

It was the ease with which this single came together that encouraged McCartney and Lennon to return to the studio just a couple of days later, this time with their bandmates accompanying them — Ringo Starr was filming “The Magic Christian” at the time of the “Ballad Of John And Yoko” session, and Harrison was apparently “out of the country,” which may or may not have been a euphemism for other forms of unavailability.

But now they were back, and the quartet reunited at Abbey Road April 16, 1969, to record two of Harrison’s recent compositions: “Old Brown Shoe” and an early draft of the spectral beauty of “Something” — a song which Harrison wrote for his wife Patti, and which Frank Sinatra later described as “the greatest love song of the past 50 years.” Sadly, any joy George might have taken from those words would soon be tempered when Sinatra took to describing his live version of the song as a Lennon/McCartney composition. “He was very old by then,” Harrison is said to have retorted. “We probably all looked the same to him.”

Two days later, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” was approached for the first time, a veritable Lennon leviathan that would be subject to any number of overdubbed guitar lines before it finally sounded as “massive” as the band demanded. How fitting, then, that McCartney had already decided upon a title for the album. It would be called Everest.

Tape operator John Kurlander told Beatles chronicler Mark Lewisohn, “It was around July, when it was very hot outside, that someone mentioned the possibility of the four of them taking a private plane over to the foothills of Mount Everest to shoot the cover photograph. But as they became more enthusiastic about the LP, someone — I don’t remember whom — suggested, ‘Look, I can’t be bothered to schlep all the way over to the Himalayas for a cover; why don’t we just go outside, take the photo there, call the LP Abbey Road and have done with it?”

A legend was christened.

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Despite such promising beginnings, the sessions were not carefree, at least this early in.

Engineer Phil McDonald informed Lewisohn, “You didn’t want to get involved, but people would be walking out, banging instruments down, not turning up on time and keeping the others waiting three or four hours, then blaming each other for not having rehearsed, or not having played their bit right.”

Recording “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” according to Lennon, was an especial chore — and he wasn’t even present for the session. He had recently been involved in a car accident and was still recovering at the time, “ … but I believe [Paul] really ground George and Ringo into the ground recording it. We spent more money on that song than any of them on the whole album, I think.” And what did they get out of it? Looking back from the mid-1970s, Lennon sneered, “a typical McCartney single, or whatever.”

It was only as the album came together and the quartet realized just how monumental it was becoming that, as Harrison later explained, “Things got a bit more positive. We did actually perform more like musicians again.”

“It was a very happy record,” producer George Martin agreed. “I guess it was happy because everybody thought it was going to be the last.”

Overseeing the sessions, Martin himself was allegedly still smarting over his virtual exclusion from many of the Let It Be recordings.

He could not, however, resist McCartney’s request that the Fab Five reunite to make an album “like we used to,” and though he would again be absent from several of the upcoming sessions, it is clear that he had a lot of magic to bring to the proceedings. He too had surely tired of the art-for-art’s sake cleverness that characterized The Beatles’ last two full albums; the countless hours spent scouring the EMI sound-effects library in search of another sound or effect that nobody had ever heard before, while John and Yoko made unintelligible noises in the guise of modern art. Abbey Road would indeed be made just like they used to.

“Let It Be was such an unhappy record that I really believed that was the end of The Beatles, and I assumed I would never work with them again,” George Martin later said. “I thought, ‘What a shame to end this way.’ So I was quite surprised when Paul rang me up and said, ‘We’re going to make another record, would you like to produce it?’ My immediate answer was, ‘Only if you let me produce it the way we used to.’ He said, ‘We will, we want to.’ ‘John included?’ ‘Yes, honestly.’ So I said, ‘Let’s do it’.”

“Abbey Road was a kind of Sgt. Pepper mark two,” Martin would continue. “It was innovatory, but in a more controlled way, unlike The Beatles [the White Album] and Let It Be which were a little beyond control.” A happy medium, then, which made for a very happy album.

With Chris Thomas filling Martin’s shoes on the occasions when he was not in the studio, the Moog-heavy “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” was followed into the can by McCartney’s tribute to the harmonic pop of a decade before, “Oh! Darling,” and the latest product of Starr’s wacky pen, the aquatic whimsy of “Octopus’s Garden.”

The album was clearly taking shape, then; the only question was, what would that shape ultimately be? At this point in time, The Beatles had still to formulate any cohesive form for Abbey Road. Indeed, a report in Rolling Stone in September 1970 (that is, a full year after Abbey Road was released) insisted that an entirely different LP had been in the works, one which was to be titled Hot As Sun and whose full contents remain the stuff of speculation, as “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “Don’t Let Me Down” were joined by such titles as “Proud As You Are,” “Dirty Old Man” and “Zero Is Just Another Even Number.” “The Beatles Album No-one Will Ever Hear,” announced the headline, and while the putative title track would reappear as a brief instrumental on McCartney’s first solo album, McCartney, it has remained that way.

According to the story that followed, the tapes for the album were either lost, erased or stolen, and it really doesn’t matter that the entire tale was a fabrication, originally published in Elektra Records’ Touch magazine and written by Bruce and Steve Harris. It entered Beatle lore regardless, and the fiction continues to this day, on the Web site www.beatlemoney.com.

Speculating upon what might have happened had The Beatles not actually broken up, the site sees Hot As Sun piece together “tracks from Paul’s and Ringo’s [first solo LPs] as well as preview tracks from John’s and George’s pending solo albums … trying to capitalize on a rumored lost album discussed in an article in Rolling Stone magazine. [EMI] wanted to release it in time for Christmas. The Beatles blocked this effort, but a few hundred were pressed for The Beatles Fan Club and the music press.”

Yes, it’s all a joke. But where fantasy leads, reality will quickly follow. The Japanese bootleg label Junk Headz has since released an album titled Hot As Sun featuring (admittedly mistitled) versions of all the songs cited in the original report, plus a clutch more from the same period, and another LP’s worth of bonus “outtakes.” Suffice to say, the songs you’ve never previously heard of tend to be jams and snippets from the Let It Be sessions, and the remainder are nothing that you don’t own already. But it’s a fascinating collection all the same: “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” / “Don’t Let Me Down” / “Hot As Sun” / “Junk” / “Polythene Pam” / “Octopus’s Garden” / “I Should Like To Live Up A Tree”/ “Zero Is Just Another Even Number” / “What’s The New Mary Jane” / “Dirty Old Man” / “Proud As You Are” / “Watching Rainbows.” All of which would indeed have made a fascinating album. But The Beatles had far greater things in store.

Among the manifold rumors and legends that populate Beatle-land, one of the most pervasive is the suggestion that John’s original vision for the album would have segregated his songs on one side, and McCartney’s on the other (with, presumably, Starr and Harrison’s contributions squeezed someplace in between). “Even before they began,” engineer Phil McDonald told Lewisohn. “I remember John saying [that].”

Somewhere around the beginning of May, however, the notion of presenting one full side of the album as a medley hove into view. It appears to have first been mooted by George Martin: “The segues were my idea, to have a continuous piece of music. Wherever possible, we would design a song that way.” Once the idea had been floated, however, McCartney leaped upon it; indeed, it is often reported that he originally envisioned linking the entire album in that fashion, as The Beatles’ riposte to the Who’s recently unveiled Tommy rock opera.

 In any event, less ambitious heads prevailed, and a compromise was arrived at, a decision that placed the medley on Side 2 and all of the songs recorded so far onto Side 1. There they would be joined by the protracted silliness of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” (recording of which began July 9) and the correspondingly sinister “Come Together” (July 21). In the meantime, work began on the medley, or “the Long One,” as the band referred to it during its gestation.

The first and, for a couple of months, the only song recorded for this ambitious suite (on May 6) was “You Never Give Me Your Money,” a song that McCartney wrote around the band’s dealings with their newly acquired business manager Allen Klein. McCartney told his biographer Barry Miles, “This was me directly lambasting Allen Klein’s attitude to us: no money, just funny paper, all promises and it never works out. It’s basically a song about [having] no faith in the person. John saw the humor in it.”

Despite this promising start, however, it would be early July before the band truly got to work in earnest, as “Her Majesty,” “Golden Slumbers” and another anti-Klein composition, “Carry That Weight” (beginning July 2), “The End” (July 23), “Sun King” and “Mean Mr. Mustard” (July 25), “Polythene Pam” and “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window” (July 28) and, finally, “Because” (Aug. 1) were all coaxed into being.

The side, and therefore the album, would then be completed with the addition of another Harrison song, “Here Comes The Sun,” which they began tackling early into the medley sessions, on July 7. With remixing, rerecording and overdubs taking place often within a day or two of the original recordings, and the medley itself being constructed beginning July 30, Abbey Road was finally declared complete Aug. 25, 1969, five days after the final actual recording session, completing “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” on Aug. 20. The LP would be in the shops exactly 31 days later; the four Beatles would never be together in the studio again.

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