On Dec. 2, Berklee College of Music will offer Singers Showcase: The Other Side of Abbey Road. The annual student concert has featured the likes of alumnae Paula Cole, Lalah Hathaway, Susan Tedeschi and Gillian Welch. This year's bright lights will be belting tunes by Usher, Janelle Monae, John Legend, Joss Stone and others, then finishing up with selections from the Beatles' "Abbey Road," the first time the Showcase has focused on a specific album. The timing is good, because as these words are written, "Abbey Road" is #4 on the iTunes album chart, joined by "The Beatles" (aka "the White Album") at #8 and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" at #10.
Steve Jobs on Tuesday debuted the Beatles catalog on iTunes, bringing a cascade of "long and winding road" comments from the media. It's not clear why it took so long to get the Beatles into the fold, with AC/DC among the few other remaining holdouts. Certainly doing anything businesswise with the feuding remnants of the Fab Four and their armies of lawyers and managers can't be easy.
But Paul and Yoko and the rest have always put Beatles-related projects through a pretty severe test of their effect on the Beatles' legacy - treating their music with respect. So I'm glad to see the albums selling well on iTunes, even though individual songs are available too. It gives me some hope that the album as an artform is not lost. As someone named Kit O'Toole raises in this piece, it's rather sad to think that young music fans will be able to just buy the songs they've heard of and skip the albums.
Of course, we could buy seven-inch 45 rpm singles of Beatles songs back in the day, but only of those few songs that the Beatles elected to release that way, usually in advance of an album's release, as a sort of appetizer. Occasionally there was a track that came out as a single without appearing immediately on an album - "Hey Jude" being the most famous example. But the idea was always to get to the albums.
As O'Toole puts it, "the Fab Four showed that albums could be considered complete works of art, a collection of songs that work together to create a mood or communicate a message." Most of their albums also changed the whole idea of what pop music could be, as did albums by Dylan and once or twice the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones; going country or psychedelic or orchestral was in each case a revolutionary idea back then.
Most Beatles albums were also simply masterpieces of sequencing, as one song led to another in a procession that was imprinted on the brains of fans. It's difficult to imagine the songs on "Sgt. Pepper" or "Abbey Road" in particular in any other order.
Which brings me back to Berklee. I'm told that the famous side-two medley on "Abbey Road" will be performed in order, but that the rest of the sequence will be broken up. I'm happy to hear that "Student vocalists, instrumentalists, and arrangers will be interpreting the music in their own unique ways." But it's just going to sound wrong if they don't start with "Come Together" and end with "Her Majesty."
Tickets to the 8:15 p.m. show at the Berklee Performance Center are $10-$15 general admission at the box office, ticketmaster.com or 617-931-2000.