Free Republic

This is Side 2 of Abbey Road by The Beatles on vinyl. This exact record is released in 2019 as a 50th anniversary celebration of the album.

Mark Kramer is a huge Beatles fan. Just hours after stepping off his overnight flight from Florida to London, he is not bleary-eyed but brimming with energy as he savors his time at the world's best-known pedestrian crossing. Beside the streaks of white paint that mark the zebra crossing on Abbey Road -- a site protected since 2010 for its cultural and historical importance -- he rattles off Beatles facts, talks about the band's musical journey and grows ever more excited. Kramer, 40, is here because of "Abbey Road," the seminal album the band released on September 26, 1969 --...

It was 50 years ago today, that The Beatles caused a traffic delay.

From the moment the Sun King arose from his sumptuous gold bed, aligned with the rising sun at the centerpiece of his beloved Versailles, the château was alive with activity. The life of every courtier, minister, lovely lady, doctor, and cook was finely tuned to the rituals of the King, his dressing, shaving, dining, meetings, and evening comedie, dancing or appartement when the halls were flooded with light and the courtiers played billiards, gambled, and ate sweets. Living under a pretense of usefulness to Louis XIV and the government of France, the courtiers were largely a source of amusement...

At 1 p.m. today, Thursday, Nov. 16, classic rock station KSWD "The Sound" 100.3 FM went off the air with side two of The Beatles' Abbey Road. The move came as a result of a deal The Sound's parent company, Entercom, struck with the FCC to divest three of its stations in exchange for regulatory approval of its $1.7 billion merger with CBS Radio, which also owns several stations in the L.A. market, including KROQ. The 100.3 FM frequency was sold to Educational Media Foundation for an undisclosed amount. EMF, based in Rocklin, owns 770 FM stations and translators and...

White Muslim convert Richard Dart and a former police community support officer were among six people arrested for allegedly plotting a terror attack in Britain.Richard Dart, who was radicalised by the cleric Anjem Choudary, was held following police raids in east and west London. A former PCSO and two of his brothers, who were living just over a mile from the Olympic site in Stratford, were also among those detained during the police and MI5 operation to prevent a suspected terror assault. One of the brothers was Tasered by officers. Counter-terrorism police had first searched their home last November. The...

Tweet TO MUCH fanfare, Italy celebrated 150 years since its unification two weeks ago. Less exuberantly, America is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the civil war, a failed attempt to undo its union. Amid this flurry of historical fissions and fusions it is easy to overlook another, arguably more significant unification set in motion in spring 1861. In March of that year James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist (pictured above), published the first piece of a four-part paper entitled "On physical lines of force". Sprinkled amid the prose in the Philosophical Magazine were equations which revealed...

One of Abbey Road Studios’ most famous clients hopes that the facility, which has reportedly been put up for sale, can be saved. Paul McCartney, speaking to the BBC’s Newsnight television show on Tuesday, said there have been efforts to save Abbey Road by “a few people who have been associated with the studio for a long time,” although he did not name those people or include himself among them. “I have so many memories there with the Beatles,” he added. “It still is a great studio. So it would be lovely for someone to get a thing together to...

Forty years ago on Saturday, one of the pop world's most infamous and imitated album covers was shot in a little side street in north London... On the 8 August 1969 that the Fab Four walked out of No 3 Abbey Road, having finished basic work on what would be - and they subsequently said they knew would be - their last album. A policeman held up the traffic, the band walked back and forth a few times and that was that ...A lesser noted curiosity is that the album cover has no writing on it and is just the...

LONDON (AFP) - Fans have rushed to buy the first "new" Beatles album for a generation -- a radical remixing of some of the group's most famous songs -- more than 35 years after the break-up of the iconic band. "Love", which has the backing of surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, comprises 26 of the Fab Four's hit songs, but many of them mixed together using previously unheard material from the studio. "I hope this will help people to hear Beatles music again," said Giles Martin, son of the group's original producer Sir George Martin who is often...

A roll of toilet paper that was criticised by the Beatles is up for auction on Ebay. The snubbed toilet roll was not received with appreciation by the members of the band, who noted with disgust that it was "too hard and shiny". Despite it giving them something to read during their visit to the toilet, they were also unimpressed with the fact that each sheet had "EMI LTD" stamped on it. The toilet paper, which once sat in an Abbey Road lavatory, has been kept in a glass box since being auctioned at a 1980 Abbey Road sale, reports...

The Beatles' 'Abbey Road' Album Airbrushed To Be Politically CorrectThe Beatles' 1969 Abbey Road album cover has been airbrushed by politically correct poster companies in the United States to remove a cigarette held in Paul McCartney's hand, BBC reports. The original album cover shows the four Beatles crossing the famed road--McCartney is barefoot, third in line, and holding a cigarette. The airbrushing was done without the permission of either McCartney or Apple Records, which owns the rights to the image. An Apple spokesman told BBC, "We have never agreed to anything like this. It seems these poster companies got...

EXCLUSIVE No more Fag Four Beatles One for the road ... Beatle Paul McCartney with a cigarette in his hand on the original 1969 album cover By SIMON WHEELER THE classic Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover showing the band on a zebra crossing has been altered – to remove the cigarette in Paul McCartney’s hand. The original image shows a barefoot Macca third in line holding his ciggie. The 1969 photo has been a poster best-seller since it was shot near Abbey Road studios in North London, where the Fab Four recorded most of their music. But companies including...