Abbey Road LIVE!

While disbanded for more than three decades now, the back catalog of the Fab Four continues to be one of the strongest-selling libraries of popular music in the world and there are literally hundreds of tribute bands worldwide offering reasonable facsimiles of the group's songs everywhere from tiny clubs and bars to large outdoor festival stages.

However, most of those groups concentrate on the band's early years, when their Cuban heels, mop-top haircuts and matching suits-and-ties helped catapult them to superstardom. That particular era of Beatlemania makes for a wise choice to emulate, as the group had yet to immerse themselves in the sea of possibilities afforded them by almost unlimited time in some of the U.K.'s finest recording facilities. By the last third of their short but prolific career, the band's increasing reliance on overdubbing, studio trickery and state-of-the-art sonic experimentation allowed them to craft some of the most amazing records of their generation (such as Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper�s Lonely Hearts Club Band). However, that creative freedom drastically outpaced the ability of anyone (even The Beatles) to approximate those compositions in a live setting without carting around upwards of ten additional musicians and the sort of PA system that had yet to be developed something their fetishists ELO would do several years later.

In light of this (and the crippling fame that threatened their lives and sanity), the band gave up the road in August of 1966, and fans never got a chance to hear what their later period material might have sounded like live. That's where this Athens-based tribute act comes in.

Since October of 2003 this group (featuring members of such well-known Classic City bands as the Grateful Dead tribute Cosmic Charlie and The Fuzzy Sprouts) has periodically dusted off 1969's Abbey Road in its entirety, but over the last few months, they've been touring regularly, with a full evening's worth of Beatles music that includes that famed album (often thought to be the band�s finest moment), and a setlist containing 70 other rarely-heard tunes from throughout the band's lifespan.

These guys don't dress up like their heroes; instead, they concentrate on pulling of the band's more mature and musically complex arrangements with vitality without straying too far from the original, iconic versions. Many who have seen the group's show rave at their devotion to the material, and word is that watching them air out these majestic rock gems only further cements one's awareness of just how unique and transcendent some of this stuff truly is.