Dear Friends,

Recently I observed that if someone had told me in 1969 I would be organizing a tribute festival for a rock group about to break up, and that very same group would be still innovating and changing popular culture in the year 2009, it would challenge all conventional thinking. No futurist, no matter how clairvoyant, could have predicted this continued surge in The Beatles’ worldwide popularity.

For while their images are timeless, and while we have difficulty placing them in a particular time, the fact is they are from another time. But, clearly what they created was so artistically original and brilliant that two generations later their art is not only being listened to as originally intended, but seen in Las Vegas as theatre, played with on hi-tech game systems, chronicled and analyzed in countless books, and imitated by thousands of bands in every country on the planet, while the two surviving members who left behind live touring 44 years ago, still tour, and sell out stadiums.

History simply does not have an art form that parallels this phenomenon. 45 years after the media put them in every newspaper and on every
radio & tv in every home, they are still on every radio & tv and every newspaper, plus now computers, phones, pods, and still in every home.

Which brings us to festivals like Abbey Road On the River. They exist, I guess, because, even with all the mediums and platforms that celebrate these four
improbable lads from Liverpool, we need to come together with fans like ourselves to sing, dance, discuss, and celebrate time and time again, what they
created and who they are.

I will leave it for greater minds than mine to figure that out. And I suspect 100, 200, and 500 years from now, they will still be playing on some mop-top hologram
on multiple planets in multiple solar systems.

So, if you love John, Paul, George, and Ringo as we all do, and if you still get excited when you hear that first undeniable chord that kicks off “A Hard Days Night”,
or believe it to be true, that in the end “the love you take really is equal to the love you make”, then join us at our festivals May 27-31 in Louisville, KY,
and Sept 2-6 in Washington DC/National Harbor, MD. How long will Beatlemania last?, a reporter asked John 45 years ago. "As long as they keep coming",
he replied.

How long will Abbey Road On The River last? As long as you keep coming. Come to Louisville in May, or to our new home in Wash DC in Sept, 2010
and you will experience firtshand what Beatles fans call the weekend(s) they mark their year by.

Gary Jacob