It seems Saturday night is a busy one in Austin.

The second annual Austin’s Got Talent competition and talent show on Oct. 16 is canceled, while the Abbey Road Band is playing that night at Knowlton Auditorium inside Austin High School as the first concert in the 67th season of the Austin Artist Series.

According to Dennis Charnecki of DC records in Austin, who helped organize Austin’s Got Talent, AGT organizers weren’t aware of a second musical act in town scheduled on that day before this week.

“We’ve had people who worked at the show who said they couldn’t work because of the upcoming (Abbey Road Band concert),” Charnecki said.

As a result, past performers and AGT hopefuls will be performing at Paramount’s annual New Year’s Eve show. Anyone who purchased tickets to Saturday’s cancelled show can redeem those tickets at the New Year’s Eve show.

Although the competition is cancelled, Charnecki said the prizes are still available for contestants who auditioned for AGT, including gigs at county fairs around the state and next year’s Freedom Fair. The grand prize CD demo recording is still up for grabs among AGT contestants, Charnecki said, although another competition is unlikely to be scheduled this year.

Abbey Road Comes Through Austin

Disappointed music lovers won’t have reason to be sad for long, as the Abbey Road Band, a Beatles tribute group that’s made a name for sounding exactly like the Beatles did live, will be performing at 7 p.m. Oct. 16 at Knowlton Auditorium.

The first concert in the Austin Artist series, Abbey Road Band will play all of the hits from the early years of Beatlemania right up to Long and Winding Road, the last No. 1 hit the Beatles put out.

Abbey Road Band is a group of four musicians from Rapid City, S.D. who grew up on Beatles music.

“It changed our lives,” said Monte Madison, who performs Paul McCartney’s role, of watching the Beatles’ live performance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

The group has been touring for 10 years, although Madison had wanted to form a band that would recreate the Beatles’ live sound for 15 years before that. Now, the group tours all over the U.S. playing from Mt. Rushmore to Montana and across the Midwest. Although the group doesn’t try to look like the Beatles, people coming to the concert can expect to hear the sort of music they would have back when the Beatles were touring.

“We’re gonna take them back to memories that they haven’t had since that time,” Madison said. According to Madison, there’s always at least one person at every concert who tears up, remembering hearing the Beatles for the first time.

The concert is only available to Austin Artist Series season ticket holders, according to Jeannine Buechner, the Series’ membership chair. These tickets are sold during their sales campaign, which takes place for two or three weeks every year in September. Knowlton Auditorium’s seating almost sold out this year, Buechner said. The auditorium seats almost 1,900.