The car only had one working speaker - which, given the heavy stereo mixes on much of the Beatles' catalogue, gave the tracks an often surreal quality.

"I thought 'Wow, the drums are huge' ... you could only hear half the song. It took a while to work out what was going on," he says.

"But I was captivated by the songs."

It's the sticking power of those songs that drives his latest project with ARC, the Australian Rock Collective - a collaboration with Jet's Mark Wilson, You Am I's Davey Lane and Powderfinger's Darren Middleton.

The quartet first teamed up last year for Abbey Road Live, a series of shows marking the 50th anniversary of the release of Abbey Road, the Beatles' penultimate album but final studio effort (Let it Be was recorded earlier in 1969 but saw a delayed release due to creative differences and the work it took to turn it into a film).

After Abbey Road made a surprise return to the charts in October, ARC decided to take the project for one last spin, hitting up regional towns across Australia including Albury and Bendigo before coming to Canberra next Saturday, February 22.

Joined by a range of special guests, they play the album in full from start to finish, as well as a second set made up of some of the Beatles' greatest hits.

Kram says touring with ARC is a different experience to hitting the road with Spiderbait - and not just because with four band members now instead of three he sometimes has someone standing in front of him.

"We were confident people would be interested at least, but we were just really blown away by the response to [Abbey Road Live]," he says.

"This band and the whole experience is just an extension of listening to those perfect records and pretending to play guitar on your tennis racquet and bouncing on your bed when you were a kid.

"We couldn't be happier and we can't wait to go around again."

Though Abbey Road is considered one of the Beatles' more cohesive efforts, coming on the tails of the sprawling White Album and the cobbled-together Yellow Submarine soundtrack, it still showcases the Fab Four's mastery of a wide range of genres, transitioning seamlessly from orchestral ballads to down-and-dirty blues to what might be the first doom metal track ever recorded.

There are also forays into prog-style medleys, children's songs, experimental dreamscapes and a vow on the part of Paul McCartney that someday he'll marry the Queen (hang in there Macca, there's still time).

For ARC, that variety means the band can shapeshift, with the line-up and musical roles changing from song to song.

They try not to get too creative with the arrangements, Kram says, but they also don't try to impersonate the Beatles' sound exactly. Instead, they try to match the feel of each song with the frontman it most suits.

"I start the show off with Come Together... there's something about that energy that suits me. There's a little bit of danger to that performance," he says.

"I also sing on I Want You (She's So Heavy)... that was a bit of a no-brainer.

"When we do Here Comes the Sun, Davey sings that song so beautifully on acoustic and it really suits him.

"It was pretty obvious from fairly early on who was going to sing what and why."

Kram sees Abbey Road as unique in the Beatles' catalogue, in that it serves as both a fitting retrospective of their decade-long career but also a glimpse into a future that might have been.

Come Together and I Want You could have been on the White Album, he says, while Something is "just a majestic tune" that would have fit right in on Sgt. Pepper's. Oh Darling reminds him of their earlier records, while Maxwell's Silver Hammer might have been found on Magical Mystery Tour.

"There's all these elements - like little vignettes of the past," he says.

"If that was just it, you'd say 'Oh yeah, that's a cool record.' But it's side two that makes it a masterpiece.

"I don't think Bohemian Rhapsody would have happened without Abbey Road side two. It was like 'Let's not bother with all these singles, let's put something together that's a piece of work. Let's look at ourselves like composers instead of rock stars'.

"It's very much looking forward to what might have been if those relationships had stayed strong. The stuff they [might have done] in the '70s might have been completely tripped out or it could have ended up being super lo-fi rock. I guess we'll just never know."

What we do have, Kram agrees, is 13 albums making up one of the greatest bodies of work of all time. And he doesn't think it will fall out of favour any time soon.

"It's like listening to Mozart. Great music just lives forever," he says.