Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the
eighth studio album by the English rock band The Beatles. Released in June
1967, Rolling Stone called it "the most important rock & roll album
ever made ... by the greatest rock & roll group of all time." The LP
included songs such as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", "When
I'm Sixty-Four" and "A Day in the Life".
During the Sgt. Pepper sessions, the group improved upon the
quality of their music's production while exploring experimental recording
techniques. Producer George Martin's innovative approach included the use of an
orchestra. The songs on the album range from music hall, rock and roll and pop
to traditional Indian music. Widely acclaimed and imitated, the album cover's
inspiration came from a sketch by Paul McCartney that depicted the band posing
in front of a collage of some of their favorite celebrities. It later served as
the basis for the design by English pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth.
Sgt. Pepper was a worldwide critical and commercial success,
spending a total of 27 weeks at the top of the UK Album Chart and 15 weeks at
number one on the US Billboard 200. A seminal work in the emerging psychedelic
rock style, the album was critically acclaimed upon release and won four Grammy
Awards in 1968. In 1994, it was ranked number one in the book All Time Top 1000
Albums. In 2005, the album was placed at number one on Rolling Stone magazine's
list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Sgt. Pepper is one of
the world's best selling albums, with 11 million RIAA certified copies sold in
the US as of 2012.
By late 1965, the group had grown weary of touring, and by
the end of their 1966 US tour they decided to retire from live performance.
Lennon commented: "We're fed up with making soft music for soft people,
and we're fed up with playing for them too." Upon their return to England,
rumors began to circulate that the band had decided to break-up. They
subsequently took an almost two-month vacation and individually became involved
in their own interests. George Harrison travelled to India for six weeks to
develop his sitar playing at the instruction of Ravi Shankar. In 1966,
McCartney and producer George Martin collaborated on a soundtrack for the film
The Family Way. Also in 1966, John Lennon acted in How I Won the War, and
he attended art showings, such as one at the Indica Gallery where he met his
future wife Yoko Ono. Ringo Starr used the break to spend more time with his wife
and first child. In November, during a return flight to London from
Kenya, where he had been on holiday with tour manager Mal Evans, McCartney had
the creative idea that would first become a song, and would eventually inspire
the Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band concept. McCartney
commented: "We did try performing some songs off [Revolver], but there
were so many complicated overdubs we can't do them justice. Now we can record
anything we want, and it won't matter. And what we want is to raise the bar a
notch, to make our best album ever."
With Sgt. Pepper, the group wanted to create a record that
could in effect tour for them; an idea they had already explored with the
promotional film clips made over the previous years. As McCartney
explained, "We were fed up with being The Beatles. We really hated that
fucking four little mop-top approach. We were not boys, we were men ... and
[we] thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers."
In early February McCartney had the idea of recording an
album that would represent a performance by a fictitious band. This alter-ego
group would give the band the freedom to experiment musically. McCartney
explained: "I thought, let's not be ourselves. Let's develop alter egos
... it won't be us making all that sound, it won't be The Beatles, it'll be
this other band, so we'll be able to lose our identities in this." Martin
wrote of the fictitious band concept: "'Sergeant Pepper' itself didn't
appear until halfway through making the album. It was Paul's song, just an
ordinary rock number ... but when we had finished it, Paul said, 'Why don't we
make the album as though the Pepper band really existed, as though Sergeant
Pepper was making the record? We'll dub in effects and things.' I loved the
idea, and from that moment on it was as though Pepper had a life of its
own".
The album starts with the title song, which introduces Sgt.
Pepper's band itself; this song segues into a sung introduction for bandleader
"Billy Shears" (Starr), who performs "With a Little Help from My
Friends". A reprise version of the title song appears on side two of the
album just prior to the climactic "A Day in the Life", creating a
bookend effect. However, the band effectively abandoned the concept other than
the first two songs and the reprise. Lennon was unequivocal in stating that the
songs he wrote for the album had nothing to do with the Sgt. Pepper concept,
and further noted that none of the other songs did either, saying "Every
other song could have been on any other album". In spite of Lennon's
statements to the contrary, the album has been widely heralded as an early and
ground-breaking example of the concept album.
The Beatles began sessions for the album in late November
1966 with a series of recordings that were to form an album thematically linked
to their childhood. The initial results of this effort produced
"Strawberry Fields Forever", "When I'm Sixty-Four" and
"Penny Lane". "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny
Lane" were released as a double A-sided single in February 1967 after EMI
and Epstein pressured Martin for a single. Once the single was released the
childhood concept was abandoned in favor of Sgt. Pepper, and in keeping with
the group's usual practice, the single tracks were not included on the LP (a
decision Martin states he now regrets). They were released only as a single in
the UK and Canada at the time, but were included as part of the American LP
version of Magical Mystery Tour (which was issued as a six-track double EP in
Britain). The Harrison composition "Only a Northern Song" was also
recorded during the Sgt. Pepper sessions but did not see a release until the
soundtrack album for the animated film Yellow Submarine, released in January
1969.
As EMI's premier act and the world's most successful rock
group, the group had almost unlimited access to Abbey Road Studios.
All four band members had already developed a preference for long, late
night sessions, although they were still extremely efficient and highly
disciplined in their studio habits.
By 1967, all of the Sgt. Pepper tracks could be recorded at
Abbey Road using mono, stereo and four-track recorders. Although eight-track
tape recorders were already available in the US, the first eight-tracks were
not operational in commercial studios in London until late 1967, shortly after
the album was released. Like its predecessors, the recording made extensive use
of the technique known as "bouncing down" (also known at that time as
a "reduction mix"), in which a number of tracks were recorded across
the four tracks of one recorder, which were then mixed and dubbed down onto one
or several tracks of the master four-track machine. This enabled the Abbey Road
engineers to give the group a virtual multi-track studio.
New modular effects units were used, like the wah-wah pedal
and fuzzbox, and running voices and instruments through a Leslie speaker.
Several then-new production effects feature extensively on the recordings. One
of the most important was automatic double tracking (ADT), a system that used
tape recorders to create a simultaneous doubling of a sound. Although it had
long been recognised that using multitrack tape to record "doubled"
lead vocals produced a greatly enhanced sound, it had always been necessary to
record such vocal tracks twice; a task which was both tedious and exacting. ADT
was invented especially for the band by EMI engineer Ken Townsend in 1966,
mainly at the behest of Lennon, who hated tracking sessions and regularly
expressed a desire for a technical solution to the problem. ADT quickly became
a near-universal recording practice in popular music. Martin, having fun at
Lennon's expense, described the new technique to an inquisitive Lennon as a
"double-bifurcated sploshing flange". The anecdote explains one
variation of how the term "flanging" came to be associated with this
recording effect. Also important was varispeeding, the technique of
recording various tracks on a multi-track tape at slightly different tape
speeds, which was used extensively on their vocals in this period. The speeding
up of vocals became a widespread technique in pop production. The band also
used the effect on portions of their backing tracks (as on "Lucy in the
Sky with Diamonds") to give them a "thicker" and more diffuse
sound.
"Within You Without You" was recorded on 15 March
with Harrison on vocals, sitar and tambura; the other instruments (tabla,
dilruba, swarmandel, and an additional tambura) were played by four
London-based Indian musicians. None of the other Beatles participated in the
recording. For the 17 March recording of "She's Leaving Home",
McCartney hired Mike Leander to arrange the string section as Martin was
occupied producing one of his other artists, Cilla Black.
The lyrics for Lennon's song "Being for the Benefit of
Mr. Kite!", were adapted from a Victorian circus poster for Pablo Fanque's
circus, which Lennon had bought at an antique shop in Kent on the day of filming
the promotional clip for "Strawberry Fields Forever" there. The sound
collage was created by Martin and his engineers, who collected recordings of
calliopes and fairground organs, which were then cut into strips of various
lengths, thrown into a box, mixed up and edited together in random order,
creating a long loop which was mixed in during final production.
This album also makes heavy use of keyboard instruments: a
grand piano is used on tracks such as "A Day in the Life", a Lowrey
organ is used for "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", a harpsichord can
be heard on "Fixing a Hole", and Martin played a harmonium on
"Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!". An electric piano, upright
piano, Hammond organ and glockenspiel can also be heard on the record. Harrison
used a tambura on several tracks, including "Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds" and "Getting Better".
The thunderous piano chord that concludes "A Day in the
Life", and the album, was produced by assembling three grand pianos in the
studio and playing an E chord on each simultaneously. Together on cue, Lennon,
Starr, McCartney and assistant Mal Evans hammered the keys on the assembled
pianos and held down the chord. The sound from the pianos was then mixed up
with compression and increasing gain on the volume to draw out the sound to
maximum sustain.
British pressings of the album (in its original LP form that
was later released on CD), end with a 15-kilohertz high-frequency tone (put on
the album at Lennon's suggestion and said to be "especially intended to
annoy your dog"), followed by an endless loop of laughter and gibberish
made by the run-out groove looping back into itself. The loop (but not the
tone) made its US debut on the 1980 Rarities compilation, titled "Sgt.
Pepper Inner Groove". However, it is only featured as a two-second
fragment at the end of side two rather than an actual loop in the run-out
groove. The CD version of "Sgt. Pepper Inner Groove" is actually a
bit shorter than that one found on the original UK vinyl pressing. The sound in
the loop caused some controversy when it was interpreted as a secret message.
McCartney later told his biographer Barry Miles that in the summer of 1967 a
group of kids came up to him complaining about a lewd message hidden in it when
played backwards. He told them, "You're wrong, it's actually just 'It
really couldn't be any other'". He took them to his house to play the
record backwards to them, and it turned out that the passage sounded to him
very much like "We'll fuck you like Superman". McCartney recounted to
Miles that "we had certainly had not intended to do that but probably when
you turn anything backwards it sounds like something ... if you look hard
enough you can make something out of anything".
Concerns that lyrics in Sgt. Pepper referred to recreational
drug use led to several songs from the album being banned by the BBC. The
album's closing track, "A Day in the Life", includes the phrase
"I'd love to turn you on". The BBC banned the song from airplay on
the basis of this line, claiming it could "encourage a permissive attitude
toward drug-taking". Both Lennon and McCartney denied any drug-related
interpretation of the song at the time, although McCartney's later comments in
The Beatles Anthology documentary regarding the writing of the lyric make it
clear that the drug reference was indeed deliberate.
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" also became the
subject of speculation regarding its meaning, as many believed that the words
of the chorus were code for LSD. The BBC used this as their basis for banning
the song from British radio. Again, Lennon consistently denied this
interpretation of the song, maintaining that the song describes a surreal
dreamscape inspired by a picture drawn by his son Julian. However, during
a newspaper interview in 2004, McCartney was quoted as saying:
“ 'Lucy in the Sky,' that's pretty obvious. There's others
that make subtle hints about drugs, but, you know, it's easy to overestimate
the influence of drugs ... Just about everyone was doing drugs in one form or
another and we were no different, but the writing was too important for us to
mess it up by getting off our heads all the time. ”
At other times, though, McCartney seems to have contradicted
himself. "When [Martin] was doing his TV program on Pepper,"
McCartney is quoted as saying, "he asked me, 'Do you know what caused
Pepper?' I said, 'In one word, George, drugs. Pot.' And George said, 'No, no.
But you weren't on it all the time.' 'Yes, we were.' Sgt. Pepper was a drug
album."
Upon its release on 1 June 1967, Sgt. Pepper received both
popular and critical acclaim. The album was a global hit, with huge sales
in Europe, North and South America, Africa, Japan, Australia, and even in the
black market in the Soviet Union, where their albums were very popular and widely
available. Various reviews appearing in the mainstream press and trade
publications throughout June 1967, immediately after the album's release, were
generally positive. In The Times, prominent critic Kenneth Tynan described Sgt.
Pepper as "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization".
Richard Poirier wrote "listening to the Sgt. Pepper album one thinks not
simply of the history of popular music but the history of this century."
_cover.jpg)
For your Friday viewing enjoyment, here’s the official video for “Sunloathe” from Wilco’s latest album The Whole Love.