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Author Topic: The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ at 50  (Read 4527 times)

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The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ at 50: Still Full of Joy and Whimsy

By JON PARELESMAY 30, 2017

A half-century after its release, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is a relic of a vanished era. Like a Fabergé egg or a Persian miniature, it speaks of an irretrievable past, when time moved differently, craftsmanship involved bygone tools and art was experienced more rarely and with fewer distractions.

It’s an analog heirloom that’s still resisting oblivion — perhaps because, even in its moment, it was already contemplating a broader sweep of time. The music on “Sgt. Pepper” reached back far before rock as well as out into an unmapped cosmos, while its words — seesawing between Paul McCartney’s affability and John Lennon’s tartness — offered compassion for multiple generations.

We simply can’t hear “Sgt. Pepper” now the way it affected listeners on arrival in 1967. Its innovations and quirks have been too widely emulated, its oddities long since absorbed. Sounds that were initially startling — the Indian instruments and phrasing of George Harrison’s “Within You Without You,” the tape-spliced steam-organ collage of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” the orchestral vastnesses of “A Day in the Life” — have taken on a patina of nostalgia. “Sgt. Pepper” and its many musical progeny have blurred into a broader memory of “psychedelia,” a sonic vocabulary (available to current music-makers via sampling) that provides instant, predigested allusions to the 1960s. Meanwhile, the grand lesson of “Sgt. Pepper” — that anything goes in the studio — has long since been taken for granted.

“Sgt. Pepper” has been analyzed, researched, oral-historied and dissected down to the minute differences between pressings, and because the Beatles industry never misses an anniversary, it has been repeatedly reissued. The 50th-anniversary deluxe version is exhaustive. It has been remastered once again to give the album a broader soundstage and crisper detail, giving more separation to individual voices and instruments. (For the older blend, it also includes the mono mix from 1967.) The new box rightfully incorporates “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane,” the masterpieces recorded alongside “Sgt. Pepper” but released before the album. It also has outtakes, comprehensive reading material, video clips from 1967 and a documentary about making the album. (The anecdotes are now familiar because the film was done for the album’s 25th anniversary.)

“Sgt. Pepper” was not universally adored when it appeared. The New York Times panned it, not entirely incorrectly, as “busy, hip and cluttered.” As pop tastes have swung between elaborate musical edifices and back-to-basics reactions, “Sgt. Pepper” has been by turns embraced, reviled and simply ignored.

But now that rock itself is being shunted toward the fringes of pop, it’s a good time to free “Sgt. Pepper” from the burden of either forecasting rock’s eclectic future or pointing toward a fussy dead end. It doesn’t have to be “the most important rock & roll album ever made,” as Rolling Stone declared in 2012, or some wrongheaded counter-revolutionary coup against “real” rock ’n’ roll. It’s somewhere in between, juxtaposing the profound and the merely clever.

Although the album as a whole is synergistic, song by song it’s a mix of milestones, like “A Day in the Life” and “Within You Without You,” with meticulously wrought baubles like “Lovely Rita” and “Good Morning Good Morning.” Two of its most remarkable songs, “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane,” aren’t even on the album. But with 50 years of hindsight, “Sgt. Pepper” remains a joyful, whimsical and revelatory experiment. Even the album’s slightest songs are full of musical and verbal twists.

For people who, like me, heard the album brand-new in 1967, “Sgt. Pepper” remains inseparable from its era. It was released on June 1, the beginning of the Summer of Love. It was a time of prosperity, naïve optimism and giddy discovery, when the first baby boomers were just reaching their 20s and mind-expanding drugs had their most benign reputation.

In 1967, candy-colored psychedelic pop and rock provided a short-lived but euphoric diversion from conflicts that would almost immediately resurface: the Vietnam War and America’s racial tension. “Sgt. Pepper” remains tied to that brief moment of what many boomers remember as innocence and possibility — the feeling captured perfectly in “Getting Better,” even as Lennon taunts, “It can’t get no worse.”

Yet for the Beatles, that instant of cultural innocence was a strategic artistic opening. By 1967, the Beatles were by no means ingenuous. They had already been through exponentially expanding pop stardom, endless screaming crowds and the fierce American backlash against Lennon’s flippant 1966 remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now.”

After three years of hectic touring and recording, and of jaw-droppingly rapid development as songwriters amid the tempest, the Beatles decided to get off the road, where they couldn’t hear themselves play, and to focus on making studio albums. They took five months — an eternity at the time, now barely a pause for a new wardrobe and sponsorship deal — to record the “Sgt. Pepper” album, “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane.” With “Revolver,” they had embraced studio surrealism and partly jettisoned love songs, and for its successor they would have more time to think and tinker. Yet they still worked amazingly fast, harnessing the era’s primitive technology to pack wild ideas onto four-track tape. Each “Sgt. Pepper” song creates its own sonic realm, far removed from the live Beatles’ two guitars, bass and drums.

They gave themselves a usefully loose concept. They would become Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, setting aside all outside expectations of the Beatles and treating the album as a performance complete with canned audience reaction: a theatrical, distancing device.

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While the Beatles had traveled the world, only “Within You Without You” flaunted the exotic. Mostly, Sgt. Pepper’s band was almost provincially British: wandering London in “A Day in the Life,” telescoping an entire middle-class English life (complete with prospective grandchildren) above a music-hall bounce in “When I’m 64.” Stalwart British brass answered the rowdy distorted guitar in “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”; “She’s Leaving Home” is a stately waltz set to a harp and parlor orchestra that might have accompanied high tea. One of the Beatles’ paths forward led through an expanded embrace of the past.

They rejected any generation gap. The album cover set the 1967 Beatles, with their mustaches and shiny mock band uniforms, alongside their suited, mop-topped pop-star wax statues — so recent, yet so distant — and cultural figures like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Sonny Liston and W. C. Fields, a rightful claim to adult significance. But the LP was also packaged with cardboard cutouts — a mustache, military stripes — like something for children. While the Summer of Love nurtured hippie dreams of creating a new world, the Beatles reminded listeners of how entrenched the old one was, and how comforting.

But at the same time, “Sgt. Pepper” gazed forward in sound and sense. The Beatles and their producer, George Martin, concocted eerie, unforgettable sounds from hand-played instruments and analog tape tricks; “Strawberry Fields,” which miraculously interweaves two arrangements of the song in two keys, remains a marvel of internal disorientation. And despite all the vintage references, “Sgt. Pepper” situated its songs in the present: sometimes a rushed, workaday world and sometimes a mind-altered escape. The album’s magnificent, sobering finale, “A Day in the Life,” understood — and anticipated — the ethical and emotional ambiguities of a world perceived through mass media, even back when the news media was just newspapers, radio and television.

“Sgt. Pepper” had an immediate, short-lived bandwagon effect, as some late-1960s bands sought to figure out how to make those strange Beatles sounds, and others got more studio time and backup musicians than they needed. Artistic pretensions also notched up. And the pendulum started its long-term swings: progressive rock and corporate rock would be swatted back by punk and disco, hair metal would be blasted by grunge and hip-hop. The studio artifice that “Sgt. Pepper” daringly flaunted has long since become commonplace.

Yet while “Sgt. Pepper” has been both praised and blamed for raising the technical and conceptual ante on rock, its best aspect was much harder to propagate. That was its impulsiveness, its lighthearted daring, its willingness to try the odd sound and the unexpected idea. Listening to “Sgt. Pepper” now, what comes through most immediately is not the pressure the Beatles put on themselves or the musicianly challenges they surmounted. It’s the sheer improbability of the whole enterprise, still guaranteed to raise a smile 50 years on.

Offline jFarley

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SPLHCB is of course an album pregnant with subliminal and obfuscated messaging buried in the music.  Perhaps one of the least known is the fact that if one plays the runout groove on side 2 in reverse and slowed down, Lennon can clearly be heard repeating the word "covfefe".

And we all know what that means.
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Offline Pigmeat

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The fact that still amazes me is it was pulled off on a four track mixer, as was the Beach Boy's (Brian Wilson's) groundbreaking, near contemporary, "Pet Sounds".

It's nice that they're including the mono release from the UK. While stereo had become the norm on this side of the Atlantic, mono still ruled in the UK in 1967.

Another stellar post, Al!

Offline Josh

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Beatles, like The Doors and Elvis, highly overrated.
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Offline Pigmeat

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Well they weren't they weren't Ernest Tubb And The Texas Troubadors that's for damned sure, but different tastes for different times.

"I'm walkin' the floor over you
I can't sleep a wink and that is true.
I'm hopin' and I'm prayin' as my heart breaks right in two
I'm walkin' the floor over you."

Or at least that's how I remember it. The Bard of Avon had nothin' on The Texas Troubadour.


Offline moof

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Agreed.  Nothing but a bunch of hooligan chants compared to Count Five.  Why they didn't have huge commercial success is beyond me.  The first album was cool but a bit rough.  Then they went through a metamorphosis/evolution so far beyond what, say The Beatles did with all their LSD crap.  And through maybe five albums total!  Five albums of gold compared to the pub chant sludge churned out by the others monthly.  Does a band really have 50 LPs of good material?  Just listen to Cartesian Jetstream or Snowflakes Falling and you will agree.  The problem is locating a copy.  Everyone turned their backs to Count Five.

Offline Pigmeat

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Don't forget The Sonics. "Psycho" was recorded so far in the red it peels paint at low volume.

You know, I once played "Psychotic Reaction", "Psycho", and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates original of "Shakin' All Over" in one block and didn't hear a peep out of these Philistines on the significance of those songs other than "It sounds distorted."? Well no sh!t, Sherlocks! It sounds the same way on the records, that's what makes it good!

No wonder I retired. Buncha penguin brains!

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Overrated is a word without meaning now. All it ever means is "I don't like something that's popular, but I'm not okay with being the odd man out about it."
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Fansome

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This is the worst trip, I've ever been on.

The fact that still amazes me is it was pulled off on a four track mixer, as was the Beach Boy's (Brian Wilson's) groundbreaking, near contemporary, "Pet Sounds".

It's nice that they're including the mono release from the UK. While stereo had become the norm on this side of the Atlantic, mono still ruled in the UK in 1967.

Another stellar post, Al!

Offline Pigmeat

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This is the worst trip, I've ever been on.

The fact that still amazes me is it was pulled off on a four track mixer, as was the Beach Boy's (Brian Wilson's) groundbreaking, near contemporary, "Pet Sounds".

It's nice that they're including the mono release from the UK. While stereo had become the norm on this side of the Atlantic, mono still ruled in the UK in 1967.

Another stellar post, Al!

Well hang on to your hat, Hortense, I'm driving this bus now!

"The Magical Mystery tour is coming to take you away
Straight to the looney bin today, right away."

Say hello to Kanye West and Jerry Lee Lewis for me. They like my driving. I took them on a guided tour of "Hoochie Land", a place full of women with over-inflated butts and underage girls who write tell all books about their short marriages to you, before taking them to the bin. Broads like that don't even respect the fact that you're kin. That's why Elvis had Col. to make sure his underage girls weren't related to him.

Offline Josh

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Belinda was caught singing to Al;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WnRL-V09gg
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Online MDK2

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Belinda was caught singing to Al;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WnRL-V09gg

Yikes. Is it me, or were they singing flat?
Denver, CO.
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Offline Pigmeat

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Belinda was caught singing to Al;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WnRL-V09gg

Yikes. Is it me, or were they singing flat?

Just the one in the pajamas. Plus she has that boozy, coked up look, only your trashier 70's floozies could pull off. Who is she, Courtney Love's Mom?

Offline Skipmuck

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 ;D
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Offline Pigmeat

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;D

Proof! Take away the hair coloring that doesn't exist in nature on the woman in the video, and they're peas in a pod.