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| Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | ||
|---|---|---|
| LP by The Beatles | ||
| Released | June 1, 1967 | |
| Recorded | Abbey Road Studios 1966–1967 | |
| Genre | Rock | |
| Length | 39 min 43 s | |
| Record label | Parlophone | |
| Producer | George Martin | |
| Professional reviews | ||
| 5 stars out of 5 | ||
| Beatles Chronology | ||
| Revolver (1966) | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) | Magical Mystery Tour 1967 |
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is, in many critics' estimation, the most influential rock music album of all time, paving the way for countless subsequent recordings by many different artists, and also launching what we know today as the Classic Rock radio format. Rolling Stone ranked it as the number one album in Rock history. It was recorded by The Beatles over a 129-day period from December 6, 1966. The Album was released on June 1, 1967 in the UK and on June 2, 1967 in the United States.
Sgt. Pepper is sometimes described as a concept album because the title song, which appears twice on the album, in slightly modified forms, seems to give an overall theme to the album. There are also several instances where songs were cross-faded into one another, or joined by sound effects and other unusual transistional elements The 'theme' song was produced to create the illusion that the recording was a concert performance by the resident band of the aforementioned club, which was McCartney's original idea for the record.
The single most significant influence on the album was the fact that The Beatles had grown tired of touring and had quit the road in late 1966, burned out after the dramas of the "Bigger than Jesus' controversy (with its resultant deaths threats and Nazi-style record burnings in the United States) and the tumultuous Phillipines tour which saw them virtually frog-marched out of the country at gunpoint.
Retirement from touring gave them, for the first time in their career, an effectively unlimited period in which to prepare their next record. As EMI's premier act and England's most successful pop group ever, they had first call on and virtually unlimited access to Abbey Road Studios. They had already developed a preference for long, late-night sessions although they were, as always, extremely efficient and highly disciplined in their studio habits. As noted in Mark Lewison's definitive book on the Beatles' recording sessions, one of their greatest strengths as a recording unit was drummer Ringo Starr, who was highly creative, stylistically adaptable and extremely reliable, rarely needing more than one take. In fact, in their entire recorded archive, there are less than twenty major 'takes' that break down because of a mistake by Ringo.
By the time they came to record the album, the Beatles' musical interests and ablilities had grown enormously. They had become familiar with a wide range of instruments, such as the Hammond organ and the electric piano, and their instrumentation in their arrangements now covered the entire range, including strings, brass, woodwind, percussion and a wide range of 'treated' and exotic instruments including the sitar. Lennon and McCartney had both learned to play keyboards; McCartney, although unable to read music, had a scored a recent British film The Family Way with the assistance of producer-arranger George Martin, which earned him a prestigious Ivor Novello award.
New guitars, long unavailable because of post-war economic restrictions in Britain, were now within their reach -- the newer models of Gibson and Fender acoustic and electric guitars and, importantly for McCartney, the new Rickenbacker 4001 bass guitar, which had a much fuller and powerful tone than McCartney's old Hofner bass.
There were also new modular effects units like the wah-wah pedal and the fuzz box, which the Beatles augmented with their own experimental ideas, such as running voices and instruments through a Leslie speaker. Another important sonic innovation was McCartney's discovery of the direct injection (DI) technique, in which he could record his bass by plugging it directly into an ampified circuit in the recording console. This provided a vastly improved level of presence, power and fidelity over the old method, which was to record the bass through an amplifier with a microphone.
The Sgt. Pepper period also concided with the introduction of some important musical innovations, both within the Beatles own oeuvre and in the industry generally. The work of Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, Phil Spector and Brian Wilson was radically redefining what was possible for 'pop' musicians in terms of both songwriting and recording. Studio and recording technology had already reached a high degree of development and was poised for even greater innovation.
Since the introduction of the core technology of magnetic recording tape in 1949, multitrack recording had progressed rapidly, with 8-track recorders already available in the USA and the first 8-tracks coming on-line in commercial studios in London in late 1967, shortly after Sgt. Pepper was released.
All of the Sgt. Pepper tracks were recorded at Abbey Road using mono, stereo and 4-track recorders. Like it predecessors, the recording made extensive use of the technique known as 'bouncing down', in which a number of tracks were recorded across the four tracks of one recorder, which are then mixed and dubbed down onto one track of the master 4-track machine. This enabled the Abbey Road engineers to give the Beatles a 'virtual' 16-track studio, since they could bounce down 16 tracks into four with only the loss of one generation in quality.
The build-up of noise during over-dubbing was a major problem for engineers, since it was several years before artificial noise reduction systems were invented. The album remains a landmark in the history of sound recording and remarkable for the clarity, fidelity and quietness of the transfers. Many subtle features previously all but unheard on LP become noticeable on the superb CD version.
Magnetic tape had also led to innovative instruments and production effects, notably the tape-based keyboard 'sampler', the Mellotron, as well as production effects like flanging (a term invented by Lennon) and phasing, and a greatly improved system for creating echo and reverberation.
Several then-new productions effects feature extensively on the recordings. One of the most important automatic double tracking (ADT), a system that used tape recorders to create an instant and simultaneous doubling of a sound. Although it had long been recognised that using multitrack tape to record 'doubled' lead vocals gave them a greatly enhanced sound (especially with weaker singers) it had always been necessary to record such vocal tracks twice, a task which was both tedious and exacting.
ADT was invented specially for the Beatles by EMI engineer Ken Scott in 1965, 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.
Also important was varispeeding, the technique of recording various tracks on a multi-track tape at slightly different tape speeds. The Beatles use this effect extensively on their vocals in this period. The speeding up of vocals (also known as 'tweaking') also became a widespread technique in pop production. The Beatles 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.
With Sgt. Pepper, The Beatles wanted to create a record that could, in effect, tour for them -- an idea they had already explored with the promotional film-clips they made over the previous years, intended to help promote them in the United States when they were not touring there.
McCartney decided that they should create fictitious characters for each band member and record an album that would be a performance by that fictitious band. The idea of disguise or change of identity was one in which the Beatles, naturally enough, had an avid interest -- they were four of the most recogniseable and widely known individuals of their time, and literally could not step outside their homes without being mobbed or worse.
The Beatles' universal recogniseability was the motivation for their growing moustaches and beards and even longer hair, and was an inspiration for the disguise of their flamboyant Sgt Pepper costumes. McCartney was well known for going out in public in disguise and all four were past masters at using aliases for travel bookings and hotel reservations. Their fascination with the notion of alternate identities, such characters in a narrative, is one that resounds through the work.
Thus, the album starts with the theme song, and introduces "Billy Shears" (Ringo Starr), who performs "With A Little Help From My Friends". The album cover was also designed to look like a performance by the fictional band.
However, The Beatles essentially abandoned the concept after recording the first two songs and the reprise, so the other songs on the album are actually unrelated, and do not form an overarching theme. Lennon was unequivocal in stating that the songs he wrote for the album had nothing to do with the Sgt. Pepper concept. Thus it is debatable whether the album should be called a concept album at all, but the fact is that there is no universally recognized definition of the term. There is certainly reason to believe that it provided some of the initial inspiration for the concept album in rock, although there had already been several prototypical attempts at creating albums in which the songs were linked in some conceptual or thematic fashion, including The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and The Kinks Face To Face, and arguably, going as far back as Frank Sinatra's 'theme' albums of the late 1950s, such as Songs For Swingin' Lovers and In The Wee Small Hours.
Sgt Pepper features elaborate arrangements -- for example, the clarinet ensemble on "When I'm Sixty-Four" -- and extensive use of studio effects including echo, reverberation and reverse tape effects. Many of these effects were the devised in collaboration with producer, George Martin and his team of engineers.
One of the few moments of discord came during the recording of "She's Leaving Home", when an impatient McCartney, frustrated by Martin's unavailability on another recording session, hired freelance arranger Mike Leander to arrange the string section -- the only time during the group's entire career that he worked with another arranger.
One of the best examples of the album's daring production is Lennon's song "Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite", which closes Side 1 of the album. The lyrics were adapted almost word for word from a old circus poster which Lennon had bought at an antiques store. The flowing sound collage that gives the song its distinctive character 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 boxed, mixed up and edited together in random order, creating a long loop which was mixed in during final production.
The opening track of Side Two,, "Within You Without You," is unusually long for a 'pop' recording of the day, and features only George Harrison, on vocals and sitar, with all other instruments played by a group of London-based Indian musicians. These deviations from the traditional rock and roll band formula were facilitated by the Beatles' decision not to tour, by their ability to hire top-rate session musicians, and by Harrison's burgeoning interest in India and Indian music, which led him to take lessons from sitar maestro Ravi Shankar. Although often criticised as self-indulgent, it is arguably one of the foundation stones of the world music genre.
Other particularly well-remembered songs include "With A Little Help From My Friends" and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". The latter is a song describing a surreal dreamscape inspired by a picture drawn by Lennon's son Julian. The song became controversial as many believed that the words of the chorus were code for LSD, a claim that Lennon consistently denied. Julian, McCartney, Harrison and Starr back Lennon's story up; Starr even says that he saw the picture.
This album in many ways represented the culmination of a period of experimentation in Beatles music that had begun with their album Rubber Soul two years earlier. Although Sgt. Pepper is clearly more accomplished technically, some aficionados still consider the 1966 LP Revolver to be the more artistically adventurous of the two.
Paul McCartney has cited The Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds and Frank Zappa's album Freak Out! as key influences. It is also likely that he was also much influenced by a late 1966 visit to Los Angeles, where he met Brian Wilson, heard a number of the tracks that were being recorded by Wilson for Smile and reputedly performed on at least one. This music was slated for the next Beach Boys album, which would have been issued before Sgt. Pepper. But Smile was shelved soon after Sgt. Pepper was released, and the album tracks were never fully assembled.
The group's by then habitual use of marijuana and their increasing intake of the hallucinogen LSD were a major influence on the style and sound of the album; they deliberately sought "trippy" effects and themes, and album's closing track "A Day In The Life" (one of the last major Lennon-McCartney collaborations) includes the phrase "I'd love to turn you on" -- 'turning on' was a common drug culture colloquialism at the time, referring getting 'high' on marijuana or LSD. The narrator of "With A Little Help From My Friends" repeatedly declares that he gets high with his friends' help.
Their followup, Magical Mystery Tour contained songs that were stylistically very like those on Sgt. Pepper, but after two years at the forefront of psychedelic rock, the Beatles began to return to more conventional musical expression in 1968. Several tracks recorded during the Sgt. Pepper sessions were not released on the album; some later appeared on Magical Mystery Tour, and three others ("Only A Northern Song", "Hey Bulldog" and "It's All Too Much") eventually surfaced on the 1968 soundtrack album to the animated feature Yellow Submarine.
Two of the most important tracks from this group, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", were both recorded in late 1966 / early 1967 and were intended for inclusion on the LP. However the unusually long gap between Beatles releases, combined with the group's withdrawal from touring, saw producer George Martin placed under increasing pressure by EMI and Capitol to deliver new material. He reluctantly issued the two songs as a double-A-sided single in February 1967. In keeping with the group's usual practice, the single tracks were not included on the LP. They were only released as a single in the UK at the time, but were subsequently included as part of the American LP version of Magical Mystery Tour (which was issued as a 6-track EP in Britain).
The final track on the LP, the epic "A Day In The Life" was a long, kaleidoscopic piece, comprising several different sections edited together. The diary style and imagery of the verses was drawn from events that affected Lennon at the time.
The first verse refers obliquely to the death of Tara Browne, young heir to the Guinness fortune, whom the Beatles knew socially; he had been recently killed in a car accident, referred to in the line "He blew his mind out in car; he didn't notice that the lights had changed". The second verse alluded to Lennon's recent role as Sgt. Gripweed in the Richard Lester film How I Won The War, in the line "The English Army had just won the war".
The middle-eight section was a small independently written piece contributed by McCartney and this was to be the last major song on which he and Lennon collaborated. It includes the line "Found my way upstairs and had a smoke, and somebody spoke and I went into a dream" -- another clear reference to marijuana.
The final session for the LP, held on the evening of February 10, 1967, was to record the orchestral overdubs for "A Day In The Life" with a forty-piece ensemble, conducted by McCartney and drawn from members of the London Symphony Orchestra. The session was also in effect the 'wrap party' for the album, and the Beatles invited a number of special guests for the occasion including Donovan and members of The Rolling Stones. McCartney and others filmed portions of the evening's proceedings with hand-held colour Super-8 cameras, and this footage can be seen on the video version of The Beatles Anthology.
In another playful innovation, the album (in its original LP form that was later released on CD) ends in an unusual way, beginning with a 15-kilohertz high-frequency tone (put on the album at John Lennon's suggestion and intended for dogs), followed by an endless loop made by the runout groove looping back into itself.
The sound in the loop is also the subject of much controversy, being widely interpreted as some kind of secret message. However, it seems that in reality it is nothing more than a few random samples and tape edits played backwards. The loop is recreated on the CD version which plays for a few minutes, then fades out. Although most of the content of the runout groove is impossible to decipher, it is possible to distinguish a speeded-up voice (possibly Paul McCartney's) reciting the phrase "never could be be any other way".
On release, Sgt. Pepper was hailed as a masterpiece by critics, and after nearly forty years it is still rated in most knowledgeable critical circles as the best rock album ever recorded. Indeed, the influence of the album was felt throughout the music world and even beyond: The Times critic Kenneth Tynan described Sgt. Pepper as "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization". Within days of its release, Jimi Hendrix was performing the title track in concert, and Australian band The Twilights -- who had recently returned from London armed with a advance copy of the LP -- wowed audiences there with note-perfect live renditions of the entire album, weeks before it was even released in Australia.
The album won the Grammy Awards for Album of the Year and Best Contemporary Album for 1967.
The LP was adapted as a stage musical in the mid-1970s. A disastrous movie version of the album, produced by Robert Stigwood and starring Peter Frampton as Billy Shears and The Bee Gees as the Hendersons, with an all-star suporting cast, was released in 1978. Also appearing were Steve Martin and George Burns. Although The Bee Gees were arguably the hottest stars in music at the time, the movie flopped disastrously and it is regarded by many critics as one of the worst musical films ever made.
The packaging of the album was as stunning and trend-setting as the music. Art-directed by Robert Fraser mostly in collaboration with McCartney, designed by Peter Blake and photographed by Michael Cooper, it featured a colourful collage of life-sized cardboard models of famous people on the front of the album cover; and, as a bow to the interest that Beatles' songs now inspired, the lyrics were printed on the back cover, the first time this had been done on a pop LP. The Beatles themselves, in the guise of the Sgt Pepper band, were dressed in eye-catching military-style outfits made of satin dyed in day-glo colours.
Art director Robert Fraser was a prominent London art dealer who ran the influential Indica Gallery. he had become a close friend of McCartney and it was only at his strong urging that the group abandoned their original cover design, a psychedelic painting by The Fool.
The Fool was a four-person collective of young Dutch artists. They had executed a number of notable psychedelic graphics and costumes for the Beatles and other groups -- they 'customised' Lennon's Gibson acoustic guitar and McCartney's upright piano, and painted a striking design around the fireplace at George Harrison's home in Surrey. Their best-known works are Lennon's psychedelic Rolls Royce, painted in the style of a gyspy caravan, and the 'cosmic' mural on the outside of the Apple Boutique in Baker St, London (which was removed when the shop closed in 1968) and the famous psychedelic design painted on Eric Clapton's Gibson SG guitar.
Fraser was one of the leading champions of modern art in Britain in the Sixties and beyond. He argued strongly that the Fool artwork was not well-executed and that the design would soon date. He convinced McCartney to abandon it, and offered to art-direct the cover; it was Fraser's suggestion to use an established fine artist and he introduced the band to a client, noted British 'pop' artist Peter Blake, who in collaboration with his wife, created the famous cover collage.
According to Blake, the original concept was to create a scene that showed the Sgt Pepper band performing in a park; this gradually evolved into its final form, which shows the Beatles, as the Sgt Pepper band, surrounded by a large group of their heroes, which were created as lifesize cut-out figures. Also included were wax-work figures of The Beatles as they appeared the early Sixties were borrowed from Madame Tussaaud's.
The collage depcited more than 70 famous people, including writers, musicians, films stars and (at Harrison's request) a number of Indian gurus. Ringo Starr reportedly made no contribution to the design. The final grouping included Marlene Dietrich, author Terry Southern, Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali, Aleister Crowley, Edgar Allan Poe, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and convtroversial comedian Lenny Bruce. Also included was the image of the original Beatles bass player, the late Stuart Sutcliffe.
The package was also one of the first 'gatefold' album covers, that is, the album could be opened up like a book, to reveal a large picture of the Fab Four in costume against a yellow background. The reason for the gatefold was that the Beatles planned on filling two LPs for the release. The designs had already been approved and sent to be printed when they realized they would only have enough material for one LP.
The album also came with a page of cut-outs, with a description in the top left corner:
The special inner sleeve, included in the early pressings of the LP, featured a multi-coloured psychedelic pattern designed by The Fool.
The collage created legal worries for EMI's legal department, which had to contact those who were still living to obtain their permission. Mae West initially refused -- famously asking "What would I be doing in a lonely heart's club?" -- but she relented after The Beatles sent her a personal letter. Actor Leo Gorcey requested payment for inclusion on the cover, so his image was removed. An image of Mohandas Gandhi was also removed at the request of EMI, who had a branch in India and were fearful that it might cause offence there. John Lennon had, perhaps facetiously, asked to include images of Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler, but these were rejected because they would almost certainly have generated enormous controversy (especially in the wake of the previous year's "more popular than Jesus" furore). Most of the suggestions for names to be included came from McCartney, Lennon and Harrison, with additional suggestions from Blake and Fraser. The Rolling Stones shirt worn by the Shirley Temple doll which was placed to the right of the band belonged to Cooper's young son Adam.
The depiction of a guitar made out of hyacinths on the cover was made by the flower delivery boy, who asked if he could help with the making of the artwork. Although it has long been rumoured that some of the plants in the arrangement were marijuana plants, this is untrue.
The collage was assembled by Blake and his wife during the last two weeks of March 1967 at the London studio of photographer Michael Cooper, who took the cover shots on March 30, 1967 in a three-hour evening session. By McCartney's own admission, two of the group were 'tripping' on LSD while the photographs were being taken. The final bill for the cover was £2,867.25s.3d, a staggering sum for the time -- it has been estimated that this was 100 times the average cost for an album cover in those days.
The cover was subsequently parodied by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in the cover art of their album We're Only In It For The Money although McCartney initially refused permission for the Mothers parody cover to be released, he later relented. It was also parodied in the opening credits of an episode of The Simpsons. It has also been mimicked by a Dutch artist as Sgt Croppers Fairport Band for the many Fairport Convention band members and associates. The most widely known & acclaimed of all Beatles parodies was however The Rutles, an hilarious collaboration between the comedic minds of Saturday Night Live and Monty Python, mainly Eric Idle.
The celebrities and items featured on the front cover are (by row, left to right): Top row:
Second row:
Front row:
Other objects within the group include:
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