SGT. PEPPERS LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (August 5, 1966)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (often referred to simply as Sgt. Pepper) is the eighth studio album by English rock band the Beatles. Released in June 1967, the album included songs such as "With a Little Help from My Friends", "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", and "A Day in the Life". Continuing their artistic maturation on Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper further departed from the conventional pop rock idiom of the time and incorporated balladry, psychedelic, music hall, and symphonic influences.
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. Widely acclaimed and imitated, the album cover design by English pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth was inspired by a sketch by Paul McCartney that depicted the band posing in front of a collage of some of their favorite celebrities.
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. It is considered the most influential and most famous rock album of all time, and with an estimated 32 million copies sold, it is one of the world's best-selling albums. Sgt. Pepper has been named the greatest album of all time by both All Time Top 1000 Albums and Rolling Stone.
Background ―
By late 1965, the Beatles 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 traveled 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 Hearts 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."
Concept ―
When the Beatles had given up touring, Lennon said that they could "send out four waxworks ... and that would satisfy the crowds", and McCartney later 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 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 groundbreaking example of the concept album.
Production ―
A reproduction of the poster for Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal from 1843 that inspired the Beatles' song Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!
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 Beatles had almost unlimited access to Abbey Road Studios. 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 recognized that using multi-track 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 vari-speeding, 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". When the album was repressed for LP release in 2012, it took several attempts to successfully reproduce the run-out groove effect.
Lyrics ―
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. — Paul McCartney
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."
Cover artwork ―
The Grammy Award-winning album packaging was art-directed by Robert Fraser, designed by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, his wife and artistic partner, and photographed by Michael Cooper. It featured a colorful collage of life-sized cardboard models of famous people on the front of the album cover and the lyrics printed in full on the back cover, the first time this had been done on a rock LP. In the guise of the Sgt. Pepper band, the Beatles were dressed in custom-made military-style outfits made of satin dyed in day-glo colors. The suits were designed by Manuel Cuevas. Among the insignia on their uniforms are: MBE medals on McCartney's and Harrison's jackets, the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom on Lennon's right sleeve and an Ontario Provincial Police flash on McCartney's sleeve.
The inner sleeve
In the center of the cover, the Beatles stand behind a drum on which are painted the words of the album's title; the drum was painted by fairground artist Joe Ephgrave. The collage depicted around 60 famous people, including writers, musicians, film stars, and (at Harrison's request) a number of Indian gurus. The final grouping included Marlene Dietrich, Carl Gustav Jung, W.C. Fields, Diana Dors, Bob Dylan, Issy Bonn, Marilyn Monroe, Aldous Huxley, Karlheinz Stockhausen,Sigmund Freud, Aleister Crowley, T. E. Lawrence, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe,Karl Marx, Sir Robert Peel, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Marlon Brando, Stan Laureland Oliver Hardy, and Lenny Bruce. Also included was the image of the original Beatles' bassist, the late Stuart Sutcliffe. Pete Best said in a later NPR interview that Lennon borrowed family medals from his (Best's) mother Mona for the shoot, on condition that he did not lose them. Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ were requested by Lennon, but ultimately they were left out. A photo also exists of a rejected cardboard printout with a cloth draped over its head; its identity is unknown. The final cost for the cover art was nearly £3,000 (equivalent to £40,606 today) an extravagant sum for a time when album covers would typically cost around £50.
Critical reception ―
Professional ratings
Allmusic ― 5/5
Robert Christgau ― A
Crawdaddy! ― 5/5
The Daily Telegraph ― 5/5
Encyclopedia of Popular Music ― 5/5
The New Rolling Stone Album Guide ― 5/5
Paste ― 89/100
Pitchfork Media ― 10/10
The Rolling Stone Record Guide ― 4.5/5
Sputnikmusic ― 5/5
Upon its release on 1 June 1967, Sgt. Pepper received critical acclaim. 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."
In a negative review, Richard Goldstein of The New York Times found the album "spoiled" and felt that it "reek[ed]" of "special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent". After he was criticized for his review, Goldstein published a response a month later, in which he said that he was worried "as a critic" that the album was not on-par with the best of the Beatles' previous work, despite being "better than 80 per cent of the music around today". He called it an "in-between experience, a chic", and felt that when the novelty of its production tricks wears off, "and the compositions are stripped to their musical and lyrical essentials, Sergeant Pepper will be Beatles baroque—an elaboration without improvement". Robert Christgau of The Village Voice wrote in an article at the time that the album is "a consolidation, more intricate than Revolver but not more substantial. Part of Goldstein's mistake, I think, has been to allow all the filters and reverbs and orchestral effects and overdubs to deafen him to the stuff underneath, which was pretty nice, and to fall victim to over-anticipation." He called the album "a dozen good songs and true" in a 1977 retrospective review for Cream, and stated, "Perhaps they're too precisely performed, but I'm not going to complain."
In his Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Colin Larkin wrote that the album "turned out to be no mere pop album but a cultural icon embracing the constituent elements of the 60s' youth culture: pop art, garish fashion, drugs, instant mysticism and freedom from parental control." In a 1987 review for Q, Charles Shaar Murray commented that the album "remains a central pillar of the mythology and iconography of the late '60s." Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone argued that it "revolutionized rock & roll" and that its "immensely pleasurable trip has earned Sgt. Pepper its place as the best record of the past twenty years." DeCurtis found it to be "not only the Beatles' most artistically ambitious album but their funniest" and cited its "fun-loving experimentalism" as the album's "best legacy for our time." By contrast, Robert Christgau said that, "although Sgt. Pepper is thought of as the most influential of all rock masterpieces, it is really only the most famous. In retrospect it seems peculiarly a pollonian—precise, controlled, even stiff—and it is clearly peripheral to the rock mainstream", and asserted that "the 'concept album' idea was embodied more fruitfully—and earlier in Rubber Soul." Mark Kemp of Paste wrote similarly, "for all its sonic richness, Sgt. Pepper remains one of rock's most overrated albums—its songwriting isn’t nearly as consistent as Revolver's, and its storyline is abandoned after the first two tracks and artificially reprised near the end."
Commercial performance ―
The album also received popular acclaim. It 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. In the UK it debuted at number eight and the next week reached number one where it stayed for 23 consecutive weeks. It was knocked off the top by The Sound of Music on the week ending 18 November 1967. Eventually it spent more weeks at the top, including the competitive Christmas week. When the CD edition was released on 1 June 1987, it reached number 3. In June 1992, the CD was re-promoted to commemorate its 25th Anniversary, and charted at number six. In 2007, commemorating 40 years of its release, Sgt. Pepper again re-entered the charts at number 47 in the UK. In all, the album spent a total of 201 weeks on the UK charts, and is the second biggest-selling album in UK chart history behind Queen's Greatest Hits. Sgt. Pepper won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, the first rock album to do so, and Best Contemporary Album in 1968. Sgt. Pepper is one of the world's best-selling albums, with 11 million RIAA certified copies sold in the US. The album won Best British Album at the first Brit Awards in 1977.
Frank Zappa, whose Freak Out! was cited as an influence on the album, accused the group of co-opting the flower power aesthetic for monetary gain, saying in a Rolling Stone article that he felt "they were only in it for the money".
Legacy ―
Sgt. Pepper has been named on many lists of the best rock albums. In 1997 Sgt. Pepper was named the number one greatest album of all time in a "Music of the Millennium" poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM. In 1998 Q magazine readers placed it at number seven, while in 2003 the TV network VH1 placed it at number 10. In 2005, the album was ranked number 1 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The publisher called it "the most important rock & roll album ever made ... by the greatest rock & roll group of all time." In 2006, the album was chosen byTime magazine as one of the 100 best albums of all time. In 2002, Q magazine placed it at number 13 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. The album was named as one of Classic Rock magazine's "50 Albums That Built Prog Rock". In 2003, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. In July 2008 the "iconic bass drum skin" used on the front cover sold at auction for €670,000 (US$879,000). In November 2009, the entire album was made available to download for The Beatles: Rock Band on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii. The game disc already had the album's title track, "With a Little Help from My Friends", "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", "Getting Better" and "Good Morning Good Morning"; the download provides the remaining tracks from the album. On 30 March 2013, a rare, signed (by all four Beatles) copy of the album was sold at Dallas-based Heritage Auctions to an unnamed buyer from the Midwestern United States for $290,500.
Tributes ―
Sgt. Pepper has inspired a number of tribute albums, such as NME's Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father in 1988. In 2008, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the album's release, rock pioneer and long-time associate of Starr, Todd Rundgren headlined a live performance tour of Sgt. Pepper featuring an all-star cast. In the show were former Wings member Denny Laine, former American Idol Bo Bice, Foreigner vocalist Lou Gramm, and Grammy Award winner Christopher Cross. The American rock band Cheap Trick performed the entire Sgt. Pepper album live in New York and released the live recording in both CD and DVD formats in September 2009, with all proceeds benefiting prostate cancer research. This recording was engineered by Geoff Emerick, the original engineer for the Sgt. Pepper album. In April 2009, the reggae group Easy Star All-Stars released a dub reggae tribute cover of Sgt. Pepper, Easy Star's Lonely Hearts Dub Band. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a feature film based on the album and other Beatles songs, was released in 1978.
Awards Grammy Awards ―
Nominated for seven Grammys in 1968, it won four, including Album of the Year, the first rock album to receive this honour.
Year Winner Award
1968 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Album of the Year
1968 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts
1968 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical
1968 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Contemporary Album
Grammy Award nominations
Year Nominee Award
1968 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Group Vocal Performance
1968 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Contemporary Vocal Group
1968 "A Day in the Life" Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)
Planned television film ―
On 10 February 1967, during the orchestral recording sessions for "A Day in the Life", six cameramen filmed the chaotic events with the purpose of using the footage for a planned but unfinished Sgt. Pepper television special. The TV special was to have been written by Ian Dallas and directed by Keith Green. The shooting schedule included all the songs from the album set to music video style scenes: for example, "Within You Without You" scenes would have been set throughout offices, factories and elevators. There were even production numbers planned involving "meter maids" and "rockers". Although production was cancelled, the "A Day in the Life" footage was edited down with stock footage into a finished clip. This clip was not released to the public until the Lennon documentary Imagine: John Lennon was released in 1988. A more complete version was later aired in The Beatles Anthology documentary. In 1992, an hour-long feature produced by London Weekend Television called The Making of Sgt. Pepper was aired, and featured George Martin, the three surviving Beatles and Neil Aspinall discussing the album and the songs, with George Martin running through the tapes, similar in fashion to VH1's Classic Albums documentaries.
Track listing ―
Sgt. Pepper was the first Beatles album to be released with identical track listings in the UK and the US. The American release did not originally contain the side two run-out groove and inner groove sound effects that were restored for the worldwide CD issue, released on 1 June 1987.
Track Listing ―
From DMs Beatles Site
Magical Mystery Tour (2:52)
Recorded: April 25, 1967 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added April 26-27, 1967 (vocals), May 3, 1967 (trumpets), and November 7, 1967
John Lennon - acoustic guitar, background vocal
Paul McCartney - lead vocal, bass guitar, piano (with echo effects)
George Harrison - lead guitar, background vocal
Ringo Starr - drums, tambourine
Session musicians - three trumpets
The Fool on the Hill (3:00)
Recorded: September 25, 1967 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added September 26, 1967 and October 20, 1967 (flutes)
John Lennon - harmonica, maracas
Paul McCartney - lead vocal, piano, double-tracked recorder, flute
George Harrison - lead guitar, harmonica
Ringo Starr - finger cymbals
Flying (2:17)
Recorded: September 8, 1967 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added September 28, 1967
John Lennon - mellotron, chanting, tape loop at end
Paul McCartney - guitars, chanting
George Harrison - guitars, chanting
Ringo Starr - drums, maracas, chanting, tape loop at end
Blue Jay Way (3:57)
Recorded: September 6, 1967 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added September 7, 1967 and October 6, 1967
John Lennon - tambourine
Paul McCartney - bass guitar, background vocal
George Harrison - double-tracked lead vocal, Hammond organ, background vocal
Ringo Starr - drums
Session musician - cello
Your Mother Should Know (2:29)
Recorded: August 22, 1967 at Chappell Recording Studios, London, England with overdubs added August 23, 1967 and September 29, 1967
John Lennon - organ, background vocal
Paul McCartney - lead vocal, bass guitar, piano, background vocal
George Harrison - tambourine, tabla, background vocal
Ringo Starr - drums
I Am the Walrus (4:37)
Recorded: September 5, 1967 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added September 6, 1967 and September 27, 1967
John Lennon - lead vocal, mellotron (at the beginning)
Paul McCartney - bass guitar, background vocal
George Harrison - tambourine, background vocal
Ringo Starr - drums
Session musicians - eight violins, four cellos, three horns
Choir - six boys singing "Oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper", six girls singing "Everybody's got one"
Hello Goodbye (3:32)
Recorded: October 2, 1967 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added October 19, 20, 25 and November 2, 1967
John Lennon - lead guitar, organ, background vocal
Paul McCartney - lead vocal, bass guitar, piano, bongos, conga drum,
background vocal
George Harrison - lead guitar, tambourine, background vocal
Ringo Starr - drums, maracas
Session musicians - two violas
Strawberry Fields Forever (4:10)
Recorded: November 24, 1966 at Abbey Road, London, England with additional work on November 28-29 and December 8, 9, 15, and 21, 1966
John Lennon - lead vocal, lead guitar, harpsichord
Paul McCartney - bass guitar, piano, bongos, flute
George Harrison - lead guitar, timpani
Ringo Starr - drums
Mal Evans - tambourine
Philip Jones - alto trumpet
Session musicians - two cellos, two horns
Penny Lane (3:04)
Recorded: December 29, 1966 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added December 30, 1966 and January, 1967
John Lennon - piano, harmony vocal
Paul McCartney - lead vocal, bass guitar, Arco string bass, flute
George Harrison - conga drum, firebell
Ringo Starr - drums
George Martin - piano
David Mason - piccolo trumpet
Philip Jones - trumpet
Baby You're a Rich Man (3:03)
Recorded: May 11, 1967 at Olympic Sound Studios, London, England
John Lennon - lead vocal, clavioline, piano
Paul McCartney - bass guitar, piano, harmony vocal
George Harrison - tambourine, harmony vocal
Ringo Starr - drums, maracas
Session musicians - vibes
All You Need Is Love (3:48)
Recorded: June 14, 1967 at Olympic Sound Studios, London, England (backing track), overdubbed and shortened at an Abbey Road session, then overdubbed live on the "Our World" TV broadcast
Backing track
John Lennon - harpsichord
Paul McCartney - string bass played with a bow
George Harrison - violin
Ringo Starr - drums
Abbey Road Track
John Lennon - lead vocal
Paul McCartney - electric bass guitar
George Harrison - guitar
Ringo Starr - drums
Live "Our World" track
John Lennon - lead vocal
Paul McCartney - background vocal
George Harrison - background vocal
Session musicians - studio orchestra
Mick Jagger, Gary Leeds, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull,
Jane Asher, Patti Harrison, Keith Moon, Graham Nash - chorus
From Beatles Music History
“SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND"
Released June 1, 1967
The Beatles had been bitten by the studio experimentation bug! Their great thirst for sonic improvements on their recordings, as well as their imaginative exploits into Eastern music and drugs, led them to what became the creative high point of their career up to that point; namely the album “Revolver.” This critically acclaimed release, as well as its early single “Paperback Writer” backed with “Rain,” left them satisfied and eager for what new boundaries could be expanded upon or broken entirely. That is, if they had the time to do so.
“We spend more time on recording now, because we prefer recording.” This quote from George Harrison in 1966 was enthusiastically shared between the four of them – so much so that it was a good part of the reason the 1966 US tour was the final tour of their career. “We all agreed that maybe going into recording would be the new thing to turn us all on,” Paul remembers about their attitude about touring after their final performance at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, August 29th, 1966.
Ringo sums it up nicely in this quote from the “Anthology” book: “After deciding not to tour I don’t think we cared a damn. We’d been having more fun in the studio, as you can hear from ‘Revolver’ and ‘Rubber Soul.’ As it was building up, it was getting more experimental. We were starting to spend more time there, and the songs were getting better and more interesting. Instead of being pulled out of the studio to go on the road, we could now spend time there and relax.”
Therefore, after their final concert tour, and after nearly a three month period for vacations and/or independent projects to clear their heads, they were back into EMI Studios on November 24th, 1966 to hone their recording craft without any other commitments looming over their heads. Their attention could be fully on their work. Under these conditions, the result was “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” And the whole world took notice!
The Beatles at the promotional party for the release of "Sgt. Pepper," May 19th, 1967
Origin Of The Album ―
“’Sgt. Pepper’ is Paul, after a trip to America,” related John Lennon in 1967. “The whole West Coast long-named group thing was coming in, when people were no longer ‘The Beatles’ or ‘The Crickets’ – they were suddenly ‘Fred And His Incredible Shrinking Grateful Airplanes.’ I think he got influenced by that. He was trying to put some distance between The Beatles and the public – and so there was this identity of Sgt. Pepper. Intellectually, that’s the same thing he did by writing ‘She Loves You’ instead of ‘I love you.’”
"It was an idea I had, I think, when I was flying from L.A. to somewhere,” Paul remembered in 1984. “I thought it would be nice to lose our identities, to submerge ourselves in the persona of a fake group. We would make up all the culture around it and collect all our heroes in one place. So I thought, a typical stupid-sounding name for a Dr. Hook's Medicine Show and Traveling Circus kind of thing would be 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.' Just a word game, really."
The flight mentioned above appears to be a return trip, Paul with roadie Mal Evans, from Nairobi to London in November of 1966. It is reported that the name of the fictional band came from Mal innocently asking what the “S” and “P” stood for on the pots of their meal trays. When Paul identified them as ‘salt’ and ‘pepper,’ this eventually lead to “Sgt. Pepper” and the beginning of Paul’s brainstorm.
"We were fed up with being Beatles,” explained Paul in 1994. “We really hated that f*cking four little mop-top boys approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy sh*t, all that screaming, we didn't want anymore, plus, we'd now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers... then suddenly on the plane I got this idea. I thought, 'Let's not be ourselves. Let's develop alter egos so we're not having to project an image which we know. It would be much more free.'"
Although the musical influences were many on the album, one seemed to be the catalyst to the whole project. “The big influence was ‘Pet Sounds’ by The Beach Boys. That was the album that flipped me,” Paul related in 1980. “The music invention on that album was, like, ‘Wow!’ That was the big thing for me. I just thought, ‘Oh dear me. This is the album of all time. What the hell are we going to do?’ So, ‘Sgt. Pepper’ eventually came out, basically, from the idea that I had about this band. It was going to be an album of another band that wasn’t us. We were going to call ourselves something else, and just imagine all the time that it wasn’t us playing this album.”
Recording the Album ―
With the name suggested, and the acceptance by the other Beatles, the loose concept was integrated into the recording sessions that were already underway. With concert performances now behind them, a whole new approach to creating music was devised. “When I first started in the music business,” producer George Martin recalls, “the ultimate aim for everybody was to try and recreate, on record, a live performance as accurately as possible. But then, we realized that we could do something other than that…So, without being too pompous, we decided to go into another kind of art form, where we are devising something that couldn’t be done any other way. We were putting something down on tape that could only be done on tape.”
"Sgt Pepper is one of the most important steps in our career. It had to be just right,” stated Lennon in 1967. Ringo recalls, “’Sgt. Pepper’ was our grandest endeavor. It gave everybody – including me – a lot of leeway to come up with ideas and to try different material…The great thing about the band was that whoever had the best idea (it didn’t matter who), that would be the one we’d use. No one was standing on their ego, saying, ‘Well, it’s mine,’ and getting possessive. Always the best was used…Anything could happen, and that was an exciting process. I got to hang out and listen to it unfolding.”
The sessions for the album began on November 24th, 1966 and stretched all the way till April 21st, 1967, totaling approximately 700 hours. This was a giant leap from the 9 hour and 45 minute single session on February 11th, 1963 to record ten of the fourteen tracks for their first album, “Please Please Me.” Then again, this early album was a necessary diversion from their primary occupation, namely, the concert stage. How their priorities changed in three-and-a-half short years!
Two of the first three songs recorded during these sessions were busked away for their next single, namely “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” these never seeing the album they were intended for. However, their creativity continued heightening as the weeks progressed, recording fourteen other songs that all (with the exception of George’s “Only A Northern Song”) ended up gracing the finished album.
Working in the studio with a new experimental atmosphere was exciting but challenging, as explained by George Harrison in 1967: "Now that we only play in the studios, and not anywhere else, we have less of a clue what we're going to do. Now when we go into the studio we have to start from scratch, just thrashing it out and doing it the hard way. If Paul has written a song, he comes into the studio with it in his head. It's very hard for him to give it to us, and for us to get it. When we suggest something, it might not be what he wants because he hasn't got it in his head like that. So it takes a long time. Nobody knows what the tunes sound like until we've recorded them and listen to them afterwards.”
Although appearances made it seem that the group was unified in their direction for the album, George Harrison was actually more distanced during these sessions. Paul’s recollections in 1980 about those recording dates were: “George wasn’t very involved in that album. He just had one song, really. It’s really the only time during the whole album, the main time, I remember him turning up.”
George recalls, “I felt we were just in the studio to make the next record, and Paul was going on about this idea of some fictitious band. That side of it didn’t really interest me…It was becoming difficult for me, because I wasn’t really that into it. Up to that time, we had recorded more like a band; we would learn the songs and then play them…’Sgt. Pepper’ was the one album where things were done slightly different. A lot of the time it ended up with just Paul playing the piano and Ringo keeping the tempo, and we weren’t allowed to play as a band so much. It became an assembly process – just little parts and then overdubbing – and so for me it became a bit tiring and a bit boring…I’d just got back from India, and my heart was still out there…The trips to India had really opened me up…I’d been let out of the confines of the group, and it was difficult for me to come back into the sessions…It was a job, like doing something I didn’t really want to do, and I was losing interest in being ‘fab’ at that point.”
Despite rumors otherwise, the recording sessions for “Sgt. Pepper” were relatively drug free – hard drugs, anyway. “I never took it (LSD) in the studio,” said John, although he does go on to relate how he once took the drug accidentally during that time. “We didn’t really shove the LP full of pot and drugs,” Lennon said in 1968, “but, I mean, there was an effect. We were more consciously trying to keep it out. You wouldn’t say, ‘I had some acid, baby, so groovy,’ but there was a feeling that something had happened between ‘Revolver’ and ‘Sgt. Pepper.’”
John also has this to say about the album being wrapped together into a uniform concept: “’Sgt Pepper is called the first concept album, but it doesn’t go anywhere. All my contributions to the album have absolutely nothing to do with this idea of Sgt. Pepper and his band, but it works, because we said it worked, and that’s how the album appeared. But it was not put together as it sounds, except for Sgt. Pepper introducing Billy Shears, and the so-called reprise. Every other song could have been on any other album.”
However, it was agreed by all to be a ground-breaking achievement at it’s initial release, as witnessed by this Lennon quote from 1967: “We tried, and I think succeeded in achieving what we set out to do. If we hadn't, then it wouldn't be out now."
Cover Art ―
“The album was a big production, and we wanted the album sleeve to be really interesting,” remembers Paul McCartney. “Everyone agreed. When we were kids, we’d take a half-hour bus ride to Lewis’s department store to buy an album, and then we’d come back on the bus, take it out of the brown paper bag and read it cover to cover…You’d read them and you studied them. We liked the idea of reaching out to the record-buyer, because of our memories of spending our own hard-earned cash and really loving anyone who gave us value for money. So, for the cover, we wouldn’t just have our Beatle jackets on, or we wouldn’t just be suave guys in turtlenecks (looking like we did on ‘Rubber Soul’). It would now be much more pantomime, much more ‘Mr. Bojangles.’”
Starting with some sketches from Paul of The Beatles in uniform receiving the keys to the city by the mayor surrounded by pictures of famous people in front of a floral clock, he decided to ask advice to develop the idea further. “We got artistic people involved,” McCartney continues. “I was very good friends with Robert Fraser, the London art dealer; a guy with one of the greatest visual eyes that I’ve ever met…I took the whole album cover idea to him. He represented the artist Peter Blake, and he was very good friends with the photographer Michael Cooper. Robert said, ‘Let Michael take some pictures. We’ll get Peter to do the background, and then we’ll collage it all together.’”
With the floral clock and the ‘keys to the city’ idea scrapped, all that needed to be decided was the selection of people that would be present in the background of the photo. “I remember being in the studio,” recalls roadie Neil Aspinall, “and everybody was asking ‘Who do you want in the band?’ All these crazy suggestions were coming out.” George Harrison states: “I still have no idea who chose some of those people. I think Peter Blake put a lot of the more confusing people in there. It was just a broad spectrum of people. The ones I wanted were people I admired. I didn’t put anybody on there because I didn’t like them (unlike some people…)” “John wanted a couple of far-out ones like Hitler and Jesus,” Paul remembers, “which was John just wanting to be bold and brassy.”
Nonetheless, all the Beatles (except Ringo who was happy with whoever the others picked) put in their suggestions, as well as Peter Blake. “Mal (Evans) and I went to all the different libraries,” stated Neil Aspinall, “and got prints of them, which Peter Blake blew up and tinted. He used them to make up the collage, along with the plants and everything else you see on the cover.”
With George picking Indian gurus Babaji and Paramahansa Yogananda, John picking Albert Stubbins, Aldous Huxley, Stuart Sutcliffe and others, Paul picking William Burroughs, Marlon Brando, Fred Astaire, Stockhausen and others, and Peter Blake choosing W.C. Fields, Tony Curtis, Shirley Temple and others, the crowd of icons was chosen. However, EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood objected to the crowd entirely, due to potential lawsuits. “They’ll all be pleased to be on it,” Paul informed him, adding: “What you should do is ring them all and ask ‘em!” With manager Brian Epstein’s office in charge of contacting the parties involved, the majority consented to their likeness gracing the cover of the latest Beatles album. Lockwood did insist on omitting Mahatma Gandhi from the line-up and, with this compromise agreed upon, the cover was approved.
A gate-fold cover was decided upon, although the idea of having an artistic creation by the Dutch group The Fool gracing the inside cover was thrown out in favor of a blown-up Michael Cooper photo of The Beatles in their Sgt. Pepper military uniforms. The back cover, a first for a pop record, contained the lyrics to all of the songs on the album, despite the pleas from the music-publishing company that felt this would diminish the sales of sheet music. The Beatles got their way.
But that wasn’t all! “We wanted to pack it with goodies,” Paul insisted. “One of the ideas was to have an envelope and in it we were going to have things like they used to hand out in comics: we wanted transfers you could stick on yourself, because we had those when we were kids. It was all childhood memories.” This thought evolved into an included sheet with a cut-out fake moustache, picture card, stripes, badges and a stand up image of the group behind a Sgt. Pepper logo.
All-in-all, this was a quite elaborate package for a pop album in 1967. The Beatles were clearly involved in all aspects of their releases at this point, fighting all the way to get what they wanted. And with their proven money-making clout, EMI reluctantly bowed to their wishes.
The Monkees in a scene from their TV show circa 1967, Davy Jones holding a copy of "Sgt. Pepper"
Success of The Album ―
It seems that the world was on ‘pins and needles’ waiting for what The Beatles were concocting while locked up in EMI Studios (as well as other locations) out of public view for nearly the first half of 1967. Having full access to the studios, time no longer any factor, they worked until all involved were completely satisfied with the project at hand, no matter how long that may have been.
However, while the group was creating their masterpiece, American audiences (as well as Britain and many other countries) had their attention diverted to another “mop top” group that had seemed to have taken over, namely The Monkees. With the help of a television show that captured the hearts of young audiences, their singles raced to the top of the pop charts and their quickly released albums broke all records on the album charts – their first two albums, both released during The Beatles hiatus, concurrently topped the Billboard album chart for a total of 31 straight weeks. Their third album, “Headquarters,” also beat the Beatles to the top of the album charts in June of 1967. Affectionately termed by the media as “Monkeemania,” this phenomena, it was projected, could have toppled the empire built by The Beatles in the previous three years.
Brian Epstein recognized this and quickly arranged for the “Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane” single to be rush-released. While this amazing product did blip up to the top of the US singles chart for a week, it was hardly enough to sway the youth of America away from their latest pin-up faces of Micky, Davy, Mike and Peter. Would all of The Beatles’ hard work in the studio be in vain?
John Lennon, for one, wasn’t worried at all. When asked in 1967 about this current obsession, he exclaimed: “The Monkees? Great, man. Let ‘em dig The Monkees. Let ‘em all dig their cuddly mop-tops till they change their minds. The Monkees are up there to be screamed at. We’re busy now, just living, and we’re in such a groove!...I don’t want to be a mop-top. For those who want mop-tops, The Monkees are right up there, man!”
If they were even partially concerned, they needn’t be. Both British and American radio stations started playing tracks from the “Sgt. Pepper” album way before its release. A couple of California stations were airing these songs in early May which prompted Capitol Records to procure a court injunction to prohibit radio airplay of these songs before the prescribed date. This, undoubtedly, contributed to the advance order of over one million copies of the album in the US by late May.
Then came June 2nd, 1967 – the official release date of the album. By June 15th, it was a certified gold record. The June 24th issue of Billboard Magazine showed the album debuting at number 8 on the album chart. The very next week it was #1, dislodging the Monkees album “Headquarters” from the top spot. It then stayed at #1 for 15 straight weeks and stayed in the top five through January 13th, 1968 while their follow-up American album, “Magical Mystery Tour,” was at #1. It has been reported that over 11 million copies of the album have been sold in the US, 32 million worldwide. The album also boasts four Grammy awards. The Beatles had once again captured the hearts of their audience.
Not that statistical chart action and sales figures tell the whole story. The cultural significance that has been attributed to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is also noteworthy of mention. Being dubbed the official soundtrack to the “summer of love,” it was a defining album of the emerging “psychedelic sound” of 1967, especially in reference to the album’s startling closing track “A Day in the Life.” The album’s somewhat open lyrical drug references, such as ‘getting high’ and ‘turning on’ (not to mention the proclaimed unintentional LSD reference in the initials to “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”) were noticed in droves by the media and listeners alike. While controversial in some circles, this more adult appearance of the “fab four” ultimately showed that they had indeed grown up.
While once again not needing a single to promote the album (like the US release of “Rubber Soul” before it), it was so absorbed into the culture of the time that it was attested to in many areas. Not only have there been scores of similar or parodied album covers put on the market, the album has been paid tribute in song by other artists as well, such as the Johnny Rivers December 1967 hit “Summer Rain” which twice repeats how everybody “kept on playing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Without doubt, this legendary album perfectly encapsulates the free feeling of that special time.
Studio album by: The Beatles
Released: June 1, 1967
Recorded: 6 December 1966 – 21 April 1967
Venue: EMI and Regent Sound studios, London
Genre: Psychedelic rock, baroque pop
Length: 39:42
Label: Parlophone (UK), Capitol (US)
Producer: George Martin
From Wikipedia, Rolling Stone, About.com, and Google –
Released: June 1, 1967
Recorded: 6 December 1966 – 21 April 1967
Venue: EMI and Regent Sound studios, London
Genre: Psychedelic rock, baroque pop
Length: 39:42
Label: Parlophone (UK), Capitol (US)
Producer: George Martin
From Wikipedia, Rolling Stone, About.com, and Google –
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (often referred to simply as Sgt. Pepper) is the eighth studio album by English rock band the Beatles. Released in June 1967, the album included songs such as "With a Little Help from My Friends", "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", and "A Day in the Life". Continuing their artistic maturation on Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper further departed from the conventional pop rock idiom of the time and incorporated balladry, psychedelic, music hall, and symphonic influences.
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. Widely acclaimed and imitated, the album cover design by English pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth was inspired by a sketch by Paul McCartney that depicted the band posing in front of a collage of some of their favorite celebrities.
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. It is considered the most influential and most famous rock album of all time, and with an estimated 32 million copies sold, it is one of the world's best-selling albums. Sgt. Pepper has been named the greatest album of all time by both All Time Top 1000 Albums and Rolling Stone.
Background ―
By late 1965, the Beatles 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 traveled 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 Hearts 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."
Concept ―
When the Beatles had given up touring, Lennon said that they could "send out four waxworks ... and that would satisfy the crowds", and McCartney later 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 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 groundbreaking example of the concept album.
Production ―
A reproduction of the poster for Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal from 1843 that inspired the Beatles' song Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!
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 Beatles had almost unlimited access to Abbey Road Studios. 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 recognized that using multi-track 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 vari-speeding, 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". When the album was repressed for LP release in 2012, it took several attempts to successfully reproduce the run-out groove effect.
Lyrics ―
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. — Paul McCartney
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."
Cover artwork ―
The Grammy Award-winning album packaging was art-directed by Robert Fraser, designed by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, his wife and artistic partner, and photographed by Michael Cooper. It featured a colorful collage of life-sized cardboard models of famous people on the front of the album cover and the lyrics printed in full on the back cover, the first time this had been done on a rock LP. In the guise of the Sgt. Pepper band, the Beatles were dressed in custom-made military-style outfits made of satin dyed in day-glo colors. The suits were designed by Manuel Cuevas. Among the insignia on their uniforms are: MBE medals on McCartney's and Harrison's jackets, the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom on Lennon's right sleeve and an Ontario Provincial Police flash on McCartney's sleeve.
The inner sleeve
In the center of the cover, the Beatles stand behind a drum on which are painted the words of the album's title; the drum was painted by fairground artist Joe Ephgrave. The collage depicted around 60 famous people, including writers, musicians, film stars, and (at Harrison's request) a number of Indian gurus. The final grouping included Marlene Dietrich, Carl Gustav Jung, W.C. Fields, Diana Dors, Bob Dylan, Issy Bonn, Marilyn Monroe, Aldous Huxley, Karlheinz Stockhausen,Sigmund Freud, Aleister Crowley, T. E. Lawrence, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe,Karl Marx, Sir Robert Peel, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Marlon Brando, Stan Laureland Oliver Hardy, and Lenny Bruce. Also included was the image of the original Beatles' bassist, the late Stuart Sutcliffe. Pete Best said in a later NPR interview that Lennon borrowed family medals from his (Best's) mother Mona for the shoot, on condition that he did not lose them. Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ were requested by Lennon, but ultimately they were left out. A photo also exists of a rejected cardboard printout with a cloth draped over its head; its identity is unknown. The final cost for the cover art was nearly £3,000 (equivalent to £40,606 today) an extravagant sum for a time when album covers would typically cost around £50.
Critical reception ―
Professional ratings
Allmusic ― 5/5
Robert Christgau ― A
Crawdaddy! ― 5/5
The Daily Telegraph ― 5/5
Encyclopedia of Popular Music ― 5/5
The New Rolling Stone Album Guide ― 5/5
Paste ― 89/100
Pitchfork Media ― 10/10
The Rolling Stone Record Guide ― 4.5/5
Sputnikmusic ― 5/5
Upon its release on 1 June 1967, Sgt. Pepper received critical acclaim. 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."
In a negative review, Richard Goldstein of The New York Times found the album "spoiled" and felt that it "reek[ed]" of "special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent". After he was criticized for his review, Goldstein published a response a month later, in which he said that he was worried "as a critic" that the album was not on-par with the best of the Beatles' previous work, despite being "better than 80 per cent of the music around today". He called it an "in-between experience, a chic", and felt that when the novelty of its production tricks wears off, "and the compositions are stripped to their musical and lyrical essentials, Sergeant Pepper will be Beatles baroque—an elaboration without improvement". Robert Christgau of The Village Voice wrote in an article at the time that the album is "a consolidation, more intricate than Revolver but not more substantial. Part of Goldstein's mistake, I think, has been to allow all the filters and reverbs and orchestral effects and overdubs to deafen him to the stuff underneath, which was pretty nice, and to fall victim to over-anticipation." He called the album "a dozen good songs and true" in a 1977 retrospective review for Cream, and stated, "Perhaps they're too precisely performed, but I'm not going to complain."
In his Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Colin Larkin wrote that the album "turned out to be no mere pop album but a cultural icon embracing the constituent elements of the 60s' youth culture: pop art, garish fashion, drugs, instant mysticism and freedom from parental control." In a 1987 review for Q, Charles Shaar Murray commented that the album "remains a central pillar of the mythology and iconography of the late '60s." Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone argued that it "revolutionized rock & roll" and that its "immensely pleasurable trip has earned Sgt. Pepper its place as the best record of the past twenty years." DeCurtis found it to be "not only the Beatles' most artistically ambitious album but their funniest" and cited its "fun-loving experimentalism" as the album's "best legacy for our time." By contrast, Robert Christgau said that, "although Sgt. Pepper is thought of as the most influential of all rock masterpieces, it is really only the most famous. In retrospect it seems peculiarly a pollonian—precise, controlled, even stiff—and it is clearly peripheral to the rock mainstream", and asserted that "the 'concept album' idea was embodied more fruitfully—and earlier in Rubber Soul." Mark Kemp of Paste wrote similarly, "for all its sonic richness, Sgt. Pepper remains one of rock's most overrated albums—its songwriting isn’t nearly as consistent as Revolver's, and its storyline is abandoned after the first two tracks and artificially reprised near the end."
Commercial performance ―
The album also received popular acclaim. It 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. In the UK it debuted at number eight and the next week reached number one where it stayed for 23 consecutive weeks. It was knocked off the top by The Sound of Music on the week ending 18 November 1967. Eventually it spent more weeks at the top, including the competitive Christmas week. When the CD edition was released on 1 June 1987, it reached number 3. In June 1992, the CD was re-promoted to commemorate its 25th Anniversary, and charted at number six. In 2007, commemorating 40 years of its release, Sgt. Pepper again re-entered the charts at number 47 in the UK. In all, the album spent a total of 201 weeks on the UK charts, and is the second biggest-selling album in UK chart history behind Queen's Greatest Hits. Sgt. Pepper won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, the first rock album to do so, and Best Contemporary Album in 1968. Sgt. Pepper is one of the world's best-selling albums, with 11 million RIAA certified copies sold in the US. The album won Best British Album at the first Brit Awards in 1977.
Frank Zappa, whose Freak Out! was cited as an influence on the album, accused the group of co-opting the flower power aesthetic for monetary gain, saying in a Rolling Stone article that he felt "they were only in it for the money".
Legacy ―
Sgt. Pepper has been named on many lists of the best rock albums. In 1997 Sgt. Pepper was named the number one greatest album of all time in a "Music of the Millennium" poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM. In 1998 Q magazine readers placed it at number seven, while in 2003 the TV network VH1 placed it at number 10. In 2005, the album was ranked number 1 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The publisher called it "the most important rock & roll album ever made ... by the greatest rock & roll group of all time." In 2006, the album was chosen byTime magazine as one of the 100 best albums of all time. In 2002, Q magazine placed it at number 13 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. The album was named as one of Classic Rock magazine's "50 Albums That Built Prog Rock". In 2003, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. In July 2008 the "iconic bass drum skin" used on the front cover sold at auction for €670,000 (US$879,000). In November 2009, the entire album was made available to download for The Beatles: Rock Band on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii. The game disc already had the album's title track, "With a Little Help from My Friends", "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", "Getting Better" and "Good Morning Good Morning"; the download provides the remaining tracks from the album. On 30 March 2013, a rare, signed (by all four Beatles) copy of the album was sold at Dallas-based Heritage Auctions to an unnamed buyer from the Midwestern United States for $290,500.
Tributes ―
Sgt. Pepper has inspired a number of tribute albums, such as NME's Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father in 1988. In 2008, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the album's release, rock pioneer and long-time associate of Starr, Todd Rundgren headlined a live performance tour of Sgt. Pepper featuring an all-star cast. In the show were former Wings member Denny Laine, former American Idol Bo Bice, Foreigner vocalist Lou Gramm, and Grammy Award winner Christopher Cross. The American rock band Cheap Trick performed the entire Sgt. Pepper album live in New York and released the live recording in both CD and DVD formats in September 2009, with all proceeds benefiting prostate cancer research. This recording was engineered by Geoff Emerick, the original engineer for the Sgt. Pepper album. In April 2009, the reggae group Easy Star All-Stars released a dub reggae tribute cover of Sgt. Pepper, Easy Star's Lonely Hearts Dub Band. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a feature film based on the album and other Beatles songs, was released in 1978.
Awards Grammy Awards ―
Nominated for seven Grammys in 1968, it won four, including Album of the Year, the first rock album to receive this honour.
Year Winner Award
1968 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Album of the Year
1968 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts
1968 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical
1968 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Contemporary Album
Grammy Award nominations
Year Nominee Award
1968 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Group Vocal Performance
1968 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Contemporary Vocal Group
1968 "A Day in the Life" Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)
Planned television film ―
On 10 February 1967, during the orchestral recording sessions for "A Day in the Life", six cameramen filmed the chaotic events with the purpose of using the footage for a planned but unfinished Sgt. Pepper television special. The TV special was to have been written by Ian Dallas and directed by Keith Green. The shooting schedule included all the songs from the album set to music video style scenes: for example, "Within You Without You" scenes would have been set throughout offices, factories and elevators. There were even production numbers planned involving "meter maids" and "rockers". Although production was cancelled, the "A Day in the Life" footage was edited down with stock footage into a finished clip. This clip was not released to the public until the Lennon documentary Imagine: John Lennon was released in 1988. A more complete version was later aired in The Beatles Anthology documentary. In 1992, an hour-long feature produced by London Weekend Television called The Making of Sgt. Pepper was aired, and featured George Martin, the three surviving Beatles and Neil Aspinall discussing the album and the songs, with George Martin running through the tapes, similar in fashion to VH1's Classic Albums documentaries.
Track listing ―
Sgt. Pepper was the first Beatles album to be released with identical track listings in the UK and the US. The American release did not originally contain the side two run-out groove and inner groove sound effects that were restored for the worldwide CD issue, released on 1 June 1987.
Track Listing ―
From DMs Beatles Site
Magical Mystery Tour (2:52)
Recorded: April 25, 1967 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added April 26-27, 1967 (vocals), May 3, 1967 (trumpets), and November 7, 1967
John Lennon - acoustic guitar, background vocal
Paul McCartney - lead vocal, bass guitar, piano (with echo effects)
George Harrison - lead guitar, background vocal
Ringo Starr - drums, tambourine
Session musicians - three trumpets
The Fool on the Hill (3:00)
Recorded: September 25, 1967 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added September 26, 1967 and October 20, 1967 (flutes)
John Lennon - harmonica, maracas
Paul McCartney - lead vocal, piano, double-tracked recorder, flute
George Harrison - lead guitar, harmonica
Ringo Starr - finger cymbals
Flying (2:17)
Recorded: September 8, 1967 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added September 28, 1967
John Lennon - mellotron, chanting, tape loop at end
Paul McCartney - guitars, chanting
George Harrison - guitars, chanting
Ringo Starr - drums, maracas, chanting, tape loop at end
Blue Jay Way (3:57)
Recorded: September 6, 1967 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added September 7, 1967 and October 6, 1967
John Lennon - tambourine
Paul McCartney - bass guitar, background vocal
George Harrison - double-tracked lead vocal, Hammond organ, background vocal
Ringo Starr - drums
Session musician - cello
Your Mother Should Know (2:29)
Recorded: August 22, 1967 at Chappell Recording Studios, London, England with overdubs added August 23, 1967 and September 29, 1967
John Lennon - organ, background vocal
Paul McCartney - lead vocal, bass guitar, piano, background vocal
George Harrison - tambourine, tabla, background vocal
Ringo Starr - drums
I Am the Walrus (4:37)
Recorded: September 5, 1967 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added September 6, 1967 and September 27, 1967
John Lennon - lead vocal, mellotron (at the beginning)
Paul McCartney - bass guitar, background vocal
George Harrison - tambourine, background vocal
Ringo Starr - drums
Session musicians - eight violins, four cellos, three horns
Choir - six boys singing "Oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper", six girls singing "Everybody's got one"
Hello Goodbye (3:32)
Recorded: October 2, 1967 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added October 19, 20, 25 and November 2, 1967
John Lennon - lead guitar, organ, background vocal
Paul McCartney - lead vocal, bass guitar, piano, bongos, conga drum,
background vocal
George Harrison - lead guitar, tambourine, background vocal
Ringo Starr - drums, maracas
Session musicians - two violas
Strawberry Fields Forever (4:10)
Recorded: November 24, 1966 at Abbey Road, London, England with additional work on November 28-29 and December 8, 9, 15, and 21, 1966
John Lennon - lead vocal, lead guitar, harpsichord
Paul McCartney - bass guitar, piano, bongos, flute
George Harrison - lead guitar, timpani
Ringo Starr - drums
Mal Evans - tambourine
Philip Jones - alto trumpet
Session musicians - two cellos, two horns
Penny Lane (3:04)
Recorded: December 29, 1966 at Abbey Road, London, England with overdubs added December 30, 1966 and January, 1967
John Lennon - piano, harmony vocal
Paul McCartney - lead vocal, bass guitar, Arco string bass, flute
George Harrison - conga drum, firebell
Ringo Starr - drums
George Martin - piano
David Mason - piccolo trumpet
Philip Jones - trumpet
Baby You're a Rich Man (3:03)
Recorded: May 11, 1967 at Olympic Sound Studios, London, England
John Lennon - lead vocal, clavioline, piano
Paul McCartney - bass guitar, piano, harmony vocal
George Harrison - tambourine, harmony vocal
Ringo Starr - drums, maracas
Session musicians - vibes
All You Need Is Love (3:48)
Recorded: June 14, 1967 at Olympic Sound Studios, London, England (backing track), overdubbed and shortened at an Abbey Road session, then overdubbed live on the "Our World" TV broadcast
Backing track
John Lennon - harpsichord
Paul McCartney - string bass played with a bow
George Harrison - violin
Ringo Starr - drums
Abbey Road Track
John Lennon - lead vocal
Paul McCartney - electric bass guitar
George Harrison - guitar
Ringo Starr - drums
Live "Our World" track
John Lennon - lead vocal
Paul McCartney - background vocal
George Harrison - background vocal
Session musicians - studio orchestra
Mick Jagger, Gary Leeds, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull,
Jane Asher, Patti Harrison, Keith Moon, Graham Nash - chorus
From Beatles Music History
“SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND"
Released June 1, 1967
The Beatles had been bitten by the studio experimentation bug! Their great thirst for sonic improvements on their recordings, as well as their imaginative exploits into Eastern music and drugs, led them to what became the creative high point of their career up to that point; namely the album “Revolver.” This critically acclaimed release, as well as its early single “Paperback Writer” backed with “Rain,” left them satisfied and eager for what new boundaries could be expanded upon or broken entirely. That is, if they had the time to do so.
“We spend more time on recording now, because we prefer recording.” This quote from George Harrison in 1966 was enthusiastically shared between the four of them – so much so that it was a good part of the reason the 1966 US tour was the final tour of their career. “We all agreed that maybe going into recording would be the new thing to turn us all on,” Paul remembers about their attitude about touring after their final performance at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, August 29th, 1966.
Ringo sums it up nicely in this quote from the “Anthology” book: “After deciding not to tour I don’t think we cared a damn. We’d been having more fun in the studio, as you can hear from ‘Revolver’ and ‘Rubber Soul.’ As it was building up, it was getting more experimental. We were starting to spend more time there, and the songs were getting better and more interesting. Instead of being pulled out of the studio to go on the road, we could now spend time there and relax.”
Therefore, after their final concert tour, and after nearly a three month period for vacations and/or independent projects to clear their heads, they were back into EMI Studios on November 24th, 1966 to hone their recording craft without any other commitments looming over their heads. Their attention could be fully on their work. Under these conditions, the result was “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” And the whole world took notice!
The Beatles at the promotional party for the release of "Sgt. Pepper," May 19th, 1967
Origin Of The Album ―
“’Sgt. Pepper’ is Paul, after a trip to America,” related John Lennon in 1967. “The whole West Coast long-named group thing was coming in, when people were no longer ‘The Beatles’ or ‘The Crickets’ – they were suddenly ‘Fred And His Incredible Shrinking Grateful Airplanes.’ I think he got influenced by that. He was trying to put some distance between The Beatles and the public – and so there was this identity of Sgt. Pepper. Intellectually, that’s the same thing he did by writing ‘She Loves You’ instead of ‘I love you.’”
"It was an idea I had, I think, when I was flying from L.A. to somewhere,” Paul remembered in 1984. “I thought it would be nice to lose our identities, to submerge ourselves in the persona of a fake group. We would make up all the culture around it and collect all our heroes in one place. So I thought, a typical stupid-sounding name for a Dr. Hook's Medicine Show and Traveling Circus kind of thing would be 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.' Just a word game, really."
The flight mentioned above appears to be a return trip, Paul with roadie Mal Evans, from Nairobi to London in November of 1966. It is reported that the name of the fictional band came from Mal innocently asking what the “S” and “P” stood for on the pots of their meal trays. When Paul identified them as ‘salt’ and ‘pepper,’ this eventually lead to “Sgt. Pepper” and the beginning of Paul’s brainstorm.
"We were fed up with being Beatles,” explained Paul in 1994. “We really hated that f*cking four little mop-top boys approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy sh*t, all that screaming, we didn't want anymore, plus, we'd now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers... then suddenly on the plane I got this idea. I thought, 'Let's not be ourselves. Let's develop alter egos so we're not having to project an image which we know. It would be much more free.'"
Although the musical influences were many on the album, one seemed to be the catalyst to the whole project. “The big influence was ‘Pet Sounds’ by The Beach Boys. That was the album that flipped me,” Paul related in 1980. “The music invention on that album was, like, ‘Wow!’ That was the big thing for me. I just thought, ‘Oh dear me. This is the album of all time. What the hell are we going to do?’ So, ‘Sgt. Pepper’ eventually came out, basically, from the idea that I had about this band. It was going to be an album of another band that wasn’t us. We were going to call ourselves something else, and just imagine all the time that it wasn’t us playing this album.”
Recording the Album ―
With the name suggested, and the acceptance by the other Beatles, the loose concept was integrated into the recording sessions that were already underway. With concert performances now behind them, a whole new approach to creating music was devised. “When I first started in the music business,” producer George Martin recalls, “the ultimate aim for everybody was to try and recreate, on record, a live performance as accurately as possible. But then, we realized that we could do something other than that…So, without being too pompous, we decided to go into another kind of art form, where we are devising something that couldn’t be done any other way. We were putting something down on tape that could only be done on tape.”
"Sgt Pepper is one of the most important steps in our career. It had to be just right,” stated Lennon in 1967. Ringo recalls, “’Sgt. Pepper’ was our grandest endeavor. It gave everybody – including me – a lot of leeway to come up with ideas and to try different material…The great thing about the band was that whoever had the best idea (it didn’t matter who), that would be the one we’d use. No one was standing on their ego, saying, ‘Well, it’s mine,’ and getting possessive. Always the best was used…Anything could happen, and that was an exciting process. I got to hang out and listen to it unfolding.”
The sessions for the album began on November 24th, 1966 and stretched all the way till April 21st, 1967, totaling approximately 700 hours. This was a giant leap from the 9 hour and 45 minute single session on February 11th, 1963 to record ten of the fourteen tracks for their first album, “Please Please Me.” Then again, this early album was a necessary diversion from their primary occupation, namely, the concert stage. How their priorities changed in three-and-a-half short years!
Two of the first three songs recorded during these sessions were busked away for their next single, namely “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” these never seeing the album they were intended for. However, their creativity continued heightening as the weeks progressed, recording fourteen other songs that all (with the exception of George’s “Only A Northern Song”) ended up gracing the finished album.
Working in the studio with a new experimental atmosphere was exciting but challenging, as explained by George Harrison in 1967: "Now that we only play in the studios, and not anywhere else, we have less of a clue what we're going to do. Now when we go into the studio we have to start from scratch, just thrashing it out and doing it the hard way. If Paul has written a song, he comes into the studio with it in his head. It's very hard for him to give it to us, and for us to get it. When we suggest something, it might not be what he wants because he hasn't got it in his head like that. So it takes a long time. Nobody knows what the tunes sound like until we've recorded them and listen to them afterwards.”
Although appearances made it seem that the group was unified in their direction for the album, George Harrison was actually more distanced during these sessions. Paul’s recollections in 1980 about those recording dates were: “George wasn’t very involved in that album. He just had one song, really. It’s really the only time during the whole album, the main time, I remember him turning up.”
George recalls, “I felt we were just in the studio to make the next record, and Paul was going on about this idea of some fictitious band. That side of it didn’t really interest me…It was becoming difficult for me, because I wasn’t really that into it. Up to that time, we had recorded more like a band; we would learn the songs and then play them…’Sgt. Pepper’ was the one album where things were done slightly different. A lot of the time it ended up with just Paul playing the piano and Ringo keeping the tempo, and we weren’t allowed to play as a band so much. It became an assembly process – just little parts and then overdubbing – and so for me it became a bit tiring and a bit boring…I’d just got back from India, and my heart was still out there…The trips to India had really opened me up…I’d been let out of the confines of the group, and it was difficult for me to come back into the sessions…It was a job, like doing something I didn’t really want to do, and I was losing interest in being ‘fab’ at that point.”
Despite rumors otherwise, the recording sessions for “Sgt. Pepper” were relatively drug free – hard drugs, anyway. “I never took it (LSD) in the studio,” said John, although he does go on to relate how he once took the drug accidentally during that time. “We didn’t really shove the LP full of pot and drugs,” Lennon said in 1968, “but, I mean, there was an effect. We were more consciously trying to keep it out. You wouldn’t say, ‘I had some acid, baby, so groovy,’ but there was a feeling that something had happened between ‘Revolver’ and ‘Sgt. Pepper.’”
John also has this to say about the album being wrapped together into a uniform concept: “’Sgt Pepper is called the first concept album, but it doesn’t go anywhere. All my contributions to the album have absolutely nothing to do with this idea of Sgt. Pepper and his band, but it works, because we said it worked, and that’s how the album appeared. But it was not put together as it sounds, except for Sgt. Pepper introducing Billy Shears, and the so-called reprise. Every other song could have been on any other album.”
However, it was agreed by all to be a ground-breaking achievement at it’s initial release, as witnessed by this Lennon quote from 1967: “We tried, and I think succeeded in achieving what we set out to do. If we hadn't, then it wouldn't be out now."
Cover Art ―
“The album was a big production, and we wanted the album sleeve to be really interesting,” remembers Paul McCartney. “Everyone agreed. When we were kids, we’d take a half-hour bus ride to Lewis’s department store to buy an album, and then we’d come back on the bus, take it out of the brown paper bag and read it cover to cover…You’d read them and you studied them. We liked the idea of reaching out to the record-buyer, because of our memories of spending our own hard-earned cash and really loving anyone who gave us value for money. So, for the cover, we wouldn’t just have our Beatle jackets on, or we wouldn’t just be suave guys in turtlenecks (looking like we did on ‘Rubber Soul’). It would now be much more pantomime, much more ‘Mr. Bojangles.’”
Starting with some sketches from Paul of The Beatles in uniform receiving the keys to the city by the mayor surrounded by pictures of famous people in front of a floral clock, he decided to ask advice to develop the idea further. “We got artistic people involved,” McCartney continues. “I was very good friends with Robert Fraser, the London art dealer; a guy with one of the greatest visual eyes that I’ve ever met…I took the whole album cover idea to him. He represented the artist Peter Blake, and he was very good friends with the photographer Michael Cooper. Robert said, ‘Let Michael take some pictures. We’ll get Peter to do the background, and then we’ll collage it all together.’”
With the floral clock and the ‘keys to the city’ idea scrapped, all that needed to be decided was the selection of people that would be present in the background of the photo. “I remember being in the studio,” recalls roadie Neil Aspinall, “and everybody was asking ‘Who do you want in the band?’ All these crazy suggestions were coming out.” George Harrison states: “I still have no idea who chose some of those people. I think Peter Blake put a lot of the more confusing people in there. It was just a broad spectrum of people. The ones I wanted were people I admired. I didn’t put anybody on there because I didn’t like them (unlike some people…)” “John wanted a couple of far-out ones like Hitler and Jesus,” Paul remembers, “which was John just wanting to be bold and brassy.”
Nonetheless, all the Beatles (except Ringo who was happy with whoever the others picked) put in their suggestions, as well as Peter Blake. “Mal (Evans) and I went to all the different libraries,” stated Neil Aspinall, “and got prints of them, which Peter Blake blew up and tinted. He used them to make up the collage, along with the plants and everything else you see on the cover.”
With George picking Indian gurus Babaji and Paramahansa Yogananda, John picking Albert Stubbins, Aldous Huxley, Stuart Sutcliffe and others, Paul picking William Burroughs, Marlon Brando, Fred Astaire, Stockhausen and others, and Peter Blake choosing W.C. Fields, Tony Curtis, Shirley Temple and others, the crowd of icons was chosen. However, EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood objected to the crowd entirely, due to potential lawsuits. “They’ll all be pleased to be on it,” Paul informed him, adding: “What you should do is ring them all and ask ‘em!” With manager Brian Epstein’s office in charge of contacting the parties involved, the majority consented to their likeness gracing the cover of the latest Beatles album. Lockwood did insist on omitting Mahatma Gandhi from the line-up and, with this compromise agreed upon, the cover was approved.
A gate-fold cover was decided upon, although the idea of having an artistic creation by the Dutch group The Fool gracing the inside cover was thrown out in favor of a blown-up Michael Cooper photo of The Beatles in their Sgt. Pepper military uniforms. The back cover, a first for a pop record, contained the lyrics to all of the songs on the album, despite the pleas from the music-publishing company that felt this would diminish the sales of sheet music. The Beatles got their way.
But that wasn’t all! “We wanted to pack it with goodies,” Paul insisted. “One of the ideas was to have an envelope and in it we were going to have things like they used to hand out in comics: we wanted transfers you could stick on yourself, because we had those when we were kids. It was all childhood memories.” This thought evolved into an included sheet with a cut-out fake moustache, picture card, stripes, badges and a stand up image of the group behind a Sgt. Pepper logo.
All-in-all, this was a quite elaborate package for a pop album in 1967. The Beatles were clearly involved in all aspects of their releases at this point, fighting all the way to get what they wanted. And with their proven money-making clout, EMI reluctantly bowed to their wishes.
The Monkees in a scene from their TV show circa 1967, Davy Jones holding a copy of "Sgt. Pepper"
Success of The Album ―
It seems that the world was on ‘pins and needles’ waiting for what The Beatles were concocting while locked up in EMI Studios (as well as other locations) out of public view for nearly the first half of 1967. Having full access to the studios, time no longer any factor, they worked until all involved were completely satisfied with the project at hand, no matter how long that may have been.
However, while the group was creating their masterpiece, American audiences (as well as Britain and many other countries) had their attention diverted to another “mop top” group that had seemed to have taken over, namely The Monkees. With the help of a television show that captured the hearts of young audiences, their singles raced to the top of the pop charts and their quickly released albums broke all records on the album charts – their first two albums, both released during The Beatles hiatus, concurrently topped the Billboard album chart for a total of 31 straight weeks. Their third album, “Headquarters,” also beat the Beatles to the top of the album charts in June of 1967. Affectionately termed by the media as “Monkeemania,” this phenomena, it was projected, could have toppled the empire built by The Beatles in the previous three years.
Brian Epstein recognized this and quickly arranged for the “Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane” single to be rush-released. While this amazing product did blip up to the top of the US singles chart for a week, it was hardly enough to sway the youth of America away from their latest pin-up faces of Micky, Davy, Mike and Peter. Would all of The Beatles’ hard work in the studio be in vain?
John Lennon, for one, wasn’t worried at all. When asked in 1967 about this current obsession, he exclaimed: “The Monkees? Great, man. Let ‘em dig The Monkees. Let ‘em all dig their cuddly mop-tops till they change their minds. The Monkees are up there to be screamed at. We’re busy now, just living, and we’re in such a groove!...I don’t want to be a mop-top. For those who want mop-tops, The Monkees are right up there, man!”
If they were even partially concerned, they needn’t be. Both British and American radio stations started playing tracks from the “Sgt. Pepper” album way before its release. A couple of California stations were airing these songs in early May which prompted Capitol Records to procure a court injunction to prohibit radio airplay of these songs before the prescribed date. This, undoubtedly, contributed to the advance order of over one million copies of the album in the US by late May.
Then came June 2nd, 1967 – the official release date of the album. By June 15th, it was a certified gold record. The June 24th issue of Billboard Magazine showed the album debuting at number 8 on the album chart. The very next week it was #1, dislodging the Monkees album “Headquarters” from the top spot. It then stayed at #1 for 15 straight weeks and stayed in the top five through January 13th, 1968 while their follow-up American album, “Magical Mystery Tour,” was at #1. It has been reported that over 11 million copies of the album have been sold in the US, 32 million worldwide. The album also boasts four Grammy awards. The Beatles had once again captured the hearts of their audience.
Not that statistical chart action and sales figures tell the whole story. The cultural significance that has been attributed to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is also noteworthy of mention. Being dubbed the official soundtrack to the “summer of love,” it was a defining album of the emerging “psychedelic sound” of 1967, especially in reference to the album’s startling closing track “A Day in the Life.” The album’s somewhat open lyrical drug references, such as ‘getting high’ and ‘turning on’ (not to mention the proclaimed unintentional LSD reference in the initials to “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”) were noticed in droves by the media and listeners alike. While controversial in some circles, this more adult appearance of the “fab four” ultimately showed that they had indeed grown up.
While once again not needing a single to promote the album (like the US release of “Rubber Soul” before it), it was so absorbed into the culture of the time that it was attested to in many areas. Not only have there been scores of similar or parodied album covers put on the market, the album has been paid tribute in song by other artists as well, such as the Johnny Rivers December 1967 hit “Summer Rain” which twice repeats how everybody “kept on playing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Without doubt, this legendary album perfectly encapsulates the free feeling of that special time.
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