A$# 026 Beatles | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

What can I say that hasn't already been said about what is probably the most famous and most influential rock album of all time? Though the Beatles and other artists had moved into psychedelia prior to this, the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on June 1, 1967 was a watershed.

After the artistic triumph of Revolver, and after giving up touring, what could the Fab Four possibly do to keep innovating and leading the field in rock music? After their months of labour in the studio - and, at that time, the biggest budget ever committed to one album - they unleashed their concept album that's not really a concept album, and the world was wowed.

I'll admit my bias: In my own heart, I prefer Abbey Road, Revolver and Rubber Soul as my choices for top Fab albums, but Pepper holds it own. Some have argued that it hasn't aged as well as Revolver, that it is tied too much to the Summer Of Love. But I disagree - every Beatles album (and every Beatles song) transcends the time because of the Fabs' genius. Their music is truly timeless. That said, though, nothing evokes images of the hippie, trippy vibes of 1967 as much as Pepper does.

My one complaint about the album is that they should have included both tracks of the double a-side single that preceded it: Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane. But that's not how they marketed stuff back then in the UK. And by that point, even the suits at Capitol in the USA could not dare resequence or chop up Pepper. It was *an album* - not just a bunch of songs that happened to share the same real estate on a piece of vinyl. It was an experience, a phenomenon.

I've always liked the device of the fictional band. This was a way that the group could present an alter-ego to the group: to be, for a moment, not the Beatles. Even though that didn't really go anywhere thematically through the album (John said later that it wasn't a concept album; it was to the extent only that it was promoted as such), the title song and its reprise act as superb bookends for the themes they do explore. (And the fact that the best track comes after the reprise is very clever too.)

As you hear the band tuning up, you can imagine that it really is a brass band and orchestra warming up for a gig in bandshell on a nice summer evening. As the opening number segues into track 2, the device is still there, as Billy Shears (the act we've known for all these years) steps forward.

With A Little Help From My Friends is by far the best Lennon/McCartney track created for Ringo to sing. (In this case it's primarily Paul who wrote it.) It's perfect for him. With the call and answer lyrics, it shows that the group is still a band (working together, friends helping a friend), even if the principal songwriters were usually creating very different visions. Ringo still closes his shows with this song (in fact I witnessed another great performance of it just 12 days ago at Casino Rama) and it is his signature song.

The name for Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds did not come from a reference to LSD, as many of John's detractors suggested. But with the images conveyed in the bizarre lyrics, one can't help but think that John was inspired by his experiments with the drug:

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes
And she's gone

Lucy in the sky with diamonds

Then there's a sequence of three of Paul's finest songs. Inspired by something drummer Jimmy Nichol repeated frequently, Paul came up with Getting Better, with some valuable input from John. (In his book Beatlesongs, author William J. Dowlding attributes the song 65% to Paul, 35% to John.) Fixing A Hole wasn't about a junkie shooting up. Paul said it was suggested by repairs to a hole in the roof of his Scottish farmhouse. She's Leaving Home has some of the most wonderful vocals that John and Paul ever laid down on a Beatles track. It's a perfect short novel about a runaway.

Closing out side 1 of the record is John's fantastic Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!. Inspired by a circus poster he had purchased, he came up with a wonderful set of lyrics. As was common with John, he told producer George Martin what kind of sound he wanted, and then George had to do something more realistic to achieve that effect. Here, John wasnted a real steam organ. What Martin did was splice pieces of tape of steam organ performances together.

Side 2 opens with George's haunting and, to Western ears in 1967, exotically flavoured Within You Without You. He had used Indian instruments before, but this track went even further. The lyrics about illusions and spaces between us all added to the mystique of the song.

Since Paul actually turned 64 this month, many have compared the lyrics of When I'm 64 with how Macca's life has actually turned out. Of course he couldn't have foreseen what his life would be like almost five decades after he wrote it. (He wrote the song when he was a teenager). Also, critics have suggested this song is the weak spot in Pepper, but I think it fits just fine with the canvasses that make up this collection. Ditto with Lovely Rita and John's Good Morning, Good Morning. These tracks show the great creativity that the Beatles and George Martin devised to create such a complex and interesting aural landscape - from the combs and toilet paper used on Rita to the aniaml sound effects sequences (in which each successive animal could eat the previous one) on GMGM. No other band could get away with this amount of studio time, or use it to such great effect.

After the Pepper reprise comes the most creative track of all, a song that is surely the summit of this fabulous band's creativity. A Day In The Life surely is the most stunning achievement in rock music that the Beatles, or any other artist, has ever created.

They took two incomplete songs, put them together, recorded the most frenzied orchestral accompaniment to ever complement a pop song (with a brilliant orchestration by George Martin in which instrumentalists played from the lowest note of each instrument's range to the highest), added that crashing, sustained piano chord at the end, and included elements like an alarm clock, an inaudible-to-humans sound and the bizarre Sgt. Pepper Inner Groove at the very end of the track. The whole is clearly more than the sum of its fantastic parts. It is a work of colossal genius, the final movement of a masterpiece album.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is so much a statement of its time, yet it still reverberates through the world of music four decades after its debut.

Track listing:
1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
2. With A Little Help From My Friends
3. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
4. Getting Better
5. Fixing A Hole
6. She's Leaving Home
7. Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!
8. Within You Without You
9. When I'm Sixty-Four
10. Lovely Rita
11. Good Morning Good Morning
12. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
13. A Day In The Life