Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band was released 50 years ago today.
Who is online
232 visitors
232 visitors
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-19870827
I just listened to it and said to myself, "God, I really love this album." Still, today, it just sounds so fresh. It sounds full of ideas. These guys knew what they were doing. They're good. And they're inventive. I haven't heard anything this year that's as inventive. I don't really expect to.
That's how Paul McCartney describes his response to hearing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band earlier this year, and it's hard to argue with him. The album he and those other "guys" in the Beatles released in 1967 revolutionized rock & roll. The "splendid time" McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr "guaranteed for all" has lasted more than two decades — and that immensely pleasurable trip has earned Sgt. Pepper its place as the best record of the past twenty years.
After the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, they had time to explore in greater depth the possibilities of the recording studio with producer George Martin. And removed, essentially for the first time, from the nonstop hoopla of Beatlemania, they also had time to question their identity as Beatles. A chasm had begun to open between their growing musical sophistication and the public's perception of them as lovable mop tops. The magnitude of the Beatles phenomenon was starting to encroach on the band — and their experience with psychedelic drugs made that phenomenon seem increasingly surreal. Already trapped, in their early twenties, the Beatles had to find a way out. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was born.
"Pepper was probably the one Beatle album I can say was my idea," McCartney says. "It was my idea to say to the guys, 'Hey, how about disguising ourselves and getting an alter ego, because we're the Beatles and we're fed up. Every time you approach a song, John, you gotta sing it like John would. Every time I approach a ballad, it's gotta be like Paul would. Why don't we just make up some incredible alter egos and think, "Now how would he sing it? How would he approach this track?"' And it freed us. It was a very liberating thing to do."
Clearly the Sgt. Pepper concept was more significant for the psychological escape route it provided the Beatles than for its specific use on the album. Apart from some relatively modest touches — the colorful uniforms, the opening theme song, the reprise near the end and Ringo's entertaining turn as "the one and only Billy Shears" in "With a Little Help from My Friends" — the alter egos make no discernible appearances on the album. But one look at the cover of Sgt. Pepper — festooned with the band's wildly eclectic gallery of heroes and with the wax figures of the youthful Fab Four standing next to their far more hirsute and serious-looking real-life counterparts — eloquently tells how greatly removed the group had grown from what they were. Under the guise of alter egos the Beatles had finally allowed their real selves to emerge.
Interestingly, however, the Beatles had freed themselves not merely to chronicle such weighty subjects as the joys of mind-expanding drugs, in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," the paradoxical wisdom of Eastern religious philosophy, in "Within You Without You," or the sterile absurdity of mainstream values in the astonishing "Day in the Life." On the contrary, Sgt. Pepper is filled with sly inside jokes, broad music-hall humor and completely gratuitous novelties. It is not only the Beatles' most artistically ambitious album but their funniest.
Take, for example, the dog whistle — which humans can't hear — buried on the album's second side. "We're sitting around the studio, and one of the engineers starts talking about wavelengths, wave forms and stuff, kilohertz," McCartney recalls. "I still don't understand these things — I'm completely nontechnical. And as for John, he couldn't even change a plug — he really couldn't, you know. The engineers would be explaining to us what all this stuff was. An ultrasonic sound wave — 'a low one, you can kill people with the low ones.' We were all saying, 'Wow, man. Hey, wow.' 'And the high ones,' he said, 'only dogs can hear it.' We said, 'We gotta have it on! There's going to be one dog and his owner, and I'd just love to be there when his ears prick up.'"
And the famous "Inner Groove" — the snippet of pointless conversation that sticks in the album's run-out groove and that was not included in the original American version of Sgt. Pepper— has an equally zany genesis. Around the time of "Sgt. Pepper's" release, McCartney explains, "a lot of record players didn't have auto-change. You would play an album and it would go, 'Tick, tick, tick,' in the run-out groove — it would just stay there endlessly. We were whacked out so much of the time in the Sixties — just quite harmlessly, as we thought, it was quite innocent — but you would be at friends' houses, twelve at night, and nobody would be going to get up to change that record player. So we'd be getting into the little 'tick, tick, tick,': 'It's quite good, you know? There's a rhythm there.' We were into Cage and Stockhausen, those kind of people. Obviously, once you allow yourself that kind of freedom . . . well, Cage is appreciating silence, isn't he? We were appreciating the run-out groove! We said, 'What if we put something, so that every time it did that, it said something?' So we put a little loop of conversation on."
These are minor points, perhaps, in the context of the enormous achievement of "Sgt. Pepper". But such fun-loving experimentalism — born of the optimistic determination to blow away anything that "stops my mind from wandering where it will go" — is "Sgt. Pepper's" best legacy for our time. In a decade of political conservatism and stifling musical formats, of sexual fear and obsession with the past, the hopful message of Sgt. Pepper — that visionary breakthroughs are necessary to strive for and possible to achieve in every facet of life — is much more urgent now than it was twenty years ago today.
More News
Great time, the 60s...
With a half-century between then and now, the Beatles retain all their importance as the iconoclasts who opened pop music up to... everything and anything.
The Stones are still the best rock band ever.
I loved the Stones, but havent paid any attention to them for more than 20 years. A 75 year old Mick Jagger prancing around doesnt do anything for me.
I still love to see them in concert. I have seen them 4 times since the 1970's. They were here last year (along with The Who, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Roger Waters over 2 weekends) and if they come back next year (as rumor says the whole bunch are) my wife will be able to sit in the handicap section so we might go because the only reason we didn't go last year is she can't stand up that long, but she has a chair (electric scooter, soon anyway). Of course tickets for both weekends are about $1,200 each, so maybe we'll just go one weekend.
The Beatles were like kids pop music. Today they'd be on PBS and it would be a kids show like the Wiggles.
I'm sure you prefer death metal, but you can't always get what you want.
I am a Jazz fan if you must know.
You are a frog too. lol
I went back to the 60's on a few occasions, courtesy of my "Time Displacement Unit." It was interesting, in a mundane sort of way. I met with Jimi and Greg Lake.
Dear Friend Aeonpax: I was at Woodstock.
Yes, I am that old, and more.
Great music.
A big part of my life, then and now.
E
I was not at Woodstock, still just barely too young, though my older sister and her recently returned from Vietnam boyfriend were. I was lucky years later to win backstage passes at a Crosby, Stills and Nash concert in Phoenix back in 1991. Great show and David Crosby and Graham Nash were really wonderful. Stephan Stills was nice but sort of sullen. Graham Nash said to ignore him as he felt he had blown some chords during the show and was mad at himself for it. It wasn't like I expected. I thought it'd be just a "Hi, here they are, now leave" type thing, but my girlfriend were with them for a good 45 mins and talked and talked with them and met David Crosby's wife (I believe it was Jan), had some cokes and snacks and when we left Stephan Stills was in a better mood and he and Graham Nash gave us a great goodbye, with David Crosby giving us a hug about crushing us. His wife laughed said he was always a big hugger. They were really good and really real people.
Back in the 60s Joni Mitchell, who was an old friend, came to my home because she wanted my opinion on some new songs she had written. She happened to bring David Crosby with her, and he was the most arrogant ungrateful asshole I ever met. She was much better off with gentlemen like Steve Stills or James Taylor, who at least were gentlemen.
He must have still been drinking and drugging back then. When we met him he'd been sober for a few years and was just as nice as could be. Like a big teddy bear. I told him I saw the whole concert straight (which I had and it was the first time) and he laughed and said that was great because now I wouldn't have to worry about getting busted on the way home or puking. LOL!
Whenever I think of Jimi (did you mean Hendrix?), I think of the way he played The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. I consider that one of the greatest performances I ever heard.
I find it impossible to decide whether either the Stones or the Beatles was the greatest Rock band of all time. I would think of the Stones as the Power of Rock and Roll, and the Beatles as the beauty of it. Both exhibited diversity within the genre.
Of course the Sgt Pepper album was brilliant. And although it still sounds good, it doesn't have the incredible effect it had when I had listened to it "with a little help from my friends".
Buzz, Bob Dylan is 76 today.
[jrEmbed module="jrYouTube" youtube_id="l3qQh33GN94"]
I can't open the YouTube - what is it?
The number 76 has always had special meaning for me. The first house I owned was no. 76 on the street,
Oh, I momentarily forgot.
It is John Lennon singing Dylan's Rainy Day Woman.
You know, it's a funny thing, but I always thought I was more than 4 years older than him.
Here's two audios Buzz
the first one is an all star tribute to Dylan in 1993 playing My Back Pages. The musicians include Roger McGuinn, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and Dylan himself.
http://dugan49.webs.com/Bob%20Dylan%20-%20My%20Back%20Pages%20(From%20the%2030th%20Anniversary%20Concert).mp3
the second one is Jackson Browne singing Love Minus Zero No Limit
http://dugan49.webs.com/Jackson%20Browne%20-%20Love%20Minus%20Zero%20No%20Limits.mp3
First link isnt registering for some reason. I was going to use the NT system for making audios but it takes forever.
Oh well.
http://thenewstalkers.com/johnrussell/audio/129/love-minus-zero-no-limit
http://thenewstalkers.com/johnrussell/audio/130/my-back-pages
I just saw these two after I had listened to the songs and wrote the comment below. Jackson Browne's version is very smooth and easy to listen to. However, as I said below, I was able to watch the video of the tribute on another site.
I opened elsewhere and watched the 30th Anniversary concert with those performers singing My Back Pages, and although the sites I use did not have Jackson Browne singing Love Minus Zero - No Limit, I did watch Dylan sing it in 1965 while sitting with Donovan, and also there was a version with Clapton singing it.
I do have access to a lot of music, but the reason I left your Music group is because although if the member would post the song and the musician I could often find it on the web sites here, they most often just posted the youtube with no identification and no discussion about the music, so it left me out.
There are many lines in Dylan's songs that have been special to me and "But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now" is one of them. I actually changed the life of a man who was almost going to commit suicide because he was being sued by the Tax Department for a huge amount of money and thought he would never be able to climb out of their grip, but he had wisely put his home and assets into his wife's name many years before so he was actually judgment proof so I told him "When you ain't got nothing you got nothing to lose" (Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone") so go bankrupt and start over again and the tax department can't touch you. For years after, he reminded me of that line because it gave him the impetus to work to become successful again.
I think Dylan is a subpar singer, at best, but may be America's greatest songwriter of the "rock era". These are really beautiful songs.
Absolutely. As well, the Nobel Committee must have thought so - at least the poetry of them, if not the music.
I don't know if you can get this over there Buzz, but here is an internet radio station that plays nothing but Bob Dylan songs.
http://www.accuradio.com/artist/Bob%20Dylan/?name=Tangled%20Up%20in%20Bob&b0=Artist%20features
click on the one that is titled "Tangled Up In Bob"
I could open that site, and I registered there, but when I try to play something (i.e. click on a genre, like the Dylan one or the Folk Music one, it just keeps buffeting/loading (that gear wheel going round and round) forever, so I gave up. Maybe if I try at a different time of day it will work, but it must be either my computer or my internet service that isn't up to par.
Correction, John. It's around 4:30 in the afternoon here, I just went to that site and clicked the Dylan choice, and it works perfectly. Thanks for this. I'm going to spend a lot of time listening to him and the regular Folk choice.
In fact I just spent an hour listening to great music from the past that I had not listened to for many years. I really enjoyed listening to Tim Hardin.
Good.
There is no doubt in my mind, that, that album changed music forever. There will never be a band like the Beatles or an album like Sgt. Pepper.