Sing it with me, children, all together now …
“It was 50 years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.”
Maybe not today, exactly, but on June 1 it’ll be five decades since the Beatles’ totemic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album arrived. Ambitious for its time, and still a rich musical experience even after so long, Sgt. Pepper is such a part of our cultural fabric that the individual songs – from the apocalyptic “A Day in the Life” to the joyously trippy “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” to the dopey yet endearing “With a Little Help From My Friends” – have transcended their designated spots in an album that was meant to be listened to as whole.
The notion of a themed “concept album” was still in the distance, but Paul McCartney’s original idea was that Sgt. Pepper’s band, not the Beatles, were doing a show just for you, the listener. Fed up with the hassles of touring, the Beatles – who didn’t need the money, or the exposure – had called it quits on live shows near the end of 1966.
Free of the shackles of being “trained fleas” on the road (to use John Lennon’s phrase), they were growing up fast. McCartney was going to plays and listening to classical music, George Harrison was indulging his new-found passion for Indian sounds, and Lennon – who’d just been introduced to Yoko Ono, but hadn’t yet fallen under her sway – was gobbling LSD and daydreaming in the garden of his garish country estate.
Ringo Starr, who lived just up the road, hung around and did whatever John was doing.
“We were all opening our minds to different areas,” McCartney would reflect in The Beatles Anthology. “And then we’d come together and share it all with each other. It was exciting, because there was a lot of cross-fertilization.”
Along with their producer George Martin, they’d already been spending more and more time in the EMI studios, experimenting with sounds, and were entering a new, cloistered phase as studio auteurs.
McCartney’s pronouncement that “the record could go on tour” was initially met with enthusiasm, but after the title song (introducing the Pepper band) and its tie-in “With a Little Help From My Friends,” the idea of a unified “theme” was scrapped.
\\“All my contributions to the album have absolutely nothing to do with this idea of Sgt. Pepper and his band,” Lennon said in one of his last-ever interviews, “but it works because we said it worked, and that’s how the album appeared.”
Except for that opening salvo of linked numbers, he added, “Every other song could have been on every other album.”
Well, yes and no. Perhaps because they were young, rich and more famous than God – they were also consuming copious amounts of psychedelic drugs – the Fab Four took six months (a lifetime in those days) to make Sgt. Pepper, augmenting their usual rock ‘n’ roll instruments with everything from clarinets and animal noises to sitars and a circus calliope.
Its roots can be found in Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys masterpiece of ’66. Brian Wilson – who’d been inspired by the Beatles’ new direction on Rubber Soul – had created a pop suite consisting of unusual arrangements – horns, harps and harmonicas – ladled over masterful melodies.
Sgt. Pepper, in a way, was the latest round in a game of cross-Atlantic musical one-upsmanship.
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On June 1, there it was in the record store. The multi-colored cover, with the newly-moustachio’d Beatles dressed in bright satin marching band uniforms, jumped out at you and demanded attention.
No singles were released from the album, which meant it wasn’t being constantly plugged on Big Sister’s transistor radio.
Yet, somehow, everybody knew it had arrived. In Tampa, 20-year-old Ronny Elliott waited in line at a shop on South Dale Mabry. He bought Sgt. Pepper in mono, because it only cost $3.98. The stereo version went for a dollar more.
Today, Elliott is one of Tampa Bay’s most celebrated singer/songwriters. In 1967, he was the bass player for a rock ‘n’ roll combo called Noah’s Ark. “Everything was psychedelic,” he recalls. “The Vox amps had to be paisley and glow in the dark.”
The long-held notion that Sgt. Pepper set off a tsunami of cultural change – igniting the so-called Summer of Love – doesn’t sit well with him. Drugs hadn’t arrived – in a big way – in the bay area, but there were already plenty of kids with long hair, colorful clothes and “peace and love” ideals here. As there were all over the country.
“I think the album was just a congealing center for that sort of thing,” Elliott says. “But the Beatles had already been that. The Beatles were the thing that had kind of brought us all together to begin with.
“The whole idea of ‘this is the best pop album’ and ‘the most important popular music album that’s ever been made,’ I think came later more than instantaneously. It was revolutionary – did it get to be blown out of proportion because time went by, and that’s the way people remember it? Or was it really that important and we needed the space to be able to tell? Probably a little bit of both. I can’t tell.”
Certainly, it broke fertile ground, ushering in the era of rock-album-as-art, as opposed to a collection of groovy songs for kids to dance to. Sgt. Pepper marked the first time lyrics were printed on an album sleeve. Within weeks of its release, kids whose hair was already long were sprouting moustaches.
The record was adventurous and expansive, which told musicians everywhere it was OK to start making “psychedelic” tracks with orchestras and other weird sounds. Most of which have been rightfully forgotten with the passage of time.
Sgt. Pepper isn’t Revolver or Abbey Road, but it’s near the top of the list of great Beatles albums. In such a rich canon, it stands alone as a glorious experiment.
What it isn’t is rock ‘n’ roll.
“Put the needle down on Meet the Beatles, the first American album,” Elliott says. “When ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ kicks off, the hair on your arm stands up. Well, that doesn’t happen with Sgt. Pepper.”
This article appears in May 25 – Jun 1, 2017.