SONGS PLAYED ON GUITAR + ART WORK + INFORMATION ABOUT MUSIC
MUSIC AND ART
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Sgt. Pepper is regarded by musicologists as an early concept album that advanced the use of extended form in popular music while continuing the artistic maturation seen on the Beatles' preceding releases. It has been described as one of the first art rock LPs, aiding the development of progressive rock, and credited with marking the beginning of the Album Era. An important work of British psychedelia, the multigenre album incorporates diverse stylistic influences, including vaudeville, circus, music hall, avant-garde, and Western and Indian classical music. In 2003 the Library of Congress placed Sgt. Pepper in the National Recording Registry, honouring the work as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". That same year Rolling Stone magazine ranked it number one in its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". As of 2014 it has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums in history. Professor Kevin J Dettmar, writing in the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, described it as "the most important and influential rock and roll album ever recorded".
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. Released on 1 June 1967, it was an immediate commercial and critical success, spending 27 weeks at the top of the albums chart in the United Kingdom and 15 weeks at number one in the United States. Time magazine declared it "a historic departure in the progress of music" and the New Statesman praised its elevation of pop to the level of fine art. It won four Grammy Awards in 1968, including Album of the Year, the first rock LP to receive this honour.
In August 1966, the Beatles permanently retired from touring and began a three-month holiday from recording. During a return flight to London in November, Paul McCartney had an idea for a song involving an Edwardian era military band that would eventually form the impetus of the Sgt. Pepper concept.
Sessions for the Beatles' eighth studio album began on 24 November in Abbey Road Studio Two with two compositions inspired from their youth, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", but after pressure from EMI, the songs were released as a double A-side single; they were not included on the album.
In February 1967, after recording "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", McCartney suggested that the Beatles should release an entire album that would represent a performance by the fictional Sgt. Pepper band. This alter ego group would give them the freedom to experiment musically. During the recording sessions, the band endeavoured to improve upon the production quality of their prior releases. Knowing they would not have to perform the tracks live, they adopted an experimental approach to composition, writing songs such as "With a Little Help from My Friends", "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "A Day in the Life". The producer George Martin's innovative recording of the album included the liberal application of sound shaping signal processing and the use of a 40-piece orchestra performing aleatoric crescendos. Recording was completed on 21 April 1967.
BACKGROUND
By 1966 the Beatles had grown weary of live performance. In John Lennon's opinion, they could "send out four waxworks ... and that would satisfy the crowds. Beatles concerts are nothing to do with music anymore. They're just bloody tribal rites."
In June, two days after finishing the album Revolver, the group set off for a tour that started in Germany. While in Hamburg they received an anonymous telegram stating: "Do not go to Tokyo. Your life is in danger". The threat was taken seriously in light of the controversy surrounding the tour among Japan's religious and conservative groups, with particular opposition to the Beatles' planned performances at the sacred Nippon Budokan arena. As an added precaution, 35,000 police were mobilised and tasked with protecting the group, who were transported from hotels to concert venues in armoured vehicles. The polite and restrained Japanese audiences shocked the band, because the absence of screaming fans allowed them to hear how poor their live performances had become. By the time that they arrived in the Philippines, where they were threatened and manhandled by its citizens for not visiting the First Lady Imelda Marcos, the group had grown unhappy with their manager, Brian Epstein, for insisting on what they regarded as an exhausting and demoralising itinerary. After their return to London George Harrison replied to a question about their long-term plans: "We'll take a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans." His comments would prove prophetic, as soon afterwards Lennon's remarks about the Beatles being "more popular than Jesus" embroiled the band in controversy and protest in America's Bible Belt. A public apology eased tensions, but a miserable US tour in August that was marked by half-filled stadia and subpar performances proved to be their last.
The author Nicholas Schaffner writes:
To the Beatles, playing such concerts had become a charade so remote from the new directions they were pursuing that not a single tune was attempted from the just-released Revolver LP, whose arrangements were for the most part impossible to reproduce with the limitations imposed by their two-guitars-bass-and-drums stage lineup.
Upon the Beatles' return to England, rumours began to circulate that they had decided to break up. Harrison informed Epstein that he was leaving the band, but was persuaded to stay on the assurance that there would be no more tours. The group then took a seven-week holiday, during which they focused on individual interests. Harrison travelled to India for six weeks to develop his sitar playing under the instruction of Ravi Shankar. Paul McCartney and producer George Martin collaborated on the soundtrack for the filmThe Family Way. Lennon acted in the film How I Won the War and 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 Maureen and son Zak.
RECORDING AND PRODUCTION CONTINUED...
"Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" were subsequently released as a double A-side in February 1967 after EMI and Epstein pressured Martin for a single. When it failed to reach number one in the UK, British press agencies speculated that the group's run of success might have ended, with headlines such as "Beatles Fail to Reach the Top", "First Time in Four Years" and "Has the Bubble Burst?" After its release, at Epstein's insistence the single tracks were not included on the LP. Martin later described the decision to drop these two songs as "the biggest mistake of my professional life". Nonetheless, in his judgment, "Strawberry Fields Forever", which he and the band spent an unprecedented 55 hours of studio time recording, "set the agenda for the whole album." He explained: "It was going to be a record ... [with songs that] couldn't be performed live: they were designed to be studio productions and that was the difference." McCartney's goal was to make the best Beatles album yet, declaring: "Now our performance is that record." Emerick recalls: "Because we knew that the Beatles wouldn't ever have to play the songs live, there were no creative boundaries." On 6 December 1966 the group began work on "When I'm Sixty-Four", the first track that would be included on the album.
Sgt. Pepper was recorded using four-track equipment. Although eight-track tape recorders were available in the US, the first units were not operational in commercial studios in London until late 1967. As with previous Beatles albums, the Sgt. Pepper recordings made extensive use of the technique known as reduction mixing, in which one to four tracks from one recorder are mixed and dubbed down onto a master four-track machine, enabling the Abbey Road engineers to give the group a virtual multitrack studio. EMI's Studer J37 four-track machines were well suited to reduction mixing, as the high quality of the recordings that they produced minimised the increased noise associated with the process. Preferring to overdub his bass part last, McCartney tended to play other instruments when recording a song's backing track. This approach afforded him the extra time required to write and record melodic basslines that complemented the song's final arrangement. When recording the orchestra for "A Day in the Life", Martin synchronised a four-track recorder playing the Beatles' backing track to another one taping the orchestral overdub. The engineer Ken Townsend devised a method for accomplishing this by using a 50 Hz control signal between the two machines.
In an effort to get the right sound, the Beatles attempted numerous re-takes of "Getting Better". When the decision was made to re-record the basic track, Starr was summoned to the studio, but called off soon afterwards as the focus switched from rhythm to vocal tracking. Starr, who after the completion of his basic drum parts saw his participation limited to minor percussion overdubs, later lamented: "The biggest memory I have of Sgt. Pepper ... is I learned to play chess". For the album's title track, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", the recording of Starr's drum kit was enhanced by the use of damping and close-miking. The musicologist Ian MacDonald credits the new recording technique with creating a "three-dimensional" sound that – along with other Beatles innovations – engineers in the US would soon adopt as standard practice. McCartney played a grand piano on "A Day in the Life" and a Lowrey organ on "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", while Martin played a Hohner Pianet on "Getting Better", a harpsichord on "Fixing a Hole" and a harmonium on "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!". Harrison used a tamboura on several tracks, including "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Getting Better".
The UK pressing of Sgt. Pepper was the first pop album to be mastered without the momentary gaps that are typically placed between tracks as a point of demarcation.
It made use of two crossfades that blended songs together, giving the impression of a continuous live performance. Although both stereo and monaural mixes of the album were prepared, the Beatles were minimally involved in what they regarded as the less important stereo mix sessions, leaving the task to Martin and Emerick. Emerick recalls: "We spent three weeks on the mono mixes and maybe three days on the stereo." He estimates that they spent 700 hours on the LP, more than 30 times that of the first Beatles album, Please Please Me, which cost £400 to produce.The final cost of Sgt. Pepper was approximately £25,000.The album was completed on 21 April 1967 with the recording of random noises, including a dog whistle that was included on the run-out groove.
Recording and production
According to the musicologist Walter Everett, Sgt. Pepper marks the beginning of McCartney's ascendancy as the Beatles' dominant creative force. He wrote more than half of the album's material while asserting increasing control over the recording of his compositions. He would from this point on provide the artistic direction for the group's releases. Sessions began on 24 November 1966 in Abbey Road Studio Two, the first time that the Beatles had come together since September. Afforded the luxury of a nearly limitless recording budget, they booked open-ended sessions that allowed them to work as late as they wanted. They began with three songs that were thematically linked to their childhoods: "Strawberry Fields Forever", "When I'm Sixty-Four" and "Penny Lane". The first session saw the introduction of a new keyboard instrument called the Mellotron whose keys triggered tape-recordings of a variety of instruments, enabling its user to play keyboard parts using those voices. McCartney performed the introduction to "Strawberry Fields Forever" using the flute setting. The track's complicated production involved the innovative splicing of two takes that were recorded in different tempos and pitches. The EMI audio engineer, Geoff Emerick, remembers that during the recording of Revolver, "we had gotten used to being asked to do the impossible, and we knew that the word 'no' didn't exist in the Beatles' vocabulary." In Martin's opinion, Sgt. Pepper "grew naturally out of Revolver", marking "an era of almost continuous technological experimentation".
Release
After finishing Sgt. Pepper, but prior to the album's commercial release, the Beatles brought an acetate disc of the album to the American singer Cass Elliot's flat off King's Road in Chelsea, where at six in the morning they played it at full volume with speakers set in open window frames. The group's press agent, Derek Taylor, remembered that residents of the neighbourhood opened their windows and listened without complaint to what they understood to be unreleased Beatles music. On 1 June 1967 Sgt. Pepper became the first Beatles album to be issued simultaneously worldwide. It was also the first Beatles album where the track listings were exactly the same for the UK and US versions. The band's eighth LP, it debuted in the UK at number one – where it stayed for 22 consecutive weeks – selling 250,000 copies during the first seven days. On 4 June the Jimi Hendrix Experience opened a show at the Saville Theatre in London with their rendition of the title track. Epstein owned the Saville at the time, and Harrison and McCartney attended the performance. McCartney described the moment: "The curtains flew back and [Hendrix] came walking forward playing 'Sgt. Pepper'. It's a pretty major compliment in anyone's book. I put that down as one of the great honours of my career."
Rolling Stone magazine's Langdon Winner recalls:
The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released. In every city in Europe and America the radio stations played [it] ... and everyone listened ... it was the most amazing thing I've ever heard. For a brief while the irreparable fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.
Sgt. Pepper was widely perceived by listeners as the soundtrack to the "Summer of Love". In Riley's opinion, the album "drew people together through the common experience of pop on a larger scale than ever before". American radio stations interrupted their regular scheduling, playing the album virtually non-stop – often from start to finish. It occupied the number one position of the Billboard Top LPs in the US for 15 weeks, from 1 July to 13 October 1967. With 2.5 million copies sold within three months of its release, Sgt. Pepper 's initial commercial success exceeded that of all previous Beatles albums. None of its songs were issued as singles at the time.
The vast majority of contemporary reviews were positive, with Sgt. Pepper receiving a widespread critical acclaim that matched its immediate commercial success. Kenneth Tynan of The Times described it as "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation". 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." Time magazine declared it "a historic departure in the progress of music – any music". Newsweek 's Jack Kroll called it a "masterpiece", comparing the lyrics with literary works by Edith Sitwell, Harold Pinter and T. S. Eliot, particularly "A Day in the Life", which he compared to Eliot'sThe Waste Land. The New York Times Book Review characterised Sgt. Pepper as a harbinger of a "golden Renaissance of Song" and the New Statesman 's Wilfrid Mellers praised its elevation of pop music to the level of fine art.
One of the best-known American critics at the time, Richard Goldstein, wrote a scathing contemporary review in The New York Times that described Sgt. Pepper as "spoiled" and "reek[ing]" of "special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent". According to the music journalist Robert Christgau, The New York Times was subsequently "deluged with letters, many abusive and every last one in disagreement", a backlash that he credits as "the largest response to a music review" in the newspaper's history. Goldstein published a defence of his review in which he explained that, although the album was not on-par with the best of the Beatles' previous work, he considered it "better than 80 per cent of the music around", but felt that underneath the production when "the compositions are stripped to their musical and lyrical essentials" the LP is shown to be "an elaboration without improvement" on the group's music. In Christgau's 1967 column for Esquire magazine, he described Sgt. Pepper as "a consolidation, more intricate than Revolver but not more substantial", suggesting that Goldstein had fallen "victim to overanticipation", identifying his primary error as "allow[ing] all the filters and reverbs and orchestral effects and overdubs to deafen him to the stuff underneath, which was pretty nice".
At the 10th Annual Grammy Awards in 1968, Sgt. Pepper won in the categories of Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts, Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical and Best Contemporary Album. It also won Album of the Year, the first rock LP to receive this honour.
A key feature of Sgt. Pepper is Martin and Emerick's liberal use of signal processing to shape the sound of the recording, which included the application of dynamic range compression, reverberation and signal limiting. Relatively new modular effects units were used, such as running voices and instruments through a Leslie speaker. Several innovative production techniques feature prominently on the recordings, including direct injection, pitch control and ambiophonics. Another is automatic double tracking (ADT), a system that uses tape recorders to create a simultaneous doubling of a sound. Although it had long been recognised that using multitrack tape to record doubled lead vocals produced an enhanced sound, before ADT it had been necessary to record such vocal tracks twice, a task that was both tedious and exacting. ADT was invented by Townsend during the Revolver sessions in 1966 especially for the Beatles, who disliked tracking sessions and regularly expressed a desire for a technical solution to the problem. The process soon became a common recording practice in popular music. Martin playfully explained to Lennon that his voice had been "treated with a double vibrocated sploshing flange ... It doubles your voice, John." Lennon realised that Martin was joking, but from that point on he referred to the effect as flanging, a label that was universally adopted by the music industry. Another important effect was varispeeding. Martin cites "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" as having the most variations of tape speed on Sgt. Pepper. During the recording of Lennon's vocals, the tape speed was reduced from 50 cycles per second to 45, which produced a higher and thinner-sounding track when played back at the normal speed.
ALBUM COVER
Sgt. Pepper 's album cover was designed by the pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth from an ink drawing by McCartney. It was art-directed by Robert Fraser and photographed by Michael Cooper. The front of the LP included a colourful collage featuring the Beatles in costume as the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, standing with a group of life-sized cardboard cut-outs of famous people. The heavy moustaches worn by the group reflected the growing influence of hippie style trends, while their clothing "spoofed the vogue in Britain for military fashions", writes the Beatles biographer Jonathan Gould.The centre of the cover depicts the Beatles standing behind a drum skin, on which the fairground artist Joe Ephgrave painted the words of the album's title. In front of the drum skin is an arrangement of flowers that spell out "Beatles". The group were dressed in satin day-glo-coloured military-style uniforms that were manufactured by the theatrical costumer M. Berman Ltd. in London. The album's lyrics were printed in full on the back cover, the first time this had been done on a rock LP.
The 30 March 1967 photo session with Cooper also produced the back cover and the inside gatefold, which the musicologist Ian Inglis describes as conveying "an obvious and immediate warmth ... which distances it from the sterility and artifice typical of such images." McCartney explained: "One of the things we were very much into in those days was eye messages ... So with Michael Cooper's inside photo, we all said, 'Now look into this camera and really say I love you! Really try and feel love; really give love through this! It'll come out; it'll show; it's an attitude.' And that's what that is, if you look at it you'll see the big effort from the eyes." The album's inner sleeve featured artwork by the Dutch design team the Fool that eschewed for the first time the standard white paper in favour of an abstract pattern of waves of maroon, red, pink and white. Included with the album as a bonus gift was a sheet of cardboard cut-outs designed by Blake and Haworth, a postcard-sized portrait of Sgt. Pepper based on a statue from Lennon's house that was used on the front cover, a fake moustache, two sets of sergeant stripes, two lapel badges and a stand-up cut-out of the Beatles in their satin uniforms. Moore believes that the inclusion of these items helped fans "pretend to be in the band".
The collage includes 57 photographs and 9 waxworks that depict a diversity of famous people, including actors, sportsmen, scientists and – at Harrison's request – the Self-Realization Fellowship gurus Mahavatar Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, Sri Yukteswar and Paramahansa Yogananda. Inglis views the tableau "as a guidebook to the cultural topography of the decade", demonstrating the increasing democratization of society whereby "traditional barriers between 'high' and 'low' culture were being eroded." The final grouping included singers such as Bob Dylan and Bobby Breen; the film stars Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Marlene Dietrich, and Marilyn Monroe; the artist Aubrey Beardsley; the boxer Sonny Liston and the footballer Albert Stubbins. Also included were the comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (as well as comedian W.C. Fields) and the writers H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, and Dylan Thomas. Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ were requested by Lennon, but ultimately rejected. When McCartney was asked why the Beatles did not include Elvis Presley, he replied: "Elvis was too important and too far above the rest even to mention ... so we didn't put him on the list because he was more than merely a ... pop singer, he was Elvis the King." The final cost for the cover art was nearly £3,000, an extravagant sum for a time when album covers would typically cost around £50. For their work on Sgt. Pepper, Blake and Haworth won the 1968 Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts.
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Title. Double click me.
Concept and inspiration
In November 1966, during a return flight to London from Kenya, where he had been on holiday with Beatles' tour manager Mal Evans, McCartney had an idea for a song that eventually formed the impetus of the Sgt. Pepper concept. His idea involved an Edwardian-era military band that Evans invented a name for in the style of contemporary San Francisco-based groups such as Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service. In February 1967 McCartney suggested that the Beatles should record an entire album that would represent a performance by the fictional band. This alter ego group would give them the freedom to experiment musically. He explained: "I thought, let's not be ourselves. Let's develop alter egos."
Martin remembered:
"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.
In 1966, the American musician and bandleader Brian Wilson's growing interest in the aesthetics of recording and his admiration for both record producer Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and the Beatles' album Rubber Soul resulted in the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds LP, which demonstrated his production expertise and his mastery of composition and arrangement. The author Thomas MacFarlane credits the release with influencing many musicians of the time, with McCartney in particular singing its praises and drawing inspiration to "expand the focus of the Beatles' work with sounds and textures not usually associated with popular music." He thought that his constant playing of the album made it difficult for Lennon to "escape the influence", adding: "It's very cleverly done ... so we were inspired by it and nicked a few ideas." Martin stated: "Without Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper never would have happened ... Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds."