Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

With the competition building between the Beach Boys and the Beatles, it was inevitable than one of them create an album that couldn't be beat. Most thought that this had already happened with Pet Sounds, and that the mighty Beatles had finally been beaten. Although the had Beatles tried with Revolver, it still didn't measure up to the standard for excellence that Pet Sounds had set. On May 26th of 1967, though, the Beatles proved that they were still the most influential band of all time and could be defeated by no one with their release of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was the first true album, that is a work of art on its own bound by a comment concept. Basically, the album wasn't "done" by the Beatles, but by Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles combined this with the experimentation they had made famous in Revolver, and created an album that has never been surpassed in quality or influence. This week, we look at Sgt. Pepper's and its songs.

The album represented the fruit of mostly Paul McCartney's labours. It was him who came up with the idea of a Beatles' album that was presented as if another group did it. He figured that they could overdub sound effects and make it seem like a live performance. The name was inspired by the psychedlic bands of the West Coast like Big Brother and the Holding Company. The album itself was produced, unlike Revolver, entirely for the psychedlic generation. It starts off with the title track, an introduction to the album. The song seems like a live performance, with the audience applauding at the beginning as the band begins to play. The song features a full brass and orchestra ensemble, the most noticable of which are the french horns. The end of the song blends into the next (this was easy to do on vinyl), "With A Little Help From My Friends", which was sung by Ringo, or actually by his alter ego Billy Shears. It grew to fame covered by Joe Cocker and featured as the theme song to the television series "The Wonder Years", but the song was not nearly as wholesome as the show; it featured sexual connotations, implied drug experimentation and all the other happy things for which sixties music had become famous. The next song was one of the many on the album that were banned from radio airplay because it was judged to be "obscene". It is, of course, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", a surrealistic trip dripping with seemingly L.S.D induced imagery (even the name, whose intials spell out LSD, implied this). John claims it was a painting that his son Julian once did for him, and the BBC claimed it was yet another deviance from proper music. In any case, it is on of the reasons why Sgt. Pepper's was so successful. The next song, "Getting Better", was even riskier (actual lyrics are: "I used to be cruel to my woman/I beat her/and kept her apart from the things that she loved"), and was banned from many radio stations in England and the US, although not officially, as "Lucy" had been. From there, the album moves to Fixing A Hole, which was officially banned because of its content. Apparently it suggested intravenous drug use ("I'm fixing a hole/where the rain gets in/and stops my mind from wandering" and "I'm painting a room/in a colourful way/and when my mind is wandering/there I will go"). The Beatles, of course, denied this, but it seems to be fairly supicious that the psychedelic theme of the album combined with other songs that were banned for the same reason could be simply a coincedence. Paul returned to his "Eleanor Rigby" and "For No One" roots with "She's Leaving Home", a touching ballad about a girl who leaves, as so many did in that era, to find her own way. It featured, as the two previously mentioned songs did, a full strings ensemble. The next song, "Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite", was taken from a circus poster by Lennon. The circus theme runs strongly through it, with the eerie double organs piping in the background. The second side started with Harrison's Maharishi influenced "Within You Without You". Harrison's discovery of the sitar finally gave him a unique contribution to the group, and his use of transcendal religious concepts in his songs gave him a completely different sound that fit perfectly in with the Beatles' new image. "When I'm Sixty-Four" was written by Paul during the Cavern years, and would seem out of place in any other album but this because of its odd sound and, well, corny lyrics. The following song is a Lennon work, Good Morning Good Morning, which features, among other things, roosters crowing at the end. It is follwed by the reprise of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a slightly more rock 'n' roll influenced version of the title track, that seems to wrap the album up as the audience is thanked for its presence and told that the concert is over. The album isn't over yet, as the best was yet to come. "A Day In The Life" was a true McCartney-Lennon collaboration, which was becoming rarer and rarer as the years were passing by. A 40-piece band was required for it, along with a 12 bar interlude that goes from the lowest instrument to the highest, created what John dubbed a "musical orgasm".

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