The pop music band the Beatles retreated to the studio after three years of touring to revitalize their creative instincts and produced one of the most revolutionary record albums of all time.
After their last live concert in San Francisco, on August 29, 1966, the Beatles, weary from more than three years of constant, worldwide touring, retreated to the recording studio to work on an album that would become an aural scrapbook of their childhood days in Liverpool, England. Since early 1964, when they conquered the American audience, the Beatles had recorded six albums, each demonstrating a growing musical and lyrical sophistication, and audiences had come to expect that each new pressing would exceed the accomplishments of the last. Rumors had spread that the Beatles were preparing something different, but no one realized how revolutionary that next recording would be.
Work on the new record actually began in November, 1966, when John Lennon offered the first composition, “Strawberry Fields Forever,”
The next song recorded was “When I’m Sixty-Four,”
Pressured by Capitol Records in the United States, which had not had a Beatles release since Revolver in August, 1966, the band decided to issue the two strongest songs of the three—“Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever”—on a double-A-sided single record. Left now with only one song for their upcoming album, they reunited in Abbey Road Studios in February, 1967. Midway through the session, McCartney presented his song “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and suggested they make an album as though the Pepper band existed. Thus, as a result of happy accident, the concept was born.
To create a link between the first song, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and the album’s second, “With a Little Help from My Friends,”
McCartney’s other songs—“Fixing a Hole,” “Getting Better,” and “Lovely Rita”—are cheerful, though not especially complex pieces, songs that reflect a buoyant, optimistic point of view and aptly mirror the spirit of the time. His one remaining offering, “She’s Leaving Home,”
Lennon, on the other hand, his imagination fueled by increasing amounts of psychedelic drugs that he would bring to the recording sessions, offered songs that abound in fantastic images and an often fractured point of view. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”
“Good Morning, Good Morning”
The last song, “A Day in the Life,”
While all this was taking place, the Beatles, dressed in gaudy costumes and accompanied by friends such as Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, wandered among the orchestra members (who had been requested to wear evening dress), passing out joints, sparklers, and novelty items. Thus, the orchestra leader wore a bright red clown’s nose, a violinist held his bow in a gorilla’s fist, and each member had a party hat. The recording had a festival atmosphere that the band would never recapture during subsequent recording sessions.
George Harrison’s only contribution, “Within You Without You,”
Buoyed by the knowledge that they had created something truly original, the Beatles decided that the album’s cover had to match the music’s uniqueness. To that end, they commissioned Peter Blake
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band was overwhelming in its impact. In many ways, the album marked a departure from traditional rock songs, album production and packaging, fashion, and rock criticism, and as John Lennon tersely commented, “It was a peak.”
Throughout the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, pop songs held to a rather strict formula—innocuous ditties of teenage love and angst that rarely exceeded three minutes in length. They were usually not topical in content and were musically rather pedestrian, three-chord tunes. In their steady improvement as writers and musicians, the Beatles had chafed against these restrictions and had expressed their frustrations in various ways, not the least of which was a suppressed cover for one American album release that featured the band in bloody butchers’ coats, with pieces of meat and limbs of dolls draped over their shoulders.
With the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, adherence to the formula for the Beatles and for other bands quickly went out the window. No longer limited exclusively to songs of teenage romance, they began to speak out on issues of the day with increasing sharpness, and songs of adolescent love soon gave way to hymns of adult passion. “A Day in the Life” demonstrated that audiences could not only sit through but also appreciate a longer song, and later releases such as “Hey Jude” pushed the limits of song length. As McCartney explained years later,
We were always pushing ahead: “louder, further, longer, more, different.” I always wanted things to be different, because we knew that people, generally, always want to move on, and if we hadn’t pushed them the guys would have stuck by the rule books and still been wearing ties.
The notion of the concept album
The group also created firsts in album packaging by printing the lyrics to each of the songs on the back cover and by making the album a foldout that featured a close-up photograph of the band on the inside. Within the sleeve itself was included a glossy sheet of cutout figures and patches, and the record jacket, in a departure from the usual staid jackets of white paper, was illustrated with a mass of swirling waves that range from bright red to white. In all, the album cost an unprecedented $100,000 and took four months to produce. For the time, these figures were staggering; in comparison, for example, the Beatles’ first album had been completed in one day and for less than $2,000.
While the Beatles certainly did not inaugurate the explosion of fashion in the 1960’s, they did seize on a trend and bring it to even greater popularity. Around this time, Patti Harrison, George’s wife, introduced them to a group of Dutch designers whom they commissioned to make clothes, paint their pianos and cars, and run an exclusive boutique in a stuffy London neighborhood. The height of the band’s elaborate costumes came with the photos included in their next release, Magical Mystery Tour.
For years, rock music was regarded with disdain by serious musicians and critics, and the idea of a probing rock record review was still a rather foreign concept in 1967. After Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it became clear that rock music was changing, and so too the aesthetics by which it would be judged had to change. Magazines such as Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy addressed the challenges this new music posed. After 1967, rock criticism came of age as a serious form of aesthetic analysis; increasingly, it drew accomplished writers who raised the level of evaluation of a medium theretofore not regarded as an art form.
George Martin summarized the effect of the album well when he wrote,
For my part, I felt it was the album which turned the Beatles from being just an ordinary rock-and-roll group into being significant contributors to the history of artistic performance. It was a turning point—the turning point. It was the watershed which changed the recording art from something that merely made amusing sounds into something which will stand the test of time as a valid art form: sculpture in music, if you like.
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Brackett, David, comp. The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. A comprehensive collection on all aspects of the history of pop, rock, and soul music, including an essay on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and several essays on the Beatles in general. -
Carr, Roy, and Tony Tyler. The Beatles: An Illustrated Record. 1975. Rev. and updated ed. New York: Harmony Books, 1981. A book full of pictures and much detailed information. The authors often make keen observations about the band and its songs, and the book is important for its notes on each of the Beatles’ albums and their solo recordings. -
Lewisohn, Mark. The Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Abbey Road Studio Session Notes, 1962-1970. New York: Harmony Books, 1988. A scrupulously researched listing of all known Beatles recordings, listing where and when they took place, how many takes were recorded, who participated in the sessions, and the instruments played on each track. Includes an interview with McCartney. -
Moore, Allan F. The Beatles, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Part of the Cambridge Music Handbooks series, this analysis of the song and album looks at all phases of the famous Beatles work, from its beginnings to its legacy in rock history. -
_______. “The Brilliant Career of Sgt. Pepper.” In Windows on the Sixties: Exploring Key Texts of Media and Culture, edited by Anthony Aldgate, James Chapman, and Arthur Marwick. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000. Moore continues his study of the Sgt. Pepper phenomenon in this reader on popular culture and media. -
Norman, Philip. Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation. 1981. Rev. and updated ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. In spite of the incongruous title, this remains one of the best histories of the band. Norman traces the Beatles from their beginnings to eventual success and decline. An epilogue considers the impact of Lennon’s murder. -
Schaffner, Nicholas. The Beatles Forever. Harrisburg, Pa.: Cameron House, 1977. Although written primarily for fans, this is a highly readable, documented, well-informed look at the Beatles and their recordings. Schaffner brings a passion to his study that few other publications can match. -
Szatmary, David P. “The British Invasion of America: The Beatles.” In Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll, by David P. Szatmary. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. A thorough social history of the arrival of the Beatles in the United States. -
Trynka, Paul, ed. The Beatles: Ten Years That Shook the World. Foreword by Brian Wilson. London: Dorling Kindersley, 2004. Considered one of the best works on the Beatles, this collection of articles first published in the 1960’s by leading rock journalists covers the details of the band’s tours and concerts, their day-to-day lives, and happenings from the band’s early days that were published only in local newspapers. -
Wenner, Jann. “The Rolling Stone Interview: John Lennon.” In The Rolling Stone Interviews, 1967-1980, edited by Peter Herbst. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. This discussion, conducted in 1971 in the immediate aftermath of the Beatles’ breakup, is a classic in the magazine’s history of distinguished interviews. A must for all interested in the band’s history. -
Womack, Kenneth, and Todd F. Davis, eds. Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Examines the cultural and intellectual significance of the Beatles and their “resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music.” Argues that the Beatles as a group and a cultural phenomenon warrant serious academic study.
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