OTR: The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

[illusionofjoy]

It was on June 1^st, 1967 that The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was nicknamed "the soundtrack to the Summer of Love." Sgt. Pepper has also been credited as being the first concept album, even though any overarching theme break apart after track two, despite the existence of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)," which isn't even the final song on the album! Credit for the first concept album (in the realm of pop music, ignoring classical operas recorded on modern media) should technically go to The Who, with the release of Tommy in 1969. Still, a band who would perfect the art of the concept album during the 1970s made their album debut in 1967; the album was Piper At the Gates of Dawn and the band was Pink Floyd.

There has never been a time that I have heard the first two songs on this album - "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "With A Little Help From My Friends" - played out of sequence or on their own. Alone, they each sound half-finished, but together they function perfectly as one four minute and forty-six second song. The track split, of course, was a bane to DJs everywhere once CDs became the preferred format for broadcasting recorded media. Such sequencing shenanigans effectively defeat technological conveniences like the "single track" mode of air studio CD players.

This album is trippy - there's no other way to put it. It was probably trippy in 1967, but looking back at it over forty years time, it is even more so. "When I'm Sixty Four" is strangely prophetic and unsettling as Sir Paul McCartney actually is that age now (and two of his bandmates have passed on, along with his wife). The song's bouncy Vaudevillian style with it's happy clarinet totally contradicts the meaning foisted upon it by the passage of time, however.

"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" remains a sonic delight, playfully pushing and pulling the listener around with it's time signature changes and surreal lyrics. "Getting Better," unfortunately, only reminds me of a Target advertisement from the late 1990s in which it was used (you can blame any commercial exploitation of Beatles songs on Michael Jackson, who owns the publishing rights to the entire catalogue).

Despite destroying any chance of this being a "true" concept album, "A Day In The Life" is a spectacular closer, it's grandeur showing how much The Beatles had matured as songwriters since their early days. In many ways Sgt. Pepper serves as the dividing line between early Beatles, where they were pretty much exclusively writing silly love songs and later Beatles, where they branched out in not writing styles, but instrumentation and arrangements. I mean, Sgt. Pepper is the first album to feature actual songs with a duration of more than four minutes (i.e.: "A Day In The Life," "Within You Without You" and one could also possibly count the introductory couplet of "Sgt. Pepper/With A Little Help From My Friends").

Still, The Beatles remained a better singles band than LP group.