The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Saying something new about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band went out of style in 2003, when it was voted best album of all time by Rolling Stone magazine. The album, which is supposed to have defined the psychedelic era and pioneered the concept that rock-and-roll could be artistically significant, may, in fact, be almost all hype. Wasn’t Rubber Soul catchier? Wasn’t Revolver more psychedelic? For a concept album, doesn’t Sgt. Pepper lack a concept? What the hell are they wearing? And, most importantly, does the album live up to its hype?

In August of 1965, the Beatles were exclusively a pop band. They catered mostly to “teenyboppers,” the name given to the mindless, sugar-coated, pop-culture-consuming youth of the 1960s. By 1967, they weren’t playing live at all and their songs were being banned from the BBC for drug references. In two years, it seemed like they had gone from an immature, if incredibly popular, pop band, to full-blown artists.

Their 1965 album, Rubber Soul, was a big step forward. The Beatles, thanks to their friend Bob Dylan, had begun regular use of marijuana and were beginning to expand their artistic horizons. Their producer, George Martin, said about the album:

“We had been making albums rather like a collection of singles. Now we were really beginning to think about albums as a bit of art on their own.”

Still, every song on the album is about romance and they only deviate from their guitar/guitar/bass/drums format once, when they incorporate a sitar into “Norwegian Wood.”

1966’s Revolver is where everything changed. The group was coming to the realization that live performances were not doing their musical ambitions justice, and decided to operate exclusively out of their studio. And from that studio came great things. The Beatles worked hard to shed their “pop music” label by incorporating drug-induced tape loops, odd sound effects and a wide variety of instruments not traditionally associated with rock music into these fourteen tracks. Their song topics range from the political (“Tax Man”) to the psychedelic (“Love You To,” “She Said She Said,” “Tomorrow Never Knows”), to the just-plain-weird (“Eleanor Rigby,” “Yellow Submarine”). And the few love songs that do make it onto the LP are, frankly, beautiful (“Here, There, and Everywhere,” “For No One”).

After Revolver, The Beatles receded from the public eye and stopped touring to create the monolithic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Rolling Stone magazine writes:

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time. From the title song’s regal blasts of brass and fuzz guitar to the orchestral seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of “A Day in the Life,” the 13 tracks on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band are the pinnacle of the Beatles’ eight years as recording artists. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were never more fearless and unified in their pursuit of magic and transcendence.”

First of all, the concept of this album is apparent on four of these thirteen tracks, to be generous. And could we even call it a concept? The Beatles dress up like lunatics and pretend to be a novelty band that’s “been going in and out of style but guaranteed to raise a smile.” Some popular albums with a more cohesive concept include Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, The Who’s Quadrophenia, and Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city. In terms of sound, George Martin’s corny sound effects begin to sound quite grating fifty years after their innovative inclusion on the record (see “Good Morning”), and nobody could say that the band was at its most collaborative in ’67. Ringo Starr’s main reflection on the composition of the album:

“The biggest memory I have of Sgt. Pepper … is I learned to play chess.”

Still, Sgt. Pepper does have an undeniable importance. Corny and grandiose as it is, the album had a large impact on the world of rock and roll. It introduced the concept of a rock album being something transcendent. The album cannot be summed up in one or two genre labels. Every song is different from the last, pushing the boundaries of what rock is and is not. The opener is a straightforward rocker with crowd noises and the sound of a pit orchestra tuning up. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is pure psychedelia. “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” is circus music. “Within You Without You” is a five minute sitar jam. “When I’m Sixty-Four” is a Sinatra-esque music-hall tune. And the closer, “A Day in the Life,” is one of the more complex songs the Beatles ever did and quite possibly their best.

All of this does not make Sgt. Pepper the “greatest album of all time,” though. This holds true for all music that anybody has a deep emotional attachment to, but there is something inexplicable about the album that makes it so beloved. The album hasn’t secured its number one spot on all those lists of “greatest albums” purely because of its innovations. If “classic” albums were selected only by this factor, then Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (an album composed entirely of clanging machinery noises by the former Velvet Underground leader) would be a lot more popular than it should be. While it would be impossible to speak to everybody’s emotional attachment to the album, simply put, Sgt. Pepper is the sound of pure, unmitigated joy.

How much we like something, particularly a piece of music, comes from not only the quality of it, which is subjective, but how well we can put our emotions and feelings into it, and how the music reflects them. Therefore, for an album to be considered good, people must listen to it and essentially pour their heart out. If one can do this and the music lets them feel good about it, then, typically, one might consider that music to be good. The unmitigated joy of Sgt. Pepper has clearly allowed many people to have this experience.

At six o’clock in the morning, after the Beatles finished their new album, sometime in May of 1967, the sound of music filled King’s Road in Chelsea, London. It was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, being played at full volume, with speakers placed in the open window frames. The residents of the neighborhood opened their windows and listened, without complaint, to what may be, for some odd reason inside of us, the greatest album of all time.