Sgt Pepper Part 2
OK, so the Beatles are in the process of working on SFF/Penny Lane, but they still need an idea for the album. One day, Paul comes in with this idea to record an album, but kind of as an alter ego. Instead of recording as the Beatles, they would record as this fictitious band called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In Paul's words, it would sort of free them from the whole Beatles thing and give them an opportunity to approach the album in a fresh way, not having to do what the Beatles would normally do when recording an album. Paul's idea was to record the album as if it is a live performance of Sgt. Pepper's band. You would hear the audience, warming up, tuning, chat between performances, ect. Everyone seemed to like the idea, so they went off and wrote some songs.
It was Paul's concept, so he wrote the title track and a reprise which would kind of end the show. He also had a song for Ringo that would come right in after the title track called With A Little Help From My Friends. He also had a song that he had written as a teen called When I'm 64, which was kind of a jazz number.
John, who at this time was having problems writing songs because of his domestic life with his wife, used inspiration from things around him. His son Julian brought home a drawing of a classmate kind of flying in the air. Julian called it "Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds". John thought that was good, so he wrote kind of an Alice In Wonderland song around it. John also heard a TV commercial that said "Good Morning Good Morning", so he had a song called that. He also had an old circus poster in his house, so he decided to write a song around that called Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite. An most famously, John read an article in the newspaper about a car crash and about a bunch of potholes in the street, so he wrote A Day In The Life.
George, struggling for material at this point because he was far more into the sitar than anything else, wrote Only A Northern Song, which was rejected, but then wrote Within You Without You which was an Indian song and that one was accepted.
Technically, what was done with Pepper considering they only had tape and 4 tracks is mind blowing. Many of the tricks they used with Revolver were also used with Pepper, but it was much bigger. For example, on A Day In The Life, they wanted a big orchestral buildup, but it would have been too expensive to get a full orchestra, so they decided they'd just record with a smaller number of instruments, but would duplicate it, in effect, making a larger orchestra, but they needed more tracks. Geoff Emerick, somehow, got two four track machines to run simultaneously because four tracks weren't enough, in effect inverting an 8 track recorder on the fly. On Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite, John wanted to create a circus atmosphere in the song, so George Martin went around and got various tapes of steam organs and calliopes, threw them up in the air and pasted them back together to form kind of a watershed in the background. Crowd noises were also all over the album to give the illusion of a live performance.
The sequencing of Pepper was also interesting in that it was, pretty much, two continuous sides of music. Some tracks were physically joined together, like Sgt Pepper and With A Little Help From My Friends. Then, Good Morning Good Morning was joined to Sgt Pepper reprise with a bunch of baryard animals, each one being able to eat or scare the one before it until the last sound, which was a chicken cluck which happened to be the same tone as the guitar note which led into the Sgt Pepper reprise, which led directly into A Day In The Life. Other songs weren't joined together, but there was only the briefest of silences between those songs. Even after a Day In The Life, there isn't silence as the Beatles put a dog whistle into the runout groove (dating myself here) which your dog would hear.
The cover was also interesting and became the most famous cover in the history of pop music. Basically, it was a collage of people standing behind the Beatles dressed in colorful satin uniforms with a big bass drum that said Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. There are even wax figures of the Beatlemania era Beatles standing behind Sgt Pepper's Band. People that made the cover: Stu Sutcliffe, Sonny Liston, Mae West, WC Fields, Edgar Allen Poe, Bob Dylan, Laurel and Hardy, Karl Marx, Marlon Brando, and Shirley Temple. John also wanted Jesus and Hitler, but the record company said no. You could stare at this cover for hours, there is so much to see.
As for the songs, they were great, although IMO not as strong a set as Revolver, but Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds, A Day In The Life, and the Sgt Pepper title track became Beatles classics. Mostly, it's about the whole of the album and not about individual tracks. A quick word on A Day In The Life which is, IMO, the greatest album closer ever. It's actually two different songs. John wrote the verses and Paul wrote the middle eight. To connect the two, they decided they needed a big orchestral buildup, so when recording, the had Mal Evans, a Beatles road manager, could out 24 bars and ended the 24 bars with an alarm clock. They decided to leave in the alarm clock when Paul started singing Woke up, fell out of bed. You can still hear Mal counting on the finished version. After another orchestral buildup, the Beatles decided they needed a chord to end it on. They tried humming the chord, but decided they needed something stronger, so they each got by a piano and on the count of three, each hit an E Major. It took them a few tries to do it at the same time. They applied an effect to it to make it sound otherworldly, then faded it out for like 45 seconds.
Pepper became the album of the Summer of Love and was universally praised and sold extremely well. Pepper is the album that proved that rock and roll could be art. Lately, it has become fashionable to say that Revolver is the Beatles best work, but no album captured it's time better or captured the public's imagination better than Pepper. it is considered the first concept album, for better or worse and, I believe, a more influential work than Revolver, although with lesser songs, at least IMO. Regardless of whether or not you believe it's the Beatles best work, Pepper is routinely in the top 3 of albums countdowns. At the time, it was considered the Beatles masterpiece and still is a masterpiece by any reasonable measure.
Pepper marks the high point of the Beatles career and, although they would still have many great moments, Pepper was the last time the Beatles really presented a unified front. After Pepper, they would start to drift apart. Therefore, that makes Pepper, along with everything else it is, kind of a bittersweet album.
Next...Brian dies and the Beatles take a Magical Mystery Tour
You are correct about Capitol records getting it right. Magical Mystery Tour was released in Britain as a double EP. Having tried the EP format twice in America with poor results Capitol wisely couple the MMT songs with the 1967 singles and created an album which, if you compare song by song, may be as good as Pepper.
It exists. Plenty of witnesses to it.
