78. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
2. With A Little Help From My Friends
3. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
4. Getting Better
5. Fixing A Hole
6. She's Leaving Home
7. Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite
8. Within You Without You
9. When I'm Sixty Four
10. Lovely Rita
11. Good Morning Good Morning

12. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
13. A Day In The Life

Well, shit. You complain about this book starting a year off badly and then you get one of the most famous albums of all time dropped on you. I don't know who put these albums in order, but they sure as hell did a fantastic job of confusing everybody!

So, here we are, Sgt. Pepper. Unlike some of the more obscure albums I've reviewed so far, you're more or less bound to know this one. Seriously, if you haven't heard this by now, you must be under several layers of rock and halfway through the process of turning into fossil fuels. This album is one of those very special albums that gets a massive cult built up around it, one that renders it nearly impossible to badmouth it in any way, no matter how much I wanted to. Not that I would really need to, since I'm so biased towards the Beatles that you'd think Apple was giving me a stipend.

Listening to this album years and years after the event can make one wonder how on earth this came to be known as the greatest album of all time. A very good collection of songs, to be  sure, but the greatest album ever? Well, not quite. I've always had a bit of an axe to grind where this album is concerned, but that's only because I'm a snob who thinks Revolver is better anyway. When an album is acclaimed to the hyperunrealistic degree that this is, it's inevitable for a bit of backlash to occur.

The only real thing that bugs me about the constant barrage of praise for this album is the constant parroting that this is the first concept album ever. This is blatantly untrue. For one, the phrase 'concept album' can be applied loosely enough that Frank Sinatra's 'In The Wee Small Hours', the very first album reviewed here, could be called one. If you want to get into semantics and argue about 'intellectual' concepts greater than 'sad songs' or 'songs about cars', then I direct you to 'Freak Out', which has a much more solid and significant concept than this one.

Which brings me to complaint #2: This album isn't a concept album. It started as a concept album, sure, but it isn't one. The original idea came after their decision to quit touring in '66, an extraordinarily stressful time for the group that found them wanting to escape their public personalities and perform under the guise of another (fictional) band. And so Sgt. Pepper was born.

...But the Beatles, being human beings, got lazy. So we have two songs and a reprise, and that is all that remains of the album's grand concept. Like almost every other achievement the Beatles made, they were not first, but through the virtues of their immense fame they codified the idea of concept albums for years to come. And all this without even making a proper concept album!

Much of the album's reputation stems from the reception it received at the time. This album plowed into the music world with the force of an atomic bomb. The reception was so huge that even the mainstream press had to take notice. A review in the London Times called it "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation", which, while it seems a bit much, perfectly encapsulates the reaction many people had to this album. Before Pepper (BP?), rock music was frequently derided as meaningless music for teenagers that could never aspire for greatness or to be labeled by that lofty term, "art", not like jazz music. This album changed all that. From here on we enter fully into the Age of the Album. It is perhaps symbolic that this would be the Beatles' first American LP that would be left untouched by Capital Records, which had a rather nasty habit of cutting up the track lists of their earlier albums, making a bunch of weird patchwork albums. Needless to say, the Beatles didn't like that very much at all. No more of that nonsense, though. From here on, the album would be fully acknowledged as a genuine artistic statement. And even if this album does suffer from being overrated, any album that has that on their claim to fame is alright by me.

So, I've written all these big lofty paragraphs about how this album was an Event, but I haven't even mentioned any of the songs yet. Christ, Pitchfork oughta hire me.

Despite my whinging earlier, this really is an exceptional album. You've got the iconic intro, replete with sound effects, followed by Ringo getting a song that, for once, isn't way worse than the other members' songs. It's nice that they finally threw Ringo a bone for once. Sure, Ringo may never be an amazing singer, and Joe Cocker's well known cover knocks this song out of the park, but forget all that. Give Ringo some credit for once!

'Lucy' has always amused me on some level. John Lennon's famously denied the LSD allegations over and over, but with lyrics like that, not to mention the sweet acid-fried haze that the song's trapped in, who does he think he's fooling?

Following this, we get 'Getting Better', 'Fixing A Hole', 'She's Leaving Home'...a veritable Paul blitzkrieg. Come to think of it, Paul seems to be doing the heavy lifting on this album, taking up half the record while John gets a paltry 3 and a half songs. The first two tracks' boundless optimism and cheery feeling are perfectly deflated by the depressing 'She's Leaving Home'. With that harp intro and those oh-so-melodramatic strings, it's merely inches away from sliding into unbearably sentimentality. However, one of McCartney's greatest gifts in the Beatles was his ability to fall just short of that line, making cheesy sentimental pop music (famously derided as 'Paul's granny music' by Lennon during that period where he couldn't let a day pass without bitching about Paul and the Beatles), music that is undeniably syrupy, but somehow without leaving a bad taste in your mouth. And as if that wasn't enough, he does the exact same thing in 'When I'm 64', whose music hall atmosphere sounded dated even then.

George is no slouch either, even if it may feel that way on first listen, since he only gets one song, and his role as lead guitarist was rather diminished in the wave of their studio craziness. He still finds time to throw down bitchin' solos here and there, and he's definitely brought the Indian influence up a notch. 'Within You Without You' seems to be the most disliked track here, being a five minute raga-influenced piece with rather preachy lyrics, but forget the haters, this track is fire. Seriously, listen to it again.

I've always felt that 'Mr. Kite' is the underrated gem on this record, for some reason. Although the lyrics reveal Lennon's sheer songwriting laziness that plagued him throughout their later period, taken almost completely from a 19th century circus poster, the song's instrumentation is nothing short of magical. It seems hard to believe that the instrumental breaks were written by humans.

And finally, we can't really go too far without mentioning 'A Day In The Life', can we? This song represents one of the last true songwriting collaborations between John and Paul, mashing their two individual songs together to make a combination that would melt faces for all time. The way the orchestra just keeps building and building...it still sounds jarring today, I can only imagine how it must've sounded back then. While A Hard Day's Night, released a mere 3 years before this (can you believe that?) has one of the most iconic opening chords of all time, Pepper has the most iconic closing chord-a dramatic,climactic finish that closes the curtain on an era in rock history, but not without showing a glimpse of the exciting turns yet to come. 10/10