The Beatles: 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' (released in 1967)

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On May 26, 1967 one of the most talked-about albums in pop history appeared in the United Kingdom. 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', the eighth album by the Beatles. One Times critic wrote, 'This record will mark a watershed moment in the history of Western civilization.' Without going that far, we can say that it is among the five most important in the history of pop.

And not because in the first week of its release it sold more than 250,000 copies, nor because there were more than a million pre-orders in the US when it was released there on June 2. Nor because Peter Blake's revolutionary cover design marked a milestone in the history of record graphic design, nor because listening to the album accelerated Brian Wilson's mental and creative deterioration, making him think that 'I can't get over that anymore'. The fact that it was the first album in history to win four Grammy Awards doesn't make it overly extraordinary, either…

Perhaps it was the right time or a work of fate, 'they themselves did not intend to create something great, they simply wanted to do something different' (George Martin) but it ended up being a masterpiece that enchanted, bewitched, excited and brought hope and complicity to millions of teenagers of that generation. The lyrics no longer said 'I want to hold your hand' or 'She loves you'. Now they proclaimed 'with our love we can save the world' or 'I would love to get you in the mood'.

A pop masterpiece that included instruments never heard before and that broke with the image of a rock group à la Buddy Holly with three guitars and drums. There was an orchestra of 41 musicians, wind sections, Indian instruments and others invented on the fly, as well as all kinds of sound effects; all masterfully managed by producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick (one of the great forgotten in most reviews of this album) since it was recorded on a team of only four tracks, a luxury for 1967. However, there were those who did not share that idea: 'With 'Sgt Pepper' I felt more like a studio musician, because what I was interested in was making an album with strings, brass and sheet music. Everybody says it's a classic, but it's not the one I prefer' (Ringo) or Bob Dylan when someone first played the record to him: 'Turn that off!', he growled.

Fed up with touring, massive concerts in which only the hysterical screams of the fans could be heard and what it meant to be constantly exposed to public opinion (Lennon had recently had to retract what he said about whether the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ) the Liverpool quartet decided to leave the concerts and concentrate on studio works that offered in those years sound possibilities impossible to reproduce live. In addition, there was the claim of creative control by the Beatles (above all, Paul) who, like many of their generation, wanted to help improve the world.

McCartney: 'Until that album we never thought about taking the liberty of doing something like Sgt Pepper. Marijuana began to permeate everything we did. It coloured our perception and we began to realise that there weren't as many barriers as we thought, and that we could bring innovations such as working on the album cover or inventing another identity for the group'

It was precisely from Paul that the idea for the new album came after a trip to the USA: 'I think the big influence was 'Pet Sounds' by the Beach Boys. That album blew my mind. It's still one of my favorite albums; His musical inventiveness is incredible. Now I put it on my kids and they love it. When I heard it I thought, 'Oh my God, this is the best album ever. From there the ideas began to come to me'. Another influence according to McCartney was Frank Zappa and his 'Freak Out'. During the recording sessions, Paul kept saying, 'This is our 'Freak Out.' It is ironic that the creator of the first album ended up losing his mind after listening to Sgt Pepper's, and that the second one relentlessly criticized and parodied them in his 'We're only in it for the money', accusing the Beatles of taking advantage - with a lot of economic opportunism - of Californian flower power without being involved in it.

Originally the album was going to be called 'Dr. Pepper', but as the name was registered by an American soft drink company, they changed to Sgt. Pepper.

The idea of the Beatles' alter-ego band offering a kind of concert on the album with the songs intertwined was provided by Mal Evans, the road manager, who despite not receiving authorship, received part of the royalties of the song that opens the album 'Sgt Pepper's lonely hearts club band' and that serves as a presentation to the 'concert' that will be held by the 'Sgt Pepper Lonely Hearts Band'. The song was composed and sung by McCartney. In it they welcome the audience and present the first number: Billy Shears who is in charge of singing the next song: 'With a little help from my friends', specially composed for Ringo. 'Paul wrote the song very intelligently, taking into account Ringo's limited vocal style. The melody is based on five adjacent notes' (G.Martin).

This is the end of the idea of merging the songs. This shows the degree of improvisation with which the production of the new album was carried out. Marijuana had made an appearance in their lives (their first joint was spent by Bob Dylan on one of his American visits) and some of them had even already had some flirtation with acid and cocaine. George Martin: 'I knew they smoked 'marijuana', but not that they did anything more serious. In fact, he was so innocent that I took John to the rooftop in the middle of an LSD trip with no idea what was wrong with him. If he had known that he had taken an acid, the roof would be the last place he would have taken it. 

I wanted to get John out to get some air, but there were at least 500 fans on the street who would have blown him to pieces, so we went up to the roof. John went to the edge, which consisted of a parapet about fifty centimeters high, and raised his eyes to the beautiful starry night. 'Aren't they fantastic?' I suppose they were especially fantastic for him, of course. For me they were just stars. As for marijuana, they never smoked joints in front of me. What they did was go down to the canteen, take a couple of puffs and come back a little happy. I knew what they were doing, but I didn't care.'

A month after Sgt Pepper appeared on the market, the Beatles published an ad in the 'London Times' in which they asked the British government to legalize marijuana. This only added more fire to his liberal views about his use of substances that were not too well regarded in society. So everyone started looking for hidden meanings in his lyrics and looked for three feet to the cat for the initials (LSD) of the next song on the album 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds', a song that Lennon came up with when he saw a drawing of his son Julian.

Pete Shotton, a childhood friend of John's, recalls: 'I was there the day Julian came home from school with a pastel painting featuring the face of his classmate Lucy O'Donnell against an explosive background of multicoloured stars. Impressed by his son's work, Lennon asked him what he had titled it. 'It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds, Dad,' Julian replied… Although of course John was drinking a lot of acid when he wrote the song, the play on LSD was pure coincidence'

Paul McCartney: 'People would come up and wink, 'I've got it, huh? … L-S-D', and that's when all the newspapers were talking about LSD, but we never gave it that meaning… It was composed with Alice in Wonderland in mind, with a boat on the river, gliding smoothly downstream and with large cellophane flowers on its head. From time to time, it would be interrupted and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds would appear filling the sky. This Lucy was God, the great figure, the white rabbit…' Despite all the explanations, the BBC banned the song from being broadcast.

Paul was walking his dog 'Martha' in the early spring of 1967, when the sun came up and he thought 'It's getting better', which reminded him that Jimmy Nicol used to say the phrase a lot. (Jimmy Nicol was the drummer who replaced the ailing Ringo on part of an Australian tour.) When Lennon arrived that day to continue writing material for Sgt Pepper, Paul suggested that they write a song called 'Getting Better'. They worked on it for twelve hours, stopping once to eat quickly. They presented the song to George and Ringo and recorded some of the instrumentation the following night.

McCartney: 'I wrote it in my house in St. John's Wood. I just remember saying 'It's getting better all the time' and John contributed the legendary verse 'It couldn't get much worse', which I found very good. It went against the spirit of the song, which was super-optimistic. Typical John.' About the verses of being cruel and hitting a woman, John confessed in 1980: 'I used to be cruel to my wife and, physically, to any woman. He beat them. I didn't know how to express myself and then I hit them.'

It was during the recording of this song that the aforementioned episode occurred with LSD and the rooftop of Abbey Road studios. That night Paul accompanied John - who was still in the middle of the 'trip' - home and in order not to leave him alone with his high, he decided to take a dose himself. It was Paul's first time.

In 'Fixing a hole' there was no shortage of those who suggested that the 'hole' that had to be fixed was one of the many heroin that they must have in their arms… McCartney: 'This song is just about the hole in the road where the rain gets in; It's an old analogy; the hole in your constitution, which lets in the rain and prevents your mind from wandering freely. Everyone can imagine what they want, but when I wrote it I wanted to say that if there are any cracks or if the room lacks color, then I'm going to paint it.' There are also references to fans who spent night and day in front of his house not letting him lead a normal life.

'She's leaving home'  was again a collaboration between Lennon and McCartney. It started from an idea of Paul, who read a story in the newspaper about a girl who ran away from home. John contributed some of the lyrics. McCartney: 'She's a much younger girl than Eleanor Rigby, but it's the same kind of loneliness. It was a Daily Mirror story: the girl, Melanie, seventeen, had run away from home and the father said: 'We gave her everything, I don't know why she left home.' But they wouldn't have given her that much, at least not what she needed when she left.' The part about sacrifice that parents make comes from Lennon's own childhood. The words came out spontaneously. John was quoting his Aunt Mimi. 'She's Leaving Home' was the first Beatles song in which neither of them played an instrument and the first time that a woman took part in a recording of their music: Sheila Bromberg on the harp. It was also the first track in which the string arrangements are not made by George Martin. When Paul asked him to, Martin was busy on another project and McCartney couldn't wait and entrusted it to Mike Leander. 'George was very busy, and I was crazy to keep going; I was inspired. I think it was very difficult for him to forgive me for that.' Songwriter Ned Rorem described 'She's Leaving Home' as 'on the same level as any song written by Schubert'.

John came up with the idea for 'Being for the benefit of Mr Kite', when in the middle of filming a clip for 'Strawberry Fields', they paused and went with George to a restaurant. On the way he saw an antique shop and went inside to take a look. After a while he came out with an old sign under his arm that announced a nineteenth-century circus. 'Everything was there. He said that the Hendersons would also be there, just arrived from the Pablo Franques fair. There would be hoops and horses and someone would go through a real bonfire. There was also Henry the Horse. The band would start playing at ten minutes to six. All that would be in Bishopsgate. I hardly had to invent anything, because it was enough for me to put the sentences together. Word, for word, seriously. I'm not very proud of her. He didn't really give me any work. At the time we needed a new song for Sgt Pepper, so I did. Then all kinds of stories ran about whether Henry the Horse was really an allegory for the heroine. At that time I had never seen heroin!'

George Martin: 'Paul would come and sit down at the piano and tell me what he was going to do with his songs, pretty much every note… Many of the arrangements of his songs were basically his ideas that I put into practice. John was more vague in his approaches. He expressed his ideas with metaphors. I had to get into his brain to interpret what he wanted. It was a more psychological approach. For example in 'Mr Kite' he said: 'This song is about a circus. A bit shrouded in mystery. I want the feel and smell of sawdust from the track where the show takes place. Can you think of anything? Then I was thinking about how to put those images into sound'

'Within without you' came after a stay in India,' Harrison recalls, 'during which I was bewitched by the country and its music. I brought a lot of instruments. It was written at Klaus Voorman's house in Hampstead one night after dinner. The song came to me when I was playing a pedal harmonium. I also spent many hours with Ravi Shankar trying to learn how to sit and hold the sitar and how to play it. 'Within without you' I wrote based on a very long Ravi composition, in several parts, with a progression in each one. I made a mini-version using sounds similar to the ones I had discovered in his piece. I recorded it in three parts and then put them together.'

Peter Blake: 'I remember one night when George was recording. There was a carpet on the floor, several Indian musicians and the atmosphere was very different from other times.' No other Beatles took part in the recording. George Martin: 'I worked closely with George on the scores of the string orchestra, and he brought some friends from the Indian Musicians' Association to bring special instruments. I first heard the dilruba, an Indian violin, which is played using numerous dragging techniques. That meant that, when writing the scores of string players, I had to make them play in a very similar way to that of Indian musicians, bending strings and linking notes'

"'When I'm sixty-four' it was a Paul song', Lennon explains, 'in the times of the Cavern. I helped him with some of the lyrics, like the grandchildren above the knee and Vera, Chuck and Dave. It was one of the many half-songs we all had, and this one had always been very successful. We used to sing it on the piano when we ran out of power or the amplifiers broke down. The theme is 90% Paul's. I couldn't even dream of writing a song like that'.

In fact, from performances held by the Beatles in 1962, there are lists of songs performed by them that include 'When I'm sixty-four'. Paul finished the lyrics the year his father turned 64 and it was the first track to be recorded in the sessions for the new album, before the idea for 'Sgt Pepper' came up. At first it was intended for the B-side of 'Strawberry Fields Forever' or 'Penny Lane', but finally they decided to release a single with the first two songs. If it had appeared as the B-side of the single, it would not have been included on the LP and instead of it in 'Sgt Pepper' 'Strawberry Fields' would have been included, so the album, if possible, would have been more rounded.

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'Lovely Rita' it arose after a small incident that happened to McCartney: One of the days he was leaving his studios to return home, he ran into a municipal officer who had left him a ticket in his car, parked on Abbey Road, for exceeding the allowed time. Without getting angry, he took it with good humor and accepted the punishment. A few days later, at his father's house, he discussed the issue with his family.

'I was banging on the piano in Liverpool when someone told me that in America the agents of guarding the parking meters were colloquially called 'meter maids' and I loved that. I always liked the word 'maid'. So that's where 'Rita Meter Maid' came from and then 'Lovely Rita Meter Maid'. He imagined a love story with one of them. 'Examine my parking meter' and things like that. I tried to imagine what kind of person I had to be to fall in love with a 'meter maid'; perhaps a timid office worker who asks: 'May I discreetly ask you when you are free to have tea with me?'

The strange sounds that are heard in the song after the phrases 'and the bag across her shoulder/ made her look a little like a military man' are produced with homemade kazoos that were made for the occasion. Tony King (George Martin's partner): 'One night they were filming 'Lovely Rita'. You know those weird noises in the song? They were made with combs and paper. George (Martin) said to me, 'Would you mind taking a look at other rooms in the studio and checking if anyone has a metal comb?' Then we all went to the bathroom and started tearing toilet paper to get the noise we wanted with the comb. The Beatles could afford to spend an hour of their recording time getting the right combs and toilet paper.' They wrapped the comb with toilet paper and John, George and Paul blew through them to the sound of an orchestra of kazoos. The piano for 'saloon' was played by George Martin.

Lennon: 'I often sit down at the piano and work on songs with the TV on in the background, with the volume very low. If I'm out of shape and things don't move forward, I start to hear what they say on TV. This is how 'Good morning good morning' came about; It was an advertisement for cornflakes.' The original ad read: 'Good morning, good morning, The best to you each morning, Sunshine Breakfast, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, Crisp and full of fun'. The line from the song 'It's time for tea and Meet the Wife' referred to a TV series, 'Meet the Wife' which was very popular in Britain. The animal effects at the end of the song were not randomized. John indicated that each animal that appeared would have to be able to devour the previous one…

George Martin: 'Imagine my pleasure when I discovered that the sound of a rooster clucking at the end of 'Good Morning' was very similar to the sound of the guitars at the beginning of Sgt Pepper's reprise. I was able to cut and mix the two tracks so that the first one became the second one. It was one of the luckiest productions imaginable.' Additional musicians were the group Sounds Incorporated (three saxophones, two trombones and French horn), who had participated in the same program as the Beatles on the 1965 American tour.

With the return of the 'Band of the Lonely Hearts' saying goodbye with 'Sgt Pepper's lonely hearts club band (reprise)' of the audience, the 'concert' ends. But there is no concert worth its salt without an encore. And this was going to be an encore that marked history.

In the mid-sixties, Tara Browne belongs to a gang of young British aristocrats, whose way of life is not very well seen by their elders, regulars of the conventional Palace celebrations. On the day of his 21st birthday, the grandson of brewer Edward Cecil Guinness hired the American band Lovin' Spoonful to fly to the Islands to play at the party he was celebrating at the family mansion in Ireland. Among the many attendees of all kinds and coats were Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Paul McCartney and John Paul Getty.

Tara Brown was a wealthy 'bon vivant' to whom life smiled. Until December 16, 1966: Browne drives his sports car early in the morning accompanied by his friend Suki Potier, at 180 km/hour on the way to his fashion store on Kings Road. His state could be described as 'excessively conscious'. After running a red light and trying to dodge a Volkswagen that was coming at him with his Lotus, he crashed into a parked truck. Her travel companion, Potier, is unharmed with slight bruises and a shock. Browne dies on the way to the hospital. When John Lennon reads the police report in the Daily Mail a few days later, he incorporates the story into a song he is working on…

John Lennon: 'On the next page of the newspaper there was an article about 4,000 sinkholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire. I also incorporated it into the song, but when we went to record, that line was still missing a word. I knew it had to be something like, 'Now you know how many holes it takes to… something… the Albert Hall'. Actually the phrase didn't make any sense either but I insisted on finding the damn word, until my friend Terry Doran came and told me 'fill, John, 'fill'.

Paul and I worked together on 'A Day in the Life' . We did it as usual: you write the easy part, the one that comes out almost by itself. Then when you get stuck, instead of insisting, you quit. Then we would get together and I would sing half of it and that would inspire me to write the next verse, and vice versa. Paul was pretty quiet, because I think he thought it was a good song. Sometimes we didn't allow the other to interfere with a song, because when something isn't yours, you tend to take more liberties, you experiment a little. Paul's contribution, in addition to the central part that he had been thinking about independently and couldn't fit anywhere, was that beautiful final chord, and the phrase 'I'd love to turn you on'. I think we did a magnificent job'.

Paul McCartney, however, did not miss the opportunity to include the 'great effect' that left everyone (including Brian Wilson) speechless. 'I thought: This is the song, man! Anyway it was a very crazy song, with lots of psychedelic references and 'I'd love to turn you on'. I tried to sell an idea to John: 'We'll take fifteen bars, or any arbitrary amount and then we'll try something new.'

George Martin: 'To keep the tempo, we told Mal Evans to count each of the 24 bars we decided to leave free and on the record you can hear him, standing on the other side of the piano, counting 'one, two, three, four… Mal set an alarm clock that would ring at the end, which is also heard on the album. We left it because we couldn't erase it!'

When Paul told Martin that they needed a symphony orchestra to fill the transition passages, Martin flatly refused, although at McCartney's insistence 41 musicians were eventually summoned. The idea was that they would 'get out of control' and according to Lennon, that had to end up sounding 'like the end of the world'

Martin: 'John had given enough explanation for me to write a score. For the 'I'd like to turn you on' piece, we used cellos and violas. I had them play the two notes that echo John's voice. However, instead of plucking the strings, which would have produced well-defined notes, I asked the musicians to slide their fingers up and down the frets and thus create an intensity before the orchestral climax. For the climax I wrote, at the beginning of the twenty-four bars, the lowest note possible for each instrument in the orchestra. At the end of the 24 bars, I wrote the highest note each instrument could reach, the closest to an E major chord.

I then drew a curve along the 24 bars, with reference points that told you roughly which note you should have played in each measure. The musicians were also instructed to move as smoothly as possible from one note to another. On stringed instruments, they had to slide their fingers along the strings. On instruments with claves, such as the clarinet or the oboe, they obviously had to go up from scale to scale, but they were also asked to polish the changes as much as possible'

McCartney: 'The trumpets were always ahead of the others. Those in the rope section, on the other hand, looked at each other like frightened lambs: 'Are you going to go up?', 'Yes', 'Well, me too'. And they went up a little more, all very delicate and all together…'

The Beatles knew that they were facing their most ambitious and revolutionary work. It had to be accompanied, therefore, by a deck at its height. To do this, they contacted the artist Peter Blake through the art dealer Robert Fraser, a great friend of Paul's. He designed the backdrops and scenery and photographer Michael Cooper captured the image.

Peter Blake: 'Paul explained to me that the concept was a band like the ones they play in a park. So the photo on the cover had to be an image of them dressed as a municipal band, at the end of their concert in the park, on a stage, with a flower bed next to them and surrounded by a crowd of people. I think my main contribution was to decide that if we arranged the crowd in a certain way, the people who formed it could be anyone.'

When Blake asked the group members to choose characters for the park scene, George wanted gurus. Ringo, without special interest in the idea, delegated to his companions. The others suggested names whose sound they liked, such as Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, Johnny Weissmuller… John suggested three that were rejected: Hitler, for obvious reasons; Jesus Christ, who was banned because of John's recent controversial statements in which he compared the popularity of the Beatles to that of Jesus Christ; and Gandhi, which EMI officials withdrew because they considered that it could offend in India.

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Timothy Leary said in 1968: 'The Sgt Pepper album compresses the evolutionary development of musicology and most of the history of Eastern and Western sound into a new tympanic complexity… The Beatles are mutant beings sent by God… Prototypes of a new and young race of free and smiling men'

Track List:

'Sgt. Pepper's lonely hearts club band'
'With a little help from my friends'
'Lucy in the sky with diamonds'
'Getting better'
'Fixing a hole'
'She's leaving home'
'Being for the benefit of mr. Kite!'
'Within you without you'
'When I'm sixty-four'
'Lovely Rita'
'Good morning good morning'
'Sgt. Pepper's lonely hearts club band (Reprise)'
'A day in the life'