It might seem odd to start with an album by a famous rock ‘n’ roll band who once performed in front of 55,000 fans at Shea Stadium in Queens and appeared frequently on national television. No performers of the era were more public. However, this album represented a deliberate and explicit break with the concert model, and it was intended to be heard through headphones by attentive, isolated listeners.

Background

Frequently hailed as the greatest album ever recorded, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) epitomizes a musical work intended for domestic consumption. In fact, before even recording the album, The Beatles themselves knew that its contents would never be performed publicly. From the outset, according to producer George Martin, Sgt. Pepper’s was intended to contain songs that “couldn’t be performed live: they were designed to be studio productions.” With their previous two albums, Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966), The Beatles had matured beyond the rock ’n’ roll of their early period. (Chronologically and stylistically, Revolver marks the center of the band’s career, and discussions of their discography tend to place it near the middle of a transitional period from Rubber Soul to Sgt. Pepper’s.) The Beatles had become a rock band, and Sgt. Pepper’s represents a continuation and acceleration of their progression away from Beatlemania and the British Invasion era.

By the time Sgt. Pepper’s was released, The Beatles were well on their way to becoming the most influential band of all time. Along with Rubber Soul and Revolver, it is remembered as one of the first albums of the album era, a period from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s during which the album, in various formats (LP, 8-track, cassette, CD), was the dominant medium for recorded music. Increasingly, albums came to be seen as more than just cost-effective vehicles for the distribution of hit-single compilations or collections of random songs. Artists had come to view their albums as extended works of art, in which each song was part of a unified whole, and The Beatles were at the forefront of this trend. With Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper’s, the band, producer George Martin, and engineer Geoff Emerick succeeded in creating albums that were truly greater than the sum of their parts. (At Martin’s request, Emerick was named The Beatles’ engineer in April 1966, just before the Revolver sessions began.) Each album features songwriting that is more sophisticated and explores a wider variety of styles than its predecessor, and each reveals the band’s ever-growing desire to experiment with the latest technological innovations. The impressive production and engineering skills of Martin and Emerick proved invaluable in this latter regard. By approaching the recording studio as another sort of musical instrument, they greatly facilitated The Beatles’ attempts to realize their grand musical ideas. Although it took several hundred hours to record (an exorbitant amount of time by 1960s standards), Sgt. Pepper’s was a huge hit in the Summer of Love, praised not only for bridging the cultural divide between popular music and high art but also for providing a musical representation of its generation and the contemporary counterculture.

The Beatles began recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on November 24, 1966, in Studio Two at EMI Recording Studios (now Abbey Road Studios), London. Still fresh in their minds were the previous summer’s momentous events. On June 24, 1966, two days after completing their seventh album, Revolver, The Beatles had begun a tour of West Germany, Japan, the Philippines, and North America. The tour was relatively unsuccessful and plagued by weaker-than-expected ticket sales and run-ins with local authorities and protest groups. It ended with what became the group’s final commercial concert, an eleven-song set at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29. By then, each band member had agreed (probably in St. Louis, on August 21) that The Beatles would never again perform publicly. (They did, however, give one last public performance, from the rooftop of the London headquarters of Apple Corps, Ltd., their multimedia corporation, on January 30, 1969.) Many Beatles scholars consider the band’s August 1966 decision to stop touring to be the most important one of their career. Within days of their August 31 return to London, they parted ways to begin a three-month break.

On November 19, 1966, five days before the Sgt. Pepper’s recording sessions began, Paul McCartney conceived and began developing the idea of an Edwardian era military band, namely, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, whose members would be The Beatles’ alter egos. The inspiration occurred “suddenly,” during his return flight to London from a short safari vacation to Kenya with his then girlfriend Jane Asher and Beatles assistant Mal Evans. In the following, McCartney recounts the episode:

I got this idea. I thought, let’s not be ourselves. Let’s develop alter egos. [Let’s] actually take on the personas of this different band. We could say, “How would somebody else sing this? He might approach it a bit more sarcastically, perhaps.” . . . It would be a freeing element. I thought we [could] run this philosophy through the whole album: with this alter-ego band, it won’t be us making all that sound, it won’t be The Beatles, it’ll be this other band, so we’ll be able to lose our identities in this.

[Mal and I] were having our [in-flight] meal, and they had those little packets marked “S” and “P.” Mal said, “What’s that mean? Oh, salt and pepper.” We had a joke about that. So I said, “Sergeant Pepper,” just to vary it, “Sergeant Pepper, salt and pepper,” an aural pun, not mishearing him but just playing with the words.

Then, “Lonely Hearts Club,” that’s a good one. [At the time, there were a] lot of those about, the equivalent of a dating agency now. I just strung those [words] together rather in the way that you might string together Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. All that culture of the Sixties going back to those traveling medicine men, Gypsies. It echoed back to the previous century, really. I just fantasized, well, “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” That’d be crazy enough, because why would a Lonely Hearts Club have a band? If it had been Sergeant Pepper’s British Legion Band, that’s more understandable. The idea was to be a little more funky. That’s what everybody was doing. That was the fashion. The idea was just [to] take any words that would flow.

In late November 1966, when The Beatles began work on their eighth studio album, they had yet to choose its title. During the earliest sessions for what became Sgt. Pepper’s, the band recorded “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” When composing these songs, Lennon and McCartney drew inspiration from their memories of Liverpool, the band’s hometown in Northwest England. For instance, Lennon, as a child, had played in the garden of Strawberry Field, a Salvation Army children’s home (now closed) in Woolton, a Liverpool suburb. And Penny Lane is an actual street in south Liverpool: The song’s lyrics vividly describe its associated characters. Also recorded during these early sessions was “When I’m Sixty-Four,” a song from The Beatles’ formative years and the only one of these three that appears on Sgt. Pepper’s. Succumbing to management and record-company pressure, the band and producer George Martin agreed to release “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” as a double A-side single on February 13, 1967. In his Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper, Martin calls his agreement to leave these two songs off the album “the biggest mistake of my professional life.”

Despite their exclusion from Sgt. Pepper’s, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” were crucial in setting its overarching theme, one involving the band members’ childhood experiences in Liverpool. (“Strawberry Fields Forever,” as Martin recalls in Summer of Love, “set the agenda for the whole album.”) In the first week of February 1967, The Beatles recorded what became the album’s title track, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” yet another song evoking nostalgia for earlier times. More importantly, it was also the earliest realization of McCartney’s alter-ego idea from the previous November 19, and he soon proposed that the entire album should represent a performance by the fictional band.

This qualifies Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as one of the first examples of a concept album—an approach to album design that would become increasingly important over the next few years and that persists into the present day. A concept album, like a song cycle (see Chapter 4), brings together a unified collection of songs to tell a story or capture an experience. Although Sgt. Pepper’s does not present a specific narrative, it encourages the listener to imagine that they are present at a live concert—a concert, however, that they soon realize could never take place, due to the diversity of instruments and pervasiveness of studio editing.

"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

The scene is set by the opening track, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which opens with ambient noises intended to create the illusion that a show is about to begin. Martin combined crowd noises he had recorded at a theatrical performance with the sounds of an orchestra warming up, which he captured in the studio while recording tracks for use in the album’s final song. Of course, the ambient instrumentals aren’t quite right: We seem to hear strings at the outset, but they are absent from the song itself, which features typical rock band instruments (electric guitars, electric bass, and drums). Our expectations are soon disrupted, however, when an ensemble of French horns joins the soundscape at the conclusion of the first verse. These are hardly at home in a rock lineup, and it is hard to imagine them being played onstage. The entrance of the horns is greeted by a cheer from the crowd, and crowd sounds punctuate the performance, reminding that listener that they are “present” at a live event.

McCartney’s lyrics—belted in a rock style—also reinforce the setting. He begins by providing a brief history of the band, after which he introduces it by name. Later, with lines like “we hope that you enjoy the show,” “it’s wonderful to be here,” and “you’re such a lovely audience,” he clearly establishes the premise for the album. To further solidify the idea that we are hearing a live concert, McCartney concludes “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” by transitioning directly into the second song. McCartney introduces a fictional singer, “the one and only Billy Shears” (voiced by Ringo Starr), who then launches into “With A Little Help From My Friends” to the sound of applause.

At this point, the concert conceit begins to evaporate. We no longer hear the sounds of the crowd, and we are gradually invited to forget the surroundings made real in the opening seconds of the album. While Starr’s song is fairly conventional in terms of instrumentation and form, the third song begins the journey that will take the listener far away the concert stage.

By the time they wrote and recorded Sgt. Pepper’s, The Beatles had experimented with both cannabis and LSD, and the extent to which the band’s use of these psychoactive drugs influenced its creation has long been debated. Of all the album’s tracks, the third, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” is the one most discussed in this regard. Many believe that the first letters of the nouns in the song’s title, L, S, and D, are a reference to lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD. Lennon repeatedly denied this, maintaining that the title was derived from that of a pastel drawing by his three-year-old son, Julian, that depicted the boy’s nursery-school classmate Lucy O’Donnell. During an episode of The Dick Cavett Show airing on September 21, 1971, Lennon recalled Julian’s presentation of the drawing to him, which Starr witnessed:

This is the truth. My son came home with a drawing, and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around. I said, “What is it?” He said, “It’s Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and I thought, “That’s beautiful.” I immediately wrote a song about it.

Whatever the case, the song itself is a masterpiece of psychedelic rock, due in no small part to its imaginative lyrics, with their “marmalade skies,” “cellophane flowers,” “rocking horse people,” and “newspaper taxis.” In writing them, Lennon was directly influenced by the literary style of Lewis Carroll’s novels Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), especially the latter’s final chapter (chapter 12), “Which Dreamed It?”

Musically, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” exemplifies The Beatles’ artistic maturation over the period 1965–67. Its three main sections, the verse, the bridge, and the chorus, are in different keys: A major, B-flat major, and G major, respectively. Following a short introduction, this verse–bridge–chorus structure is heard for the first time, and is then repeated. A second repetition begins, but this time, the bridge is absent: verse 3 leads directly to chorus 3, which is then repeated through the fade-out. Moreover, the song employs mixed meter. The introduction, the verse, and the bridge (except its last measure) are in triple meter, while the bridge’s last measure and the chorus are in quadruple meter, also known as common time. The technique of shifting from triple to quadruple meter one measure before the chorus is also used to connect verse 3 to chorus 3. Each meter-change is accompanied by a noticeable tempo shift.

“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” also reflects The Beatles’ increasing tendency to utilize sounds and instruments infrequently heard in contemporary rock. The song’s introduction, for instance, features a memorable keyboard part, brilliant in its simplicity, played by McCartney on a Lowrey DSO-1 Heritage Deluxe electronic organ. The ear-catching harpsichord- or celeste-like sound used for this part is (probably) a combination of the organ’s harpsichord, vibraharp, guitar, and music box stops. Then, about halfway through the first verse, Harrison enters on the tambura (tanpura), a long-necked, unfretted lute commonly associated with Indian music. Typically, as heard here, the player plucks the instrument’s strings (usually four or five) in a continuously repeating pattern, producing a buzzing, overtone-rich drone. (In Western art music, the repetition of a musical pattern numerous times in succession is called ostinato.)

Indian music’s influence is again evident at the start of the first bridge. Here, as author Peter Lavezzoli explains, Harrison “mirrors Lennon’s [lead] vocal with electric guitar, as if he were playing a sarangi behind a khyal singer.” The Beatles’ guitarist is known to have “liked ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ a lot.” In discussing his contributions to its arrangement, Harrison highlights the song’s integration of non-Western elements:

I particularly liked the sounds on it where I managed to superimpose some Indian instruments onto the Western music. . . . I like the way the drone of the tambura could be fitted in there.

There was another thing: during vocals in Indian music, they have an instrument called a sarangi, which sounds like the human voice, and the vocalist and [the] sarangi player are more or less in unison in a performance. For “Lucy,” I thought of trying that idea, but because I’m not a sarangi player, I played it on guitar. . . . I was trying to copy Indian classical music.

"She's Leaving Home"

We will pass over the next two songs, although of course they have many points of interest: “Getting Better” includes the Indian tambura and an unusual early electric keyboard instrument called the pianette, while “Fixing a Hole” opens with the sounds of a harpsichord. “She’s Leaving Home,” however, marks the first wholesale departure from the rock-band sound, for the accompaniment is provided exclusively by strings. The arrangement for four violins, two violas, two cellos, string bass and harp was created by Mike Leander, although George Martin was never happy with it. Double tracking on the chorus—a technique by which a melodic line is recorded twice—causes the voices of Lennon and McCartney to multiply, thereby providing a marked contrast with the more subdued singing in the verses.

"Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite"

More extraordinary sounds await the listener in the next song, the lyrics of which describe the activities of circus performers. In seeking to evoke a carnival atmosphere, Martin naturally turned to the instrument most closely associated with fairgrounds: the calliope, or steam organ. To bring an actual calliope into the studio, however, would have been impossible, so he instead combined recordings of instruments made on-site with the reedy sounds of the studio organ. The timbral palette is filled out by harmonium and four harmonicas.

These instruments—and others—are heard at the beginning of the track and in two extended interludes, each of which transports the listener to the scene being described. The first interlude is in triple time—an unusual feature, since the rest of the song is in quadruple time. The change is explained by the line preceding the interlude: “And of course Henry the horse dances the waltz.” We are hearing the music to which he is dancing (and perhaps seeing Henry in our minds). The second interlude has been described by Michael Hannan as having been designed “to conjure up the giddy experience of a hallucinogenic carousel ride.” Any listener is likely to confirm this view, for Martin has overlaid a dense tapestry of recorded calliope sounds that fail to line up to the pulse in a meaningful way. The effect is dizzying.

"Within You Without You"

We must consider, for a moment, the nature of the medium for which Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club was intended. So far, all of the songs we have encountered appeared on the first side of the LP. “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” closed out that side with its “hallucinogenic carousel ride.” Next, the listener would have to take a brief break from listening in order to turn the record over. What they encountered next would represent the most distant point on their sonic journey.

The North Indian instruments heard in “Within You Without You” are not new to the listener, but Harrison goes further in his efforts to absorb and reflect Indian musical influence, such that this song represents The Beatles’ deepest foray into the world of Indian music. The Beatles’ fascination (especially Harrison’s and Lennon’s) with Indian music and philosophy began in 1965. Like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” the songs “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” from Rubber Soul, and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” from Revolver, contain obvious examples of Indian musical influence. Written primarily by Lennon, all three are firmly rooted in the Western popular music tradition. Their “Indian” elements, though innovative, are essentially superficial, a sort of sonic flavoring, mainly involving the use of non Western instruments (e.g., sitar, tambura).

“Within You Without You” features a veritable orchestra of Indian and Western instruments, including three tamburas, two dilrubas (a bowed lute), a sitar, eight violins, three cellos, and tabla (a pair of hand drums). The unusual scales on which the melodies are based reflect Indian influence, as does the fact that the entire song is rooted in a persistent drone. Other Indian-derived elements include the slides we hear between pitches and the use of call and response between solo and grouped instruments. The lyrics convey Lennon’s understanding of Eastern philosophy.

The inclusion, at Harrison’s request, of the images of four Indian gurus on the album’s iconic cover further attests to the culture’s profound impact on the band at this time. The gurus appear there in a collage of several dozen celebrities and historical figures, before which The Beatles stand, posed as the fictional Lonely Hearts Club Band, in their brightly colored Edwardian-era military uniforms.

"A Day in the Life"

Near the end of the second side, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” returns as a reprise. It seems to the listener that this is the end of the concert—a message reinforced by the lines “we hope you have enjoyed the show” and “we’re sorry, but it’s time to go.” The song sounds a little bit different than it did the first time: it’s faster, shorter, and at a lower pitch level. The crowd sounds are back, however, and cheers at the end suggest that the concert has indeed concluded.

Instead, the music transitions directly into a final song—the longest and most complicated song on the entire album. “A Day in the Life”⁵ begins with the spare texture of guitar and piano, but upon the words “I’d love to turn you on” the listener is gradually overwhelmed by a sound that grows in volume, pitch, and intensity with inevitable force. Although it is hard to identify, what we are actually hearing is forty orchestral musicians each recorded four times, for a total of 160 tracks. (It was during this recording session that Martin captured the ambient “warming up” noises heard at the beginning of the album.)

Following the climax of the crescendo, we are returned to what seems to be a totally different song. It certainly bears little relation to what preceded the orchestral noise. This time, the words “I went into a dream” cue the return of orchestral instruments, which now underpin McCartney’s floating vocals. The next section brings back the opening material, which again spills into a cacophonous orchestral crescendo. This time, however, it is followed up with a piano chord—in fact, a thrice overdubbed recording of three musicians playing three pianos—that slowly fades away over the course of forty-three seconds. The last thing we hear is some incidental studio chatter, which was originally cut into the outer groove so that it would loop indefinitely until the listener lifted the tonearm off of the disc.

Legacy

Few musical works in history have enjoyed the success of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. After reaching number one on the UK’s “Official Albums Chart” on June 10, 1967, it remained there for twenty-three consecutive weeks. In the U.S., Sgt. Pepper’s began a fifteen-week run atop the “Billboard 200” album chart on July 1, 1967. Since that time, it has spent hundreds of weeks on both charts. Meanwhile, critical assessments of the album have remained almost universally positive for more than five decades. (To this day, its few negative critics are attacked as heretical pariahs, often publicly shamed by their colleagues.) As author Jonathan Gould explains, the critics’ seemingly endless heaping of praise on Sgt. Pepper’s began immediately after its release:

The overwhelming consensus was that The Beatles had created a popular masterpiece: a rich, sustained, and overflowing work of collaborative genius whose bold ambition and startling originality dramatically enlarged the possibilities and raised the expectations of what the experience of listening to popular music on record could be. On the basis of this perception, Sgt. Pepper[’s] became the catalyst for an explosion of mass enthusiasm for album-formatted Rock that would revolutionize both the aesthetics and the economics of the record business in ways that far outstripped the earlier Pop explosions triggered by the Elvis phenomenon of 1956 and the Beatlemania phenomenon of 1963.

Sgt. Pepper’s has garnered a vast multitude of accolades. At the 10th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony (in February 1968, honoring 1967 releases), for example, it became the first rock album to be named Album of the Year (for The Beatles and producer George Martin). Sgt. Pepper’s also received three other Grammys that night: Best Contemporary Album (again for The Beatles and producer George Martin), Best Engineered Recording—Non-Classical (for engineer Geoff Emerick), and Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts (for art directors Peter Blake and Jann Haworth). The Library of Congress added the album to the National Recording Registry in 2003, in recognition of its cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance, and in 2012, Rolling Stone ranked Sgt. Pepper’s number one in its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” As of today, it has sold more than thirty-two million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums ever released.