The Godfather: Peter Corris on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Where were you when you first heard Sgt Pepper …? The question doesn’t have the same weight as: Where were you when JFK was shot? But for those interested in popular music it has some resonance.
The date was 1 June 1967 and I was a PhD student at the ANU. In those days the scholarships were generous and, at the ANU at least, cheap accommodation was provided and there was money for travel and research. Doctoral candidates had some prestige, there being fewer of us, and the competition for places was intense. I fell in with a group of fellow students enjoying our privileged positions and with things in common, including a liking for popular music.
There had been some advance publicity for the album and the one of our number with the best stereo system invited a batch of us to listen. We were all Beatles fans, as almost everyone was back then, even older people. Among us we would have had a good selection of the albums so far – Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night and some of the more outré ones like Rubber Soul and Revolver. I had some of these as well as a collection of EPs.
We gathered in the flat, most of us smoking as we did in those days, and all of us drinking, some more than others. Almost from the initial muffled preliminary sounds and certainly from the first bars of the title track, we were entranced. We’d never heard anything like it.
We played it again as soon as it finished and began to talk about it, to examine the extraordinary cover art and to compare it to the group’s earlier work and to other bands. Nothing comparable from the Stones, the Animals or the Yardbirds. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds perhaps for the harmonies, or Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow for the psychedelics, but not really. Some of us got drunk on cheap wine (Bob Dylan’s choice of drink, as we all knew) and the sheer euphoria and novelty of the musical experience. No illegal drugs – not that day.
I played it again recently after a very long time gap and was impressed all over again. So much has been written about the album (the Wikipedia entry seems to scroll down for minutes) that I’m reluctant to add to it and haven’t the musical knowledge to comment technically, but I have a few observations to make.
Apparently Paul McCartney was the driving force behind the concept and his influence is everywhere, but it is underlined (or is it undercut?) by John Lennon’s contributions. Lennon was by then further into the psychedelic experience that was (fleetingly) productive than the others were and it shows. His influence was strong, one suspects, on one of the best tracks, ‘She’s leaving home’ – a clearheaded piece of bitter recall, or reportage.
The album isn’t flawless. Producer George Martin over-egged the cake at times, I feel, and tracks like ‘Fixing a Hole’ and ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ strike me as empty. A little of the silliness that was later to infect them (‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’, ‘Rocky Raccoon’, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ etc) is there in ‘Lovely Rita’, but in the high good humour of the album’s context they got away with it.
Having announced their retirement from touring, the Beatles were free to write, sing and play as they chose. One of the remarkable things about the album is that it presents as though rock ‘n’ roll had never happened.
I was 15 and heard the album on our family’s 1940s radio phonograph which had finished up in my bedroom. So not ideal conditions to appreciate the much anticipated electronic wizardry. Anyway I liked it and did not regret the cobbling together of $5.25 to purchase this LP. Yes, the cover art provided hours of amusement as did the mysterious little tape loop as the record player’s stylus reached the centre of the disc. Never did work out what it was supposed to be saying.