Why ‘Sgt. Peppers’ is Probably the Best Beatles LP
June 1st, 1967. The Beatles have just released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and from that day forward, it would be The Best Album That Was Ever Released. Unless you’re talking about Thriller which is Also The Best Album Ever Released. Or Dark Side Of The Moon if you’re a fantastically boring person. And maybe Frampton Comes Alive, even though I have never actually seen a copy of it in someone’s house, ever.
Either way, June 1 is Sgt. Pepper’s birthday, so we’ll talk about that.
Ever since I’ve been conscious of these things, ‘Pep’ (as George Martin adorably called it) has been an album regarded as the best, even though everyone else says Revolver is better. Even in fan-polls, Revolver does better. Even in heritage music magazines, Revolver and Rubber Soul place higher than Sgt. Pep.
It’s one of those anomalies, like when people say “the rest, as they say, is history” more frequently than they say “the rest is history” (meaning that we should actually be saying in 2016, “as they say, the rest as they say, is history”).
I’m very much a Revolver man (Abbey Road second, White Album third if you must know), but thinking about it, Sgt. Pepper technically is the best Beatles album.
Why? Well, for starters, you need to do two things to get it right in your head. The first thing, is that Pepper is not an album you can dance to, so stop trying to judge it as one. The second is that Sgt. Pepper is a period, not an album that stands alone.
What makes Sgt. Pepper so great, and game-changing for the time, is that it was the first massive selling rock album that wasn’t too concerned with the dancefloor. That opened the door for the rest of rock music to start thinking more broadly about what it could do. “She’s Leaving Home” would never be made by a band that was obsessing about people’s Friday nights. “A Day In The Life” is not a song that patronizes its fans, thinking ‘they won’t get it because they’re too thick’. As it goes, Sgt. Pepper is when The Beatles, and ergo every white rock band that followed them, grew up a bit.
It’s one for the headphones. It’s one to listen to at home. It’s more like a book than a pop album. Now, in terms of personal preference, I like things I can dance to, and definitely edge more toward catchy, poppy things. I’m always going to prefer an album that sounds like it has loads of singles on it, than a think-piece.
However, Lonely Hearts is a real deal game changer, that ushered in a period where very popular acts could experiment with the studio, and not only that, with songwriting itself.
If you look at Sgt. Pepper as a period, then you include the pure magic that is the double A-side of “Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane.” While there were other bands on the planet that were more experimental, pop-culturally speaking, they don’t matter as much as The Beatles do. Of course, they do matter, but the fact is The Beatles mattered more, because everyone was copying them, waiting to see what they’d do. That’s because The Beatles were the most famous band on the planet at that time, and what they said, goes.
For the most part, Revolver is a very good mod album that’s grown its hair out a bit. “Doctor Robert,” “She Said She Said,” “Got To Get You Into My Life,” “Taxman,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing” are remarkable records, but essentially, they’re straight up 60s pop records that have been mixed under the influence of drugs.
“Eleanor Rigby” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” are the big two that showed The Beatles as being wildly experimental — doing baroque tracks with zero rock instruments about lonely people and a depressed priest, and spooled tape off-kilter psychedelic bangers about a book of the dead? Pretty good, in a year that the biggest selling record was by Jim Reeves.
However, the thing with Revolver, is that the weird bits sound extra weird because of context — the rest of the LP is pretty straight-up. They leap out at your ears. They’re remarkable next to a bunch of songs effectively written and played on guitars. Shout out to “For No-One” as well, for being mystifyingly brilliant.
Would those songs have had the same impact on Sgt. Pepper? Possibly, because they’re still amazing no matter where you put them, and still really peculiar. However, the fact is, the ‘Pep’ period is ALL WEIRD.
“Being For The Benefit Of Mister Kite” and the orchestral bits in “A Day In The Life” are the go-to weirdos on Pepper, but the whole project is really, really strange.
The album starts off by wandering into view, rather than crash-landing — the first thing you hear is an orchestra warming up. Bands didn’t do that in 1967. On “Penny Lane” Paul McCartney writes a song that seems simple and cheerful enough, but again, while the rest of the competition was working along the same lines as 12 Bar Blues, he’d written a song that has SEVEN key changes in it. It was nostalgic, without sounding fogeyish.
‘Pep’ (and Revolver, if we’re being fair) used musical devices which had not been seen in popular music since the Renaissance. Imagine that. A pop band being the first to use a musical tool for the first time since the 14th century. It’s crazy.
It was the first time most of the record buying public had seen someone present themselves as alter-egos too. Sgt. Pepper isn’t a Beatles album in the same way Revolver is. Obviously, there were literal alter-egos (“Billy Shears” anyone?), but there’s something of a Breaking Of The Fourth Wall going on in ‘Pep.’
It was the first proper LP they made where they were entirely studio-based, and therefore, something of a gamble. Kenneth Womack said that the album showed audiences for the first time, within the first 5 minutes of kicking off, “exemplify the mindless rhetoric of rock concert banter” while “mocking the very notion of a pop album’s capacity for engendering authentic interconnection between artist and audience.” With Revolver, they weren’t long out of the touring game, but with Pepper, they were free to spend ages on their music (‘ages’ in the Beatle sense, not the ‘only release an album every seven years like some bands do’).
This is a pop band we’re talking about here, not some abstract, chattering dinner party bollocks by Stockhausen. The title song definitely sounds like The Beatles, but at the same time, is like something from a Victorian funfair. Of course, that was shown even more in the pipe-organ of “Mr Kite.”
In “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” there was something that was totally at odds with the rest of 1967’s releases. Other artists were still very much in the mode of talking about love and heartbreak. Engelbert Humperdinck was asking for a woman to ‘release him’, Tom Jones was thinking about the ‘green, green grass of home’, and Harry Secombe was telling us “This Is My Song.” And there, the biggest band in the world, singing “picture yourself on a boat on a river” and going on about “tangerine eyes,” and the instrumentation in the intro, down to the gear change on the chorus, and you see how remarkable it is that Pepper wasn’t career suicide—it sold a metric shit-tonne.
“Strawberry Fields” itself, with super slowed-down vocals, tripped out drums, nightmare sections (the horns in the second chorus are borderline harrowing), and all the rest that you know inside-out already, is a remarkable pop feat. When one of Paul Revere and the Raiders first heard it, they didn’t say “Wow!” he said: “Now what the fuck are we going to do?” Of course, it was a song so good, that Brian Wilson heard it, and went into a hole he’s never quite got out of 49 years later.
If you think, that basically, The Beatles were just some white kids who really loved soul music, and they go and make a song like “Strawberry Fields,” then in the present climate, you’d have to look at someone like Adele, suddenly turning her back on R&B torch-songs, and dropping an album that was based on experimental, and unfashionable music, and still selling bucketloads, yet still sounding like catchy Adele records.
It’s amazing these can happen in pop-music. It’s what music-nerds live for.
Even the inclusion of “When I’m Sixty Four” is a really strange move. Again, it’s not even close to being a rock/pop song of the time, and with bands being so obsessively looking into the future in the mid-60s, along comes Paul McCartney with a trio of clarinets, singing a song about dying, with the absolutely killer line of: “Send me a postcard, drop me a line, stating point of view — indicate precisely what you mean to say; Yours sincerely, wasting away.”
No musical training. The band couldn’t read music. Four scrotes from Liverpool, pissing about in London and stoned out of their minds after getting in a taxi with Bob Dylan, using music as a conceptual thing, as their playground. Part Goons, part Shostakovich, and always, always themselves.
All these reasons (and more) is why Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is probably the best Beatle LP. Sure, it isn’t really anyone’s favorite, but that’s because it is just too peculiar, even down to the babbling nonsense in the run-out groove.
The period of Sgt. Pepper has to include the singles they didn’t put on the album, because it is all the same body of work, thematically. So, in 1967, you’ve also got “I Am The Walrus,” “All You Need Is Love,” “Hello Goodbye,” and the Magical Mystery Tour EP.
Obviously, there’s far too many words written on The Beatles, especially Sgt. Pepper—but it did kick a door in which the rest of pop-culture followed. From small things like mods growing mustaches and their hair out, to the birth of ‘retro’ being a thing, to the whole of rock music having their tastes broadened.
George Harrison said at the time: “We’re not trying to outwit the public. The whole idea is to try a little bit to lead people into different tastes”
Thing is, in different hands, ‘Pep’ would have been far too clever for its own good (some might argue that it is). However, this was a deeply experimental album that the average record buyer loved. It wasn’t designed solely to be listened to by faux-intellectuals who liked the idea free-love, but never got around to it; it was an album that was supposed to be enjoyed by everyone.
And it was.
Sgt. Pepper went to number one and stayed their for 23 weeks, and spent 148 consecutive weeks in the charts, and is still one of the top 10 best-selling albums of all time, worldwide.
Sure, Beatle-nerds can argue that Revolver or Rubber Soul is better all they (we) want, but on close scrutiny, you can’t argue with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band being the masterpiece it is.
All things considered, when you strip away your own tastes, it probably is the best thing they ever did, but we all live in a post-Beatle world and can’t call it properly.
So with that, happy birthday to Sergeant Pepper. I’m off to listen to Revolver.
PS: If you’ve got an hour, and want to see the bones of The Beatles (in general, rather than just on Sgt. Pepper), watch this documentary by Howard Goodall. It is magnificent.
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