It was 50 years ago today Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.
Well, not quite, but close. It was June 2, 1967. And what a momentous day it was – the day a pop-rock album changed the cultural landscape of the world, the springtime day just before the Summer of Love, the day the Beatles released their psychedelic masterwork, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
How well I remember first hearing that album. My astonished ears kept hearing it over and over, nonstop, night and day, wherever I went that summer.
I was 18, living in my boyhood St. Cloud home at 904 Fifth Ave. S., a block south of Barden Park near the college. Walking up Fifth Avenue to downtown just about every day or night with friends, I would hear Sgt. Pepper songs cascading out of the open windows of so many houses – many of them college rooming houses. It’s as if everybody in the world fell madly in love, all at once, with that landmark album. And what a landmark it was! To use the lingo of those carefree hippy days, the album was far out, groovy, mind-blowing. Wow!
First of all, there was the strange cover, a riot of colors showing the Beatles in their early mop-head days and to the right the Beatles gussied up in blindingly bright shiny-satin, old-time military-band members’ outfits. The rest of the cover showed cardboard cut-out images of famous people – everyone from Mae West to Edgar Allan Poe, from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan. They were all crowded together like captives in a Technicolor sardine tin.
The back of the double-fold album was blazing red, with all the songs’ lyrics printed on it.
Opening the double-fold album, we beheld inside more strange things: a huge spread of the Pepper/Beatles’ faces, as well as a goofy cardboard insert from which one could cut out objects like a Sgt. Pepper badge and a mustache. The album’s packaging could be described as cartoony. Cheeky-whimsical. We were puzzled, amused, intrigued.
They must have been really stoned when they did this one, we all agreed.
As Paul McCartney sang in “Penny Lane:” “Strange. Very strange!”
After we (brother, friends, me) marveled at the album, one of us placed the vinyl record on the phonograph’s turntable. Stunned, we sat there speechless. We’d never heard anything like it. The music was as different as the cover.
“It was 20 years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play . . . And let me introduce to you the one and only Billy Shears and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band . . .” That rousing opener segued into a forlorn-sounding Ringo singing something about getting by with a little help from his friends. There was a song about a meter maid named Lovely Rita and one about a young girl who runs away from home to elope with a man she met in the “motor trade.” There was a vaudeville-style geriatric ditty about some guy wondering if, when he turns 64, his wife will still need him, feed him. Another odd tune had the sound of a whirling circus calliope organ with images from under the Big Top: Mr. Kite, Henry the Horse and the Henderson performers leaping through a “hogshead of real fire!” A lot of the album had that kind of circus-rinky-tinky feel to it.
But the strangest song of all was the last one – John Lennon’s masterpiece, “A Day in the Life.” His voice drenched with melancholy world-weariness, he sang about how he “read the news today, oh boy, about a lucky man who made the grade . . . “ It was a kind of surrealistic cityscape comprised of floating dreamy images, most having to do with various types of alienation, dislocations, the sundry anxieties of urban life. It was most definitely not a rocker, not a thigh-slapper.
The song ended with a delirious orchestral crescendo, making listeners feel as if we were accelerating dizzily past the sound barrier, and then the dizzy acceleration ended abruptly with a crashing chord whose sonic wake was sustained for nearly 30 seconds.
That song, as we used to say, “blew us away,” left us groping for words. We played it and that whole album constantly through that very strange and very wonderful Summer of Love, 1967. Everybody else played it, too. We were all on the same page.
Sgt. Pepper is not my favorite Beatles album. That’s a three-way tight tie among Rubber Soul, Revolver and Abbey Road. But of all the music I’ve ever loved, nothing brings back lost time to me with such vivid immediacy as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s a veritable time machine that can take me for a trip right back to my bursting, blooming youth.
