It was 40 years ago today that the Beatles dropped “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” on an unsuspecting public, instantly sending shock waves through the pop culture landscape.
The landmark album played off a tumultuous decade and provided a focal point for the Summer of Love, when the youth movement, in all its roiling excess and reinvention of the norm, came to full flower.
And the record rocked.
“The Beatles had done great albums before, but this was a turning point for what an album was versus a collection of songs,” said Jim Henke, chief curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. “The fact that they went into the studio and spent 700 hours working on it – that was fairly unprecedented.”
The standard-setting “Sgt. Pepper’s” showcased the album format’s potential. Sonically ambitious songs such as the title tune and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” became classics.
But as immediate and wide-ranging as the album’s impact was, it’s hard to imagine many mainstream acts embracing the format in 2007.
Digital technology and illegal file sharing encourage listeners to cherry-pick individual songs and ignore others. This takes a bite out of traditional album sales: In April, for example, sales suffered a 32 percent dip from the same period last year, according to Variety magazine.
Given such circumstances, are the odds against another album enjoying such sway over iPod listeners?
“I doubt an album would come out by an individual band and have that impact nowadays,” Henke said. “We’re moving away from the album format.”
Lee Abrams, one of the inventors of the AOR, or album-oriented rock, radio format, thinks the creative viability of the format remains strong, even if its commercial appeal has waned.
“It’s more of the rush for the big single,” he said.
Short attention spans have also diminished the appeal of the long-player, said Twist & Shout Records’ Paul Epstein.
“This is why getting your music on a cellphone seems to make sense to people now, just catching a couple bars in between important phone calls,” he said. “We’re suffering as a culture.”
Some artists continue to successfully exploit the format. Recent discs from bands as diverse as Green Day, Nine Inch Nails and the Dixie Chicks show a love of sequenced, cohesive musical statements. But another album as galvanizing as “Sgt. Pepper’s” seems rare.
“People’s minds aren’t blown by art and beauty but cataclysmic events,” Epstein said. “It’s shocking to say, but two airplanes flying into buildings would do it, not a bunch of English lads.”
That didn’t stop Rolling Stone magazine in 2003 from declaring “Sgt. Pepper’s” the No. 1 album of all time. The disc benefited from a confluence of elements rippling through the culture: political and social upheaval, growing drug experimentation, Eastern philosophy and trailblazing music by Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys.
“Sgt. Pepper’s” was accessible and mysterious. It has sold more than 11 million copies in the U.S.
“There was no getting into it,” said veteran Denver promoter Barry Fey. “It just came right off and belted you in the mouth. Musically, it was flawless.”
Many critics and fans peg “Sgt. Pepper’s” as the defining album of the ’60s – and rock ‘n’ roll in general – helping foster an era of technical and artistic innovation.
To be fair, “Sgt. Pepper’s” was not the only groundbreaking pop music of 1967. Jimi Hendrix rewrote the electric guitar’s vocabulary on “Are You Experienced.” Soul titan James Brown was on the cusp of inventing funk. Influential bands such as the Velvet Underground and the Doors also broke out that year.
But the Beatles were already a global phenomenon, the biggest thing in pop music. Expectations were high. What no one anticipated was the scope of the band’s imagination and competitive fire.
Like the Beach Boys’ 1966 “Pet Sounds,” “Sgt. Pepper’s” demanded to be heard all the way through, not as a collection of singles. It altered the way radio stations programmed music, challenging them to play consecutive tracks by the same artist.
Songs ranged from the sprawling “A Day in the Life” to “When I’m Sixty-Four,” which tipped a hat to the British music-hall tradition of an earlier generation.
Even the cover art was special: the Beatles at their mock grave, surrounded by a collage of luminaries. Fans deciphered the faces’ identities and studied the trippy lyrics printed on the album’s back.
Lee Abrams remembers the moment he first saw a copy of “Sgt. Pepper’s” on June 2, 1967, the day of its U.S. release. (It was released in the United Kingdom a day earlier.) He was a 15-year- old gofer working at Miami’s WQAM, a Top 40 station.
“The second it arrived, everybody just crowded around to look at it,” said Abrams, now senior vice president at XM Satellite Radio. “It immediately went on the air.”
Abrams sneaked the album home two days later to study it on headphones. “You can’t really appreciate this kind of production on AM radio,” he said.
The album had its naysayers.
Frank Zappa, whose 1966 proto-concept album “Freak Out” helped inspire “Sgt. Pepper’s,” felt the Beatles had cynically co-opted hippie culture. George Martin’s production work was innovative, but it wasn’t the first use of effects-laden multitrack recording.
“It’s not necessarily even my favorite Beatles album,” said the Rock Hall’s Henke, citing “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver.”
But few people deny how large “Sgt. Pepper’s” looms.
“It was fully developed at birth,” said Twist & Shout’s Epstein. “There was no doubt when it came out (that) it was a massively important record and that it was going to change everything.”
