In June 1967, the Beatles kicked off the psychedelic Summer of Love with the release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” their kaleidoscopic collection of rock, Eastern musical influences and turn-of-the-century British music hall that turned the pop-music world upside down.
“Sgt. Pepper’s” was an enormous hit, an early concept album that topped the album charts for months in both the United State and Britain and inspired the group’s peers to build their recordings around themes. As much as the “Hot 100” scene had been built around the single, “Sgt. Pepper’s” spurred the album era, a decades-long span in which the full-length record was the dominant form of musical expression.
The album was a long time coming. Since the early days of 1964, the Beatles had released 11 albums in the United States, but after putting out “Revolver” in August 1966, nearly a year passed before “Sgt. Pepper’s” took the studio experimentation of “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” into uncharted territory. Unencumbered by the demands of touring, which the band abandoned after its summer tour in 1966, the Beatles took their time to get things right and went to extremes to generate certain sounds and textures. According to the group’s longtime sound engineer, Geoff Emerick, the Beatles spent roughly 700 hours making the record.
The process of recording an album changed markedly with “Sgt. Pepper’s.” Whereas band members played together during a song’s recording for earlier albums, “Sgt. Pepper’s” became a piecemeal process in which parts were often recorded separately from one another. The approach was a source of frustration for George Harrison, who had grown increasingly tired of the trappings of being a Beatle and having his songs frequently dismissed by his mates.
"Up to that time, we had recorded more like a band; we would learn the songs and then play them," Harrison explained in the “Beatles Anthology” documentary. "It became an assembly process—just little parts and then overdubbing—and for me it became a bit tiring and a bit boring."
Harrison’s frustration with the Beatles phenomenon had a payoff on “Sgt. Pepper’s.” Prior to the start of the album’s recording sessions, Harrison had run off to India for six weeks without the others. His spiritual pursuits were front and center, but he also pursued an intensive training period with Indian musician Ravi Shankar, learning the basics of playing the sitar.
The trip had a profound influence on his worldview and his music. Inspired by a lengthy composition written by Shankar, Harrison composed “Within You and Without You,” integrating Indian influences and instruments, along with the Hindu tenant of removing the “space between us all” by diminishing one’s ego, into a Western pop song. He was the only Beatle on the track, which nicely complemented the kaleidoscopic mix of “Sgt. Pepper’s.”
The creative jag that generated “Sgt. Pepper’s” began with long recording sessions that produced John Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” and Paul McCartney’s “Penny Lane,” released together as a single in February 1967. Overdubbing layers of instrumentation and sounds were critical to the dreamy “Strawberry Fields.” McCartney and producer George Martin went to great lengths with “Penny Lane,” backing it with an arrangement for flutes, trumpets, piccolo and flugelhorn--and a sensational piccolo trumpet solo by David Mason, once the principal trumpeter of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, who McCartney insisted on hiring after seeing him perform Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 2” on television.
“Penny Lane” and various recordings required a trip to Abbey Road Studio’s sound effects cupboard, home to a wealth of paraphernalia: wind machines, thunder machines, bells, whistles, alarm clocks, all kinds of toys. The album opens with a recording of an orchestra tuning up while an audience buzzes with anticipation, setting up the Lonely Hearts Club Band as the Beatles’ alter-ego before the music begins.
Other sonic textures were less easy to come by. “A Day in the Life,” which closes the album, is a masterful Lennon-McCartney collaboration that stands as one of the Beatles’ greatest works. Each songwriter contributed separate melodies and lyrics, and after the recording was completed, they added two sonic touches.
To bridge the song’s two parts, Lennon had the abstract idea of “creating some kind of sound that would start out really tiny and then gradually expand to become huge and all-encompassing,” wrote Emerick in “Here, There and Everywhere,” co-written with Howard Massey. “Picking up on the theme, Paul excitedly suggested employing an entire symphony orchestra.” George Martin liked the idea until McCartney revealed that he simply wanted orchestra members to do a long, slow climb from the lowest note on their instruments to the highest note—In unison. Martin disliked asking classical musicians to engage in such an experiment, but the deed was done and what Lennon described as an “orgasm of sound” was also used after the final chorus to end the song.
Weeks after recording the symphonic blast, McCartney decided (with Lennon in agreement) that the song should end with a huge piano chord that would last forever—or as long as Emerick could sustain it in the studio. The technical specifics are complicated, but the Beatles generated the final chord by bringing six different keyboards--including three Steinways, a harmonium and Wurlitzer electric piano--into Studio 2 and recording six sets of hands striking the chord at the same time.
Adding mystique to this groundbreaking album was the cover, featuring dozens of “lonely hearts,” from Edgar Allen Poe, William S. Burroughs, Lenny Bruce, Mae West and W.C. Fields, to Aldous Huxley, Karl Marx, James Joyce, Marilyn Monroe, Dion, and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
I will post about the 1967 Twins and the wild AL pennant race all summer long, using material from my upcoming book, which I’ve tentatively titled The Glory Years of the Minnesota Twins: Rock ‘n’ Roll, War and Peace, the Civil Rights Movement and Baseball in the 1960s.
“Sgt. Pepper’s” was an enormous hit, an early concept album that topped the album charts for months in both the United State and Britain and inspired the group’s peers to build their recordings around themes. As much as the “Hot 100” scene had been built around the single, “Sgt. Pepper’s” spurred the album era, a decades-long span in which the full-length record was the dominant form of musical expression.
The album was a long time coming. Since the early days of 1964, the Beatles had released 11 albums in the United States, but after putting out “Revolver” in August 1966, nearly a year passed before “Sgt. Pepper’s” took the studio experimentation of “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” into uncharted territory. Unencumbered by the demands of touring, which the band abandoned after its summer tour in 1966, the Beatles took their time to get things right and went to extremes to generate certain sounds and textures. According to the group’s longtime sound engineer, Geoff Emerick, the Beatles spent roughly 700 hours making the record.
The process of recording an album changed markedly with “Sgt. Pepper’s.” Whereas band members played together during a song’s recording for earlier albums, “Sgt. Pepper’s” became a piecemeal process in which parts were often recorded separately from one another. The approach was a source of frustration for George Harrison, who had grown increasingly tired of the trappings of being a Beatle and having his songs frequently dismissed by his mates.
"Up to that time, we had recorded more like a band; we would learn the songs and then play them," Harrison explained in the “Beatles Anthology” documentary. "It became an assembly process—just little parts and then overdubbing—and for me it became a bit tiring and a bit boring."
Harrison’s frustration with the Beatles phenomenon had a payoff on “Sgt. Pepper’s.” Prior to the start of the album’s recording sessions, Harrison had run off to India for six weeks without the others. His spiritual pursuits were front and center, but he also pursued an intensive training period with Indian musician Ravi Shankar, learning the basics of playing the sitar.
The trip had a profound influence on his worldview and his music. Inspired by a lengthy composition written by Shankar, Harrison composed “Within You and Without You,” integrating Indian influences and instruments, along with the Hindu tenant of removing the “space between us all” by diminishing one’s ego, into a Western pop song. He was the only Beatle on the track, which nicely complemented the kaleidoscopic mix of “Sgt. Pepper’s.”
The creative jag that generated “Sgt. Pepper’s” began with long recording sessions that produced John Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” and Paul McCartney’s “Penny Lane,” released together as a single in February 1967. Overdubbing layers of instrumentation and sounds were critical to the dreamy “Strawberry Fields.” McCartney and producer George Martin went to great lengths with “Penny Lane,” backing it with an arrangement for flutes, trumpets, piccolo and flugelhorn--and a sensational piccolo trumpet solo by David Mason, once the principal trumpeter of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, who McCartney insisted on hiring after seeing him perform Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 2” on television.
“Penny Lane” and various recordings required a trip to Abbey Road Studio’s sound effects cupboard, home to a wealth of paraphernalia: wind machines, thunder machines, bells, whistles, alarm clocks, all kinds of toys. The album opens with a recording of an orchestra tuning up while an audience buzzes with anticipation, setting up the Lonely Hearts Club Band as the Beatles’ alter-ego before the music begins.
Other sonic textures were less easy to come by. “A Day in the Life,” which closes the album, is a masterful Lennon-McCartney collaboration that stands as one of the Beatles’ greatest works. Each songwriter contributed separate melodies and lyrics, and after the recording was completed, they added two sonic touches.
To bridge the song’s two parts, Lennon had the abstract idea of “creating some kind of sound that would start out really tiny and then gradually expand to become huge and all-encompassing,” wrote Emerick in “Here, There and Everywhere,” co-written with Howard Massey. “Picking up on the theme, Paul excitedly suggested employing an entire symphony orchestra.” George Martin liked the idea until McCartney revealed that he simply wanted orchestra members to do a long, slow climb from the lowest note on their instruments to the highest note—In unison. Martin disliked asking classical musicians to engage in such an experiment, but the deed was done and what Lennon described as an “orgasm of sound” was also used after the final chorus to end the song.
Weeks after recording the symphonic blast, McCartney decided (with Lennon in agreement) that the song should end with a huge piano chord that would last forever—or as long as Emerick could sustain it in the studio. The technical specifics are complicated, but the Beatles generated the final chord by bringing six different keyboards--including three Steinways, a harmonium and Wurlitzer electric piano--into Studio 2 and recording six sets of hands striking the chord at the same time.
Adding mystique to this groundbreaking album was the cover, featuring dozens of “lonely hearts,” from Edgar Allen Poe, William S. Burroughs, Lenny Bruce, Mae West and W.C. Fields, to Aldous Huxley, Karl Marx, James Joyce, Marilyn Monroe, Dion, and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
I will post about the 1967 Twins and the wild AL pennant race all summer long, using material from my upcoming book, which I’ve tentatively titled The Glory Years of the Minnesota Twins: Rock ‘n’ Roll, War and Peace, the Civil Rights Movement and Baseball in the 1960s.