It was 20 50 years ago today on June 1.
On its release in 1967, the Beatles' eighth studio album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, wasn't universally loved. "The mood is mellow, even nostalgic. But, like the cover, the overall effect is busy, hip and cluttered. Like an over-attended child, Sgt. Pepper is spoiled," the music critic Richard Goldstein wrote in The New York Times. Never mind that the album became an almost instant hit. "Oh, I get it,” Bob Dylan told Paul McCartney, when Paul played a bit of the band’s new music for him in 1966. “You don’t want to be cute anymore.”
A half-century later, Sgt. Pepper's, which ushered in the rock 'n' roll "concept album" — a collection of songs written around a central theme — and inspired musicians from Pink Floyd to Radiohead to Stevie Wonder, will be celebrated anew this month and next.
Liverpool, where the Beatles grew up, will host a "Sgt. Pepper at 50" event through June 16 featuring musicians, choreographers, visual artists and poets taking part in a range of cross-disciplinary projects that honor each of the record's 13 songs. Capitol Records is releasing reissue packages in an array of formats.
"It’s crazy to think that 50 years later, we are looking back on this project with such fondness and a little bit of amazement at how four guys, a great producer and his engineers could make such a lasting piece of art,” McCartney wrote in the introduction to the super-deluxe box-set anniversary edition of Sgt. Pepper's that includes a new stereo remix, 33 previously unreleased tracks from the recording sessions at Abbey Road Studios in London and a rare making-of-the-album documentary.
The super-deluxe box-set edition is available on Amazon for $117.99. The regular anniversary CD version costs $13.99.
McCartney and Ringo Starr are the two surviving members of the Beatles. John Lennon was murdered in New York in 1980. George Harrison died of cancer in 2001.
The Beatles recorded the majority of their songs at Abbey Road's Studio Two, a cavernous space with white walls and wooden parquet flooring that resembles more a high school gymnasium than the location for some of the world's most landmark harmonies. When USA TODAY visited this month, not much had visibly changed since then, and it was easy to imagine the Fab Four huddled with their instruments, microphones and other recording paraphernalia. A Steinway piano the band nicknamed "Mrs. Mills," which was used on A Day In The Life, Penny Lane and With a Little Help From My Friends, rested gracefully in one corner.
"Every decade has produced somebody incredibly special — a Michael Jackson or a Madonna or a Beyoncé," said Mike Jones, a popular music expert at the University of Liverpool, who is organizing a day-long classical music tribute this month to Harrison's India-infused Within You Without You from Sgt. Pepper's.
"What the Beatles had was three fantastic songwriters who created in this album the most significant musical cocktail of all time," he said.
Sgt. Pepper's spent 15 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's U.S. album sales chart. In Britain, it was No. 1 for 27 weeks. It has sold 11 million copies in the USA and more than 32 million globally, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing Nielsen SoundScan. Sgt. Pepper's was voted into the Grammy Awards Hall of Fame in 1993. Rolling Stone magazine named it the greatest album of all time.
"In its most vivid moments, you can hear the end of the bowler-hatted, imperial, fusty England and the birth of the altogether more emancipated, self-expressive, chaotic modernity," British music critic John Harris wrote, attempting to justify Sgt. Pepper's reputation as an album that embodies a specific countercultural moment in Britain. "Sometimes, given the right mixture of accident and design, music captures changes like that."
Jones said it was a "fabulous point of contrast" to think of the album in terms of Britain then vs. now.
"Yes, (1967) was a narrower time in its own way, but the Beatles had an openness to music of all cultures. Harrison basically introduced Indian music, world music, to the West. Today, Britain is just about to go into a closed period by turning its back on the European Union, it's becoming more anti-immigrant, we are swinging to the right politically — and yet 50 years on, we still have an album that's completely relevant, but relevant to openness."
Kevin J.H. Dettmar, an academic at Pomona College who specializes in British literature and music, said of Sgt. Pepper's that it is an "album that was made to bear the burden of proving that rock was smart and worth taking seriously." He said, "Retreating to the anonymity of the studio allowed the Beatles to take on personae, to make music behind the cardboard cutouts that grace the album cover," referring to the sleeve by artist Peter Blake, one of the most famous of all time.
"There was a lot of exploration and experimentation in art in the late 1960s, and the Beatles were doing that in the studio with production techniques," said Ben Ottewell, a British musician who recorded at Abbey Road with his band Gomez and whose new solo album, A Man Apart, is out Friday.
Sgt. Pepper's, like most Beatles material, was recorded in mono — sound is perceived on a single channel. A stereo mix using two or more audio channels was made without the band's input. The anniversary reissue is a new version of the stereo version made by the Beatles legendary producer George Martin.
Miles Showell, a mastering engineer at Abbey Road — where the Beatles recorded 12 studio albums — who worked on the new Sgt. Pepper's remix with Martin's son Giles and another producer named Sam Okell, recalled receiving the original vinyl LP as a 7-year-old as consolation for getting the chickenpox.
"I must have played it hundreds of times," he said. "This (the new re-issue) is far more than a straight re-master," he added. "There are a lot of differences. In the balance of the instrumentation, the speed of the tracks, where the sound effects occur and even parts of vocal that did not make it to the original stereo mix."
Doreen Dunkley, manager of Abbey Road's in-house restaurant for almost 28 years, said McCartney always makes an effort to come and see her when he visits. "I'm a 1970s girl, I like the old stuff," Dunkley said when asked if she listened to Kanye West or any of the other newer acts that have recorded at Abbey Road.
"I'm a massive Rod Stewart fan."
