Is Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band a concept album?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by PaulKTF, May 27, 2017.

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  1. Kwai Chang

    Kwai Chang Forum Resident

    Location:
    Agua Dulce, Ca.
    The album's concept is that 'anyone can be anything'
    (the group, the fantasy, the listener, the producer)
    Are you who you want to be?
     
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  2. davenav

    davenav High Plains Grifter

    Location:
    Louisville, KY USA
    This.

    It's a concept album but not a rock opera.

    Not sure why that is even needed to explain. It's pretty much baked into the presentation, down to the run-on grooves.
     
  3. petem1966

    petem1966 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Katy TX
    He sees a young lady in the park by herself being met by an older man with a fancy car and comes up with an imaginary set of circumstances that could put the young lady in that situation--even if it is just her dad picking her up from the park. People watching.
     
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  4. Yes and no..
     
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  5. Olompali

    Olompali Forum Resident

    It's in the title.
    Going to the club to catch a show because we are all the lonely people

    Life goes on within you
    .....and without you.

    The songs all deal with coping with loneliness
     
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  6. Thievius

    Thievius Blue Oyster Cult-ist

    Location:
    Syracuse, NY
    You guys are just making **** up now. :laugh:
     
  7. Maranatha5585

    Maranatha5585 BELLA + RIP In Memoriam

    Location:
    Down South
    Ok... as Sonny Boy II clearly said: "Don't Start Me Talking..."
    So....this may be my own deep seated bias, but I really do feel it was more than a prototype of a rock concept album. The Beatles were trail blazers in all that they did, and this was certainly a new concept, at least to me... of bringing back the reprise of the original starting point of a different band in fact. Now, I was all of 12 years old then, yet considered myself a well informed Beatles fanatic growing up in L.A. during the 60's. I mean all the psychedelic songs and stories seemed to fit in perfectly ... No ? Well, the answer is an astounding yes.
    At least a year and a half prior to The Who's "Tommy" (a great piece of work) and early concept LP indeed. But , let's also take a good look at The Beach Boys album "Pet Sounds"
    Where Paul tells of his astonishment when hearing the early acetates , etc... and the stimuli for a new look at things, and influence... C'mon- be pragmatic and realistic here- what band even came close to The Beatles in this arena of discussion. No one did.
    "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" beats out "Pet Sounds" any hour of a day, or day in the week. Period.


    an aside: I love the Beach Boys.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2017
  8. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    YES( and not the band).
     
  9. Rfreeman

    Rfreeman Senior Member

    Location:
    Lawrenceville, NJ
    Definitely. None of the songs really sound like The Beatles. They all sound like this other band. Cool concept that rises above the material to make it one of their best buns though it does not contain their best tracks.

    It is not, thank god, an attempt at a narrative or rock opera, as those almost always prove to be embarrassments that lose all narrative cohesion before the end unless they have books by theatrical professions like Tim Rice rather than by rockers. Ok tux wearing eyeballs can also pull it off.
     
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  10. ToneLa

    ToneLa Forum Resident

    I think Ian MacDonald described it as not a concept album "apart from the two Sgt Pepper bookends"

    In that sense, no.

    But in an internal, psychological sense, the Beatles were freeing themselves from their existing personas, although I'm not sure to what extend this comes across in the songwriting (Macca's tracks are classic Macca, Lennon doing "detached reporting" in A Day In The Life is Lennon all over)
     
  11. Sick Sick Phil

    Sick Sick Phil Forum Resident

    yep. like please please me is a concept album. the concept was a guy that goes to a concert by a new group called the beatles. He sees a beautiful bird name Anna. She was so beautiful it made him sick and he was in misery. Anna saw the guy and liked him. When he didn't come over, all of Anna's friends told her to go to him. The guy makes a play for the girl. He tells her things like "baby it is you" and "p.s. i love you". She was so happy she gave him a kiss ... a kiss that tasted like honey. That created a happy place in his mind and every time he is blue he thinks of that kiss. The end of the night was spent with the guy and girl twisting and shouting the night away.
     
  12. Sick Sick Phil

    Sick Sick Phil Forum Resident

    Sure they do.
     
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  13. Sick Sick Phil

    Sick Sick Phil Forum Resident

    Well then all albums are concept albums. Concept = lets do an album that doesn't suck.
     
  14. Rfreeman

    Rfreeman Senior Member

    Location:
    Lawrenceville, NJ
    Only in retrospect after this album redefined their sound. And there are a few earlier tracks that also don't sound like Beatles. Yesterday, Eleanor Rigby, Yellow Submarine, Love You To, Got To Get You Into My Life, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields. Any of those could have fit the concept too had they not come out first.

    Personally I prefer tracks that sound like Beatles to tracks that sound like this other band.
     
  15. ODIrony

    ODIrony Forum Resident

    Location:
    Danville, VA
    The question of whether it's a concept album depends on your definition of a concept. Is it a concept like The Who's Tommy? No. Is it a concept like Sinatra's In The Wee Small Hours? No. However, Lennon and Starr err in saying it isn't a concept, Ringo especially so given that he comes close to actually explaining the concept.

    McCartney had it right when he said that instead of the Beatles touring, they'd send the album on tour. What was/is a show by a touring band? Usually, just a collection of songs.

    Hence Sgt Pepper: The band comes on, sings their opening number, Billy Shears gets his spotlight, and the band continues with various songs. There's an ad for an upcoming show (Mr Kite) a the end of the first half. A moment of reflection as the second half of the show gets underway (Within You Without You), a few more songs, the band's closing number, and we - the audience - go back out to our humdrum lives (A Day in the Life).

    That's the idea, that's the concept, and Sgt Pepper fulfills Paul's intention magnificently. A splendid time is guaranteed for all. :agree:
     
  16. Sick Sick Phil

    Sick Sick Phil Forum Resident

    So EVEN TO YOU there are earlier Beatles tracks that sound like pepper tracks. Hate to tell you a song like There's a Place on the first album would fit on Pepper
     
  17. HfxBob

    HfxBob Forum Resident

    In spite of the incompleteness of the alternate band concept, the album has a unity to it - a lot of that may have to do with the recording process and how long they spent on it, but it's there. Call it an aura or whatever you want.
     
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  18. Sick Sick Phil

    Sick Sick Phil Forum Resident

    oh yeah ? what pop/rock band of the time could have pulled off "within you without you" live and then go in to "when I'm 64" REMEMBER THIS IS A CONCERT
     
  19. David Austin

    David Austin Eclectically Coastal

    Location:
    West Sussex
    I would say 'No, not really'. The fictional Sgt Pepper's band appears to supply a thread linking all the songs, but in the end they are not really linked thematically at all. The only concept is the (assumed and actual) identity of the performers. The Sgt Pepper's (secondary) alter ego gives the illusion of a concept album, but The Beatles is itself no more than a construct, the primary shared alter ego for Harrison, Lennon, McCartney and Starkey. In a sense, The White Album is closer to being a concept album than Sgt Pepper's (and it still isn't one) because there is a little bit of cross-referencing between songs (e.g. 'Savoy Truffle', 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da).
     
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  20. Rfreeman

    Rfreeman Senior Member

    Location:
    Lawrenceville, NJ
    I don't think that is remotely the case. That sounds exactly like my favorite band. Two guitars bass drums and harmonica.
     
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  21. BrentB

    BrentB Urban Angler

    Location:
    Midwestern US
    I had to go with no. My idea of a concept album is Thick as A Brick. Or The Wall.
    Or Animals. Or Joe's Garage. Or War of the Worlds. ...
     
  22. Folknik

    Folknik Forum Resident

    Overnight, the tables turned and the Yes votes are ahead of the No votes. Definitely a thread to watch!
     
  23. intv7

    intv7 Senior Member

    Location:
    Boston, MA, USA
    Of course it is. :confused:

    Concept albums do not need to have a storyline to make them such. There just needs to be a common thread that runs throughout, and the tunes do, more or less, need to fall under the umbrella of the original idea.

    The concept is that they were thinking of themselves as being another group, without the preconceived notions of what makes a "Beatles song". They conceived the name and identities of this other band, and presented themselves like this on the cover. In the opening and (almost) closing of the album, they TELL you "We're Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".

    Thanks, at least partly, to this way of thinking (okay, maybe thanks in larger part to the acid they were taking), the album explores genres and themes never before heard on a Beatles album. Yeah, I know, not every song takes enormous leaps in that direction -- but most of it does, IMO. Rubber Soul and Revolver had already started them on the path to write songs that weren't typical boy-loves-girl lyrics, and they'd already started to incorporate outside musicians and non-traditional rock instrumentation, however they did so on Pepper without inhibition. The standard Beatles formula was, for the first time, thrown completely out the window. And I do think it was because of this concept that they had designed.

    People refer to many of Frank Sinatra's Capitol albums -- things like "Songs For Swingin' Lovers", "Come Fly With Me"or "Nice n Easy" -- as being concept albums, because the intention was to group a bunch of similarly-themed or styled songs, NOT because there was a story to tell, per se. If those are concept albums, then there should be no question that Sgt. Pepper's is as well. It takes the concept much further.
     
  24. Folknik

    Folknik Forum Resident

    Personal definitions will vary. My take on it is that it's not just a collection of songs, but all of the songs revolve around a unified theme or they tell a story (or an interrelated series of stories), or in the case of Sgt. Pepper, it's simply the "story" of a fictitious band performing a concert. Not all concept albums have to have separate songs. Jethro Tull's Thick As a Brick and A Passion Play each consist of one continuous epic-length piece of music. For that reason, Mike Oldfiled's Tubular Bells, Hergest Ridge, and Ommadawn also qualify as concept albums even though they're almost all instrumental.
     
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  25. Folknik

    Folknik Forum Resident

    Do all the songs have to be thematically linked to constitute a concept album? Again, I will reference The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands. They took Pepper's fictitious band concert concept a step further by becoming 12 fictitious bands (a '50s rock band, a psychedelic band, a pop vocal group, a country band, an instrumental combo, a surf group, a bluegrass band, a barbershop quartet, etc.), a different band for each song, comprising a battle of the bands (basically a concert). The songs are not thematically linked and are all over the map musically, but to my knowledge, everyone who has heard that album agrees that it's a concept album. The concert format is the concept. Same with Pepper. (Of course this doesn't mean all actual live albums are concept albums.)
     
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