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

Title tune segues directly into "With a Little Help..." referencing the song and the singer. Audience can be heard laughing after "Within You Without You." Title song is reprised near the end, saying "We hope you have enjoyed the show", with applause crossfading into the "encore" "A Day in the Life." The concept is the concert by the fictitious band.

 

I think that was Dylans's reaction to Paul's mustache, not the music...

 

It may be a concept album but its not a Prog Rock concept album. Or is it?

 

Take Dream Theater. No, really...TAKE them.

 

I said no but your answer helped me change my mind. And that raises the question: Does ADITL fit into that concept?

 

I think the issue is it would have been easier to accept in 1967 as a concept album, but...(gasp!) better attempts have been made since then at creating albums with a more focused concept than "here's a make believe band." Honestly, Dylan's supposed response to/rejection of Pepper, John Wesley Harding, is probably as much of a concept album as Pepper manages to be. That was only 6 months later, I think.

It was liberating process for The Beatles to think of Pepper as a "concept," which is all that really matters now.

 

IMO too many of you are looking at the idea of a concept album too narrowly. It's a much broader general concept. And it's multi-layered because it uses show biz, British life, and the Beatles' own lives and careers as metaphors representing universal themes.

 

Not very well at all, in my mind. But that's not really the point, and @dmiller458 gets to the very nub quite well (very akin to something I posted yesterday): at the end of all of this, the results of the poll don't really answer the OP's question; rather it gets to answering the following question:

"How do you define what does or does not constitute a concept album?"

Now it's pretty obvious to most that Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall or 2112 are concept albums, but can't an album based on the concept of impersonating another band to some degree and then sort of wavering on that approach but still tacking on a penultimate tune that reinforces that concept be considered a concept album? Great googly moogly.

For the record, I don't hold concept albums or non-concept albums in any greater or lesser esteem based on this criterion; they simple are or are not or might be (sometimes concept albums as intended by the band or musician has a theme that gets missed by we lot and a concept album gets branded a non-concept album). Oy! But the answer to the OP's question is simply brutally obvious to me: of course it is.

 

It was. It is. It does boggle.

Edit/ Maybe that's a great reason we are still talking about this 50 years later.

 

Proto-concept album.

 

"It was just to give us all alter egos, to give us all invented characters. So that now we were making this album like a piece of theatre.” - Paul McCartney

The Beatles


‘You Gave Me The Answer’ – Sgt. Pepper Special Q&A by PaulMcCartney.com.
Read the full interview at ‘You Gave Me The Answer’ – Sgt. Pepper Special

 

I always heard it as an encore after the closing Reprise. I guess it can also be interpreted as people (performers AND audience) going back to their everyday lives after the entertaining diversion of the concert is over. Lennon referenced news that he had actually read, and the film where "The English army had just won the war" is a reference to the film How I Won the War in which he had recently appeared.

 

It was definitely very progressive in 1967, and that's what "prog" is short for.

 

We will never be able to definitively answer this question, because we all have different expectations of what a concept album should and can be.

I listen to a lot of concept albums from the 1950s and early 1960s. The ones that I think are successful share a consistency of mood, consistency of instrumentation, and thematic development (musical or lyrical).

So based on my how I would define a concept album, Sgt. Pepper doesn't come close.

 

Most people kind of have a misconception on what a "concept album" is. A concept album doesn't need to have a story running through it, things like Tommy, which was actually a "Rock Opera" kind of made people think that if a concept album didn't have a narrative then it wasn't one. A concept album can be anything, Sinatra made concept albums where the songs were based on the same kind of theme, they didn't have a story running through it. Pepper is a concept album because there is a "something" that ties all the songs together, if the concept is of a pretend band, going on stage and performing a series of songs, wrapped up in a continuous performance, with no gaps, reprising the opening theme and sounding unlike anything else they had done pretty much to that point, then it is a concept, because that was the idea behind it.

 

The way the balance of the votes keeps changing is making me bite my nails.

 

Even though it's not a concept album lyrically, it should be considered as a whole piece of work rather than a collection of songs.

I think Pepper and Abbey Road are more of an individual piece of work than the rest of the Beatles albums...

 

According to George Martin, Abbey Road was a compromise. Paul wanted to do a conceptual suite, but John hated that idea and wanted to get back to individual rock songs, so Side One (6 separate songs) was for John and Side 2 (Conceptual suite) was for Paul. Pepper is more of a suite from beginning to end, although Side 2 of Abbey Road generally has tighter segues and more continuity.

 

The ability of any piece of music to succeed on a particular level is based on how it is received by the listener, not based on what the artist tells you about the piece or what it is supposed to achieve. If even the four Beatles could not agree on whether Sgt. Pepper is a concept album, how are listeners ever going to agree on this? If Paul told us that Sgt. Pepper is a symphony, would that make it so just because Paul says it?

 

It's not. At most it's a particularly thin concept, so tenuous as the make the use of the term redundant. Can somebody please explain why the question even matters and why it continues to be asked and debated?

 

It doesn't matter, but like many of the topics on the forum, it's an academic, intellectual exercise. Some would even say it's fun.

 

It is a concept album and simultaneously it isn't.
Package-wise and sound-wise it looks like a concept thing. But when you start listening to/reading the lyrics it would be just a collection of songs like all the other LPs.
As John said, his tracks (Mr Kite, Lucy, etc) could be on any other album, basically it has nothing to do with a 'Pepper show'. But generally it works great. A 'studio concert record' for your home.

 

Basically a 'story' or theme that flows through a complete album. Like Pink Floyd's The Wall, The Who's Tommy or Green Day's American Idiot.

 

Was thinking about this yesterday after a fresh listen to the new mix. Personally, I don't see any concept outside of the "Sgt Pepper" imaginary band conceit, but if there's an overall concept, it's "A Day In The Life"-type theme, with the characters like "Lovely Rita", the brute of "Getting Better" looking to change his ways, the rather ordinary melodrama of "She's Leaving Home", etc.

But then this concept doesn't jive with stuff like "Lucy In The Sky", so to me stuff like that and "Within You Without You" are a day-in-the-life of a few rock stars of 1967 expanding their consciousness.

 

by jove i think he's got it!