What was the impact of SGT PEPPER at the time it was released?

Yeah, Jimi Hendrix Experience was just incredible. But Sgt. Pepper was probably the biggest release ever! Back in 6/1967 I remember how crazy it was, never have I seen it like that ever again.

 

...and yet Jimi took the time to learn Sgt. pepper the day after release to play it live. Clearly, HE was impressed.

 

Star Spangled~Sgt Pepper 'Yeah ' Saville theatre' 4 th June 1967.
McCartney ( impressed)got Jimi the Montery Pop Festival gig' two weeks later.

 

....but joyously received by the youth culture (the "counterculture") for which during the span of just a few short months, anything seemed possible. Like, exorcising and levitating the Pentagon.

Warning: Video contains Paul McCartney and Sgt. Peppers content.

 

Hard to fully express these days how weird/otherworldly/foreign this Hendrix debut was upon release. That his sonic art arrived fully formed made it even stranger.

 

it changed rock and roll as we knew it....yes, it was THAT monumental.

 

Did McCartney have any other names other than' Sgt Pepper for his fictional band?

 

I sure would like to see an official release of the It Was Twenty Years Ago Today documentary. Great interviews within from Paul, George, amongst others that you don't ever see regurgitated onto other documentaries.

 

Various versions of this have been printed/posted over the years:

“’Sgt. Pepper’ is Paul, after a trip to America,” related John Lennon in 1967. “The whole West Coast long-named group thing was coming in, when people were no longer ‘The Beatles’ or ‘The Crickets’ – they were suddenly ‘Fred And His Incredible Shrinking Grateful Airplanes.’ I think he got influenced by that. He was trying to put some distance between The Beatles and the public – and so there was this identity of Sgt. Pepper. Intellectually, that’s the same thing he did by writing ‘She Loves You' instead of ‘I love you.’”

"It was an idea I had, I think, when I was flying from L.A. to somewhere,” Paul remembered in 1984. “I thought it would be nice to lose our identities, to submerge ourselves in the persona of a fake group. We would make up all the culture around it and collect all our heroes in one place. So I thought, a typical stupid-sounding name for a Dr. Hook's Medicine Show and Traveling Circus kind of thing would be 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.' Just a word game, really."

The flight mentioned above appears to be a return trip, Paul with roadie Mal Evans, from Nairobi to London in November of 1966 (Wikipedia states it was a return flight to London from Kenya). It is reported that the name of the fictional band came from Mal innocently asking what the “S” and “P” stood for on the pots of their meal trays. When Paul identified them as ‘salt’ and ‘pepper,’ this eventually lead to “Sgt. Pepper” and the beginning of Paul’s brainstorm.

 

I've been going back to the Anthology DVDs lately and I was struck by how, during the Pepper segment, John, George and Ringo all seemed to pour cold water over the idea of the great Pepper concept, claiming that it was Paul's half baked idea and it didn't really impact what they were doing on the album. Of course, John goes a bit too far when he argues that songs like "A Day in the Life" and "Mr. Kite" could have been on any Beatles album. Clearly those songs were products of their psychedelic phase--you can't really imagine them showing up on Help! or Let It Be. Still, these interviews reinforce the sense that the fictional band concept was more of a mirage than a thoroughly conceived motif.

 

Freak Out was way ahead of its time compared to Sgt Pepper. As much as I like it, while listening to 1966 records I can find some of the traits that made the Beatles record so famous and right after it was released copycats started to appear all around. 1966's Freak Out and Pet Sounds couldn't be imitated even because most musicians of the day couldn't compose or play the music.

 

Sgt Pepper is their masterpiece. Love the indie white album also the beautiful abbey road+ their artpop album revolver. But ' Pepper was their sixties statement.

 

It was like rounding a corner on the beach and seeing the Statue of Liberty half buried in the sand...........but in a good way.

 

Iconic ' monumental 'a total mind f.

 

The quote is from Rolling Stone. I think from the original History of Rock and Roll book.
May have been repeated in one their 500 greatest album articles as well.

Like someone else posted, you had to be there.
I grew up in medium size town, 50,000, in Washington State and the anticipation of Sgt. Pepper's was very real.
The local rock\pop station played the whole thing and we, my older brother & sister, listened to the whole thing.
Brother was not much of a RnR fan but my sister and I were truly WTF!
We loved everything The Beatles released.
I remember one of her high school guy friends was over one time and spouted that he didn't think Revolver was much good. I was like 9 but even then I thought the guy was putting on a "cool" act by not liking the album.
That album was played constantly on the radio and in our house all summer.
It did generate a lot of mainstream media attention.
"Grown up" Rock n Roll, finally The Beatles were being validated on a larger scale by older people for whatever that's worth.

I don't know if other people did this but we would play multi-day lasting Risk, Monopoly and whatever other games were around
and Sgt. Pepper was always in the air.

My Dad hated our music but he worked during the day so we could play whatever we wanted.
Mom was much more musical and I think she liked some of music but some Pepper's was too weird, Lucy, A Day in The Life for her to appreciate.

 

For those who were there at the time, did anyone feel it was a letdown after Revolver?

 

The fictional band concept was Paul's trip, just like MMT. The others just went along for the ride. And then after-the-fact, it was always more cool to dump on Pepper and celebrate excessive-guitar-feedback-with-your-wife-screaming-like-a-severely-retarded-child as somehow more worthy and fulfilling...

 

I remember EVERYBODY playing it. Walk pass open windows and you would hear it. Young college temp teachers bringing it in the classroom for listening, disecting and discussion. Very cool time.

Rick A.

 

No! It was like having a b&w TV' and then watching a color TV. Not quiet the right analogy, but.

 

Re: The "Congress of Vienna" quote. It's by critic Langdon Winner, from 1968:

The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released. At the time, I happened to be driving across country on Interstate 80. In each city where I stopped for gas or food - Larmaie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend - the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I'd ever heard. For a brief while the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.

 

You're really hung up on the Yoko connection and I don't think that it has much relevance this particular question. I understand that we often have to take artists' comments on their own work with a grain of salt, but all three of them were saying more or less the same thing--there was a thin framework of a concept but it wasn't really followed through on. I didn't get the feeling from those interviews that Ringo or George had a particular agenda in saying what they did.

 

If the others (including John, whom you allude to) "just went along for the ride", then how does it follow that their subsequently being dismissive of the fictional band concept was driven by some motivation to be "cool" ("after-the-fact, it was always more cool to dump on Pepper")?

 

You would have to consider their history both with the Beatles and especially with Paul McCartney to understand why they would dump on it afterwards. Pepper was Paul's baby and later on, when both John and George were eager to shed any Beatle-ties and Paul was suing the others and when it was the others vs Paul for a period of time and when 'concept albums' began to acquire some negative connotations, it became cool to both dismiss both Beatles and Pepper especially as some silly concept that Paul talked them into while they were stoned. Or something like that...

 

The supposed 'concept' behind Pepper is probably one of the least significant aspects of that album in a musical and technical sense, but critics and fans tended to focus on it, perhaps to the chagrin of John and George, since their songs have nothing to do with Sgt Pepper and his Band.

As far as Ringo goes, I don't take his opinions on these things with any kind of weight of importance. He was going to go along with any direction the others wanted to go in, as he did from the day he joined until they split up.

As for George and John, see my comments in Post #98.

In any event, IMO, much of the recent criticism of Pepper stems from (1) the belief that it is a 'concept' album, even though it barely is, because concept albums have been reviled ever since the days of punk rock, and (2) because John Lennon said it was no good/crap/just another album/Paul's album/George Martin's album/etc. and some fans choose to believe that just because the great John Lennon said so.

It's quite interesting how fans who were of age at the time and into Beatles and/or rock music in general have very positive and fond recollections of its release....and then consider how its reputation sagged in the years since, after John and George slagged it. The Yoko connection is relevant only as far as it shows what John Lennon was fond of (Two Virgins?) in liu of Pepper.

 

Your response does not address my question. My point was that if the other three "just went along for the ride"---which I generally agree with, btw---then that suggests that the other three were dismissive of it at the time (though perhaps to a lesser extent than they were later, but still), and so why would you ascribe the other three's being dismissive of it at a later time to a desire to be cool? It doesn't follow.

I was "of age" (though a bit young) at the time and did not think much of it, except for LITSWD and ADITL. Regarding your Yoko comment, you are overestimating the significance of the collaboration with Yoko to John's music.