Sgt. Pepper 40th Anniversary - June 1, 2007!

officially, yes.

 

Soooo, twenty years ago this week I bought the CD, took it to a friends house and got seriously, seriously stoned listening to this album. My, my, time does fly like an arrow.

 

Stars to record Sgt Pepper tribute

http://news.pipex.com/pipex/story/0,17019,8832_2041928,00.html

later, chris

 

I will listen to the mono, obviously.

Think we should invent an adult beverage called Sgt. Pepper in honor of the day.

Suggestions for ingredients? Dr. Pepper immediately comes to mind. What else?

 

well, DP spiked with a little LSD (DPLSD?). is Owlsey still around?

later, chris

 

Was working in radio in 1987. Remember the excitement of cracking open the CD, taking into my production studio, and playing the disc. We recieved the CD from EMI, a few days before street date.

To commemorate, I'll be playing my mono U.K. -1 y/b Parlophone LP, wishing that EMI/Apple had released a 40th anniversary mono/stereo CD, hi-rez and LP set.

p.s. I might even put the 10th(?) anniversary Capitol U.S. picture disc LP on my Rega P3 for a spin.

 

You did get Sgt. Pepper lawn ornaments, didn't you? Or better yet, replicate the flowers and other plants on the cover! The entire neighborhood can stand behind, being the celebrities.

 

I'm going to see Billy Shears in concert....

right after I pick up the new remaster.

IN REALITY:
I'll give my CD of five of the mono mixes a spin.

 

Here was a story that ran in the Contra Costa Times (San Francisco Bay Area newspaper) about Sgt. Pepper and it's significance.

Sgt. Pepper Newspaper Story

 

from RollingStone.com:

"1) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles)

Posted Nov 01, 2003 12:00 AM

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time. From the title song's regal blasts of brass and fuzz guitar to the orchestral seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of "A Day in the Life," the thirteen tracks on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are the pinnacle of the Beatles' eight years as recording artists. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were never more fearless and unified in their pursuit of magic and transcendence.

Issued in Britain on June 1st, 1967, and a day later in America,Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is also rock's ultimate declaration of change. For the Beatles, it was a decisive goodbye to matching suits, world tours and assembly-line record-making. "We were fed up with being Beatles," McCartney said decades later, in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles' McCartney biography. "We were not boys, we were men . . . artists rather than performers."

At the same time, Sgt. Pepper formally ushered in an unforgettable season of hope, upheaval and achievement: the late 1960s and, in particular, 1967's Summer of Love. In its iridescent instrumentation, lyric fantasias and eye-popping packaging, Sgt. Pepper defined the opulent revolutionary optimism of psychedelia and instantly spread the gospel of love, acid, Eastern spirituality and electric guitars around the globe. No other pop record of that era, or since, has had such an immediate, titanic impact. This music documents the world's biggest rock band at the very height of its influence and ambition. "It was a peak," Lennon confirmed in his 1970 Rolling Stone interview, describing both the album and his collaborative relationship with McCartney. "Paul and I definitely were working together," Lennon said, and Sgt. Pepper is rich with proof: McCartney's burst of hot piano and school-days memoir ("Woke up, fell out of bed . . . ") in Lennon's "A Day in the Life," a reverie on mortality and infinity; Lennon's impish rejoinder to McCartney's chorus in "Getting Better" ("It can't get no worse").

"Sgt. Pepper was our grandest endeavor," Starr said, looking back, in the 2000 autobiography The Beatles Anthology. "The greatest thing about the band was that whoever had the best idea - it didn't matter who -- that was the one we'd use. No one was standing on their ego, saying, 'Well, it's mine,' and getting possessive." It was Neil Aspinall, the Beatles' longtime assistant, who suggested they reprise the title track, just before the grand finale of "A Day in the Life," to complete Sgt. Pepper's theatrical conceit: an imaginary concert by a fictional band, played by the Beatles.

The first notes went to tape on December 6th, 1966: two takes of McCartney's music-hall confection "When I'm Sixty-Four." (Lennon's lysergic reflection on his Liverpool childhood, "Strawberry Fields Forever," was started two weeks earlier but issued in February 1967 as a stand-alone single.) But Sgt. Pepper's real birthday is August 29th, 1966, when the Beatles played their last live concert, in San Francisco. Until then, they had made history in the studio -- Please Please Me (1963), Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966) -- between punishing tours. Off the road for good, the Beatles were free to be a band away from the hysteria of Beatlemania. McCartney went a step further. On a plane to London in November '66, as he returned from a vacation in Kenya, he came up with the idea of an album by the Beatles in disguise, an alter-ego group that he subsequently dubbed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "We'd pretend to be someone else," McCartney explained in Anthology. "It liberated you -- you could do anything when you got to the mike or on your guitar, because it wasn't you."

Only two songs on the final LP, both McCartney's, had anything to do with the Pepper character: the title track and Starr's jaunty vocal showcase "With a Little Help From My Friends," introduced as a number by Sgt. Pepper's star crooner, Billy Shears. "Every other song could have been on any other album," Lennon insisted later. Yet it is hard to imagine a more perfect setting for the Victorian jollity of Lennon's "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" (inspired by an 1843 circus poster) or the sumptuous melancholy of McCartney's "Fixing a Hole," with its blend of antique shadows (a harpsichord played by the Beatles' producer George Martin) and modern sunshine (double-tracked lead guitar executed with ringing precision by Harrison). The Pepper premise was a license to thrill.

It also underscored the real-life cohesion of the music and the group that made it. Of the 700 hours the Beatles spent making Sgt. Pepper (engineer Geoff Emerick actually tallied them) from the end of 1966 until April 1967, the group needed only three days' worth to complete Lennon's lavish daydream "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." "A Day in the Life," the most complex song on the album, was done in just five days. (The oceanic piano chord was three pianos hit simultaneously by ten hands belonging to Lennon, McCartney, Starr, Martin and Beatles roadie Mal Evans.) No other Beatles appear with Harrison on his sitar-perfumed sermon on materialism and fidelity, "Within You Without You," but the band wisely placed the track at the halfway point of the original vinyl LP, at the beginning of Side Two: a vital meditation break in the middle of the jubilant indulgence.

The Beatles' exploitation of multitracking on Sgt. Pepper transformed the very act of studio recording (the orchestral overdubs on "A Day in the Life" marked the debut of eight-track recording in Britain: two four-track machines used in sync). And Sgt. Pepper's visual extravagance officially elevated the rock album cover to a Work of Art. Michael Cooper's photo of the Beatles in satin marching-band outfits, in front of a cardboard-cutout audience of historical figures, created by artist Peter Blake, is the most enduring image of the psychedelic era. Sgt. Pepper was also the first rock album to incorporate complete lyrics to the songs in its design.

Yet Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Number One album of the RS 500 not just because of its firsts -- it is simply the best of everything the Beatles ever did as musicians, pioneers and pop stars, all in one place. A 1967 British print ad for the album declared, "Remember Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Is the Beatles." As McCartney put it, the album was "just us doing a good show."

The show goes on forever.

Total album sales: 11.7 million, Peak chart position: 1"

 

Here in Oslo, Norwegian Wood - The Beatles Fan Club of Norway, are hosting a party which serves both to commemorate Sgt Pepper's Anniversary, as well as a listening party for McCartney's new album, Memory Almost Full. We start at 7 pm with dining and drinks while we are listening to McCartney's album. Around 8 pm we will be screening the "Making of Sgt Pepper's" 1992 documentary. At 9 pm a norwegian studio technician will give a talk about the recording equipment used to produce the album. After that, I expect we will be playing probably the mono version of Sgt Pepper's. Then a few of us are likely to end up in a pub in the am.
I understand that the swedes are also arranging something, but their approach includes a concert with a Beatles cover band.
No doubt, similar celebrations will be held worldwide.
An official SACD or a remastered anniversary version would have been the icing on the cake, but the anniversary will not pass us fans by.

 

Owsley lives in Autralia and designs jewelry.

http://www.thebear.org/

 

This is probably what makes the whole album for me. I still get the chills whenever I hear it.

 

So much for the " special edition "to commemorate the 40th..

 

I was just reading through Lewisohn's Sessions book and there are some interesting Pepper outtakes that are still unreleased. The one that caught my attention is the attempted remake of Fixing A Hole they recorded at Abbey Rd (the LP version was recorded at Regent Sound)

 

I heard a radio promo on 93.7 where they played a few seconds of all the cuts. Man, that album just kicks some ***. It still sounds so good and fresh even after 40 years!

 

I'll also be playing my 20 year old CD. Here's a scan of the booklet's last page which I had postmarked 20 years ago today! (In my hometown named after the "Wizard of Menlo Park")

 

Nice!

 

On Friday, August 10th at the Hollywood bowl, there will be a concert tribute to the 40th Anniversary of "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band." It will be the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra along with Cheap Trick as the house band and guest vocalists Aimee Mann and Joan Osborne; all performing the album in its entirity.

Here is a link to the info...

http://www.hollywoodbowl.com/tix/performance_detail.cfm?id=3251

 

Yippee. We're all ten years older and still no wiser about Sgt Pepper-related anniversaries....

 

"I loved you on the Dr. Pepper album."

 

I like Diet Sgt. Pepper.

 

I am frankly pissed off that the 40th anniversary is here and absolutely NOTHING is being done by EMI, Apple, or anyone to commemorate this.*

Is it any wonder that Aspinall got sacked and EMI is going down the toilet?


*to me, "tributes", or Cheap Trick covering Pepper doesn't cut the mustard....in response to anyone who may suggest these things are some kind of something....

 

I'll be playing my slightly worn UK mono lp, the way God intended it!

Bobby Sutliff

 

Mal also,if you listen very closly,counts off the seconds (just before the first part ends) right up to the part where Paul sings "Woke up,fell out of bed..." (I believe he counted up to 35 or 34,but I'm not sure..) Michael Boyce