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

I was only 7 and far preferred The Sound Of Music which spent roughly 3 times as many weeks as Pepper's at Number 1.

 

Lucky those who heard this when it came out. This in 1967 and "The Dark Side of the Moon" in 1973. These are some milestones in popular music. Suddenly pop and rock was art and everything could happen. And it did... for a period at least.

 

I was 9 years old, and my parents bought me The Monkees Headquarters instead. I do remember frequently hearing "A Day In The Life" on the radio while playing in the neighbor's pool.

 

I would give anything to have been oh, 17 or older during those years, 67 thru 69. The coolest years in the history of mankind.

 

My dad found it rubbish. He was starved for new Beatles songs after SFF/Penny Lane and didn't like it at all.

 

Thanks for the reply. I understand that they were influenced by Dylan, but it's one thing to be influenced by him, and quite another to have the gift of pen that the Bob possesses.

There are many things to admire about Rigby, not the least of which is the impressive string quartet score, but I'm not sure the lyrics really do it for me as poetry.

Let me elaborate a little further on my original point.

Do you see how there's a kind of lean elegance to Hank's word choice? How it has to be these words in this order. Every other line of this stanza plays with alliteration, and there's a some powerful imagery here. It's not the star that lights up the purple sky, but the silence. That's what illuminates how alone the writer is. I can buy that as poetry.

Even reading this on the page, Berry's sense of rhythm leaps out at you, and his choice of imagery is both highly original and highly evocative. If I were a high school lit teacher, I'd give a student that turned this in as a poem an A+

As I said before, aside from some oblique and somewhat hazy imagery (the face that she keeps in a jar by the door), I think the actual word choice is a little bland and even clumsy at times. There is some alliteration in the song, but it's the same alliterative pattern of w's repeated throughout the whole piece, where a piece like the Hank Williams lyric I quoted changes things up and gives us some expressive variety.

I'm not trying to slag off Rigby as a song or a recording -- like I said, there are many fine things about it when played as music. I'm just trying to explain why I'm a little agnostic about the Beatles' claim to being poets. Not every lyricist has to be a poet to be effective.

 

Your post reminds me of what Dylan was reported to have said to Paul McCartney in London, 1967 upon listening to a pre-release Sgt. Peppers: “Oh I get it, you don’t want to be cute anymore.”

 

I think you lucked out getting the mono. It would have been nice to get acquainted with that record from the band intended mix. Most of us probably grew up on the stereo mix. I know I did, and as good as it is, hearing the mono was quite a revelation, in a good way. That record rocks in mono.

 

Cass Elliot and The Beatles supposedly blasted a pre-release copy of Sgt. Pepper's out the window of Cass' London flat as the neighbours woke up. People apparently stood at their windows and in their gardens while giving the thumbs up. It's quite a cool thing to imagine.

 

I think you're totally short-selling the Rigby lyrics.

Eleanor Rigby, died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came
Father MacKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave
No one was saved
All the lonely people,
Where do they all come from
All the lonely people,
Where do they all belong

To this day I find these lyrics very powerful-and very economical. Back then they were actually shocking, with their themes of universal loneliness and religious doubt.

 

maybe it's just me, but the 'wearing the face...door' always symbolized putting on makeup to greet people rather than show up hair in curlers, if you know what I mean.

 

I was just a pup in elementary school and yet still very aware of the Beatles (along with the Monkees, Elvis and Glen Campbell). I remember hanging out in friends' bedrooms and basements, listening to 'Rubber Soul' and 'Revolver' and of course, 'SPLHCB'. Back then, you didn't just listen to one record, then another - those gatherings were called parties and that was what 45's were made for. No, when we sat down to listen to an album, we listened all the way through and from the beginning again and again. We'd often flip the record several times and spend hours listening to just the one album - that's the way it was done way back when.

Sgt. Peppers occupied most of my music listening that summer and when school started back up, kids would bring the album to school for Show & Tell or just to carry it with them through the day. The impact was profound but short-lived as other artists took over the limelight within a few months and of course, 'Magical Mystery Tour' came out later that year though that was more of a 'singles/hits' record and I don't recall listening through the whole album until years later. Ironically, I didn't buy a copy of Sgt. Peppers when it first came out and didn't have a copy of my own for probably 20 years after.

I was very young so I may be compressing time a bit but culturally, there seemed to be a major shift as head shops selling blue jeans, posters and drug paraphernalia started popping up in my neck of the woods. We put up fluorescent posters and bought 'black lights' and strobes to enhance our listening experiences. We wore tight 'hip-hugger' bell bottom jeans, replete with flowers and paisley and applied colorful patches to anything. Thick belts, bright shirts, beads soon followed and everyone in my neighborhood took a hand at tie-dying all their tee shirts and we all became adept at drawing the Zig-Zag man on them with magic markers. In our little group, we even bought mini-bongs and smoked tobacco from them while we wondered what it would be like to get high. For me, Sgt. Peppers expanded my view of the world and influenced and focused my personality in a way that would carry on well into my teens. It was a profound moment and a turning point in mine and many others life.

 

Ah, yes...a warm, spring morning in London...Cass no doubt had a very nice turntable and the neighbors got teleported into rock 'n' roll history - perhaps without fully realizing what they were hearing. I would also imagine she and the Fab Four had been up all night, perhaps listening to Sgt. Pepper several times throughout the evening and morning.
Thanks for sharing that story!

 

"All summer long we were dancing in the sand,
Everybody just kept on playing "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"
- Johnny Rivers

 

I get that, I was just giving McCartney credit for phrasing it in a way that creates a trippy mental image.

The lyrics are fine...as song lyrics. They're certainly different from most pop music from a topical perspective. They don't really impress me as poetry, though. The words just don't ring in my hollow bones. I think maybe I'm not the right person to appreciate this particular verse, though - I've always found Paul's attitude toward Rigby and Father Mackenzie to smack of condescension. Maybe my failure to connect with Rigby is at the center of my whole mystification over the 'Beatles lyrics as poetry' thing. It's something to think about. Thanks for your input.

 

Apropos to this topic - in one of my university English Lit courses the prof asked the class to each bring in a couple of poems by poets we were fond of. I tried to be hip and brought in the lyrics from 2 Who songs. It didn't go well. The class wasn't impressed by the poetry, and when I protested, the prof suggested that I read one of them out loud, which only compounded the fiasco.

 

Which two WHO songs?

 

I hope they weren't Call Me Lightning and Bucket T.

 

What I find surprising is all the people who remember hearing it on the radio. Since there was no "album oriented rock" FM stations in most (all?) cities, only Top 40/Top of the Pops type AM stations, those stations must have dropped their singles-only policy for Sgt. Pepper.

 

"Pure and Easy" and "Imagine a Man", I'm afraid.

 

Amazing! Nothing like that album before or since! The music world is so diluted nowadays.

Imagine, no advance warning (obviously no internet, so no teasers for months if not
years ahead of the release, since many bands nowadays only release an album every two or three years and we have to hear about it endlessly until the release)...

...we expected a new LP at least every year, or two or three a year from those 60's greats!

It was just there, in the record shop window in all its glory! The first spin in the turntable was like a psychedelic trip--without the psychedelic aids. No shuffling or sampling.
We actually had to TURN over the platter for side two!

 

Even a couple years earlier, I remember the AM stations playing Michelle....there were no singles released from Rubber Soul either, but The Beatles were played no matter!

 

I have an aircheck from WBBF, Top 40 Rochester NY station at the time, they played "Within You, Without You".

 

I'll bet that didn't actually happen.

 

Huh. Both of those have great lyrics, especially the former (one of my all-time favorite Who songs). Townshend deservedly gets plaudits for his music but I've always felt his talents as a lyricist are severely underrated.

Anyway, back on topic...