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

Dr Pepper's Medicine Band.

 

+1000

 

1967 was in my opinion the banner year for rock and roll classic albums. Check out this list:

The Doors: The Doors
The Rolling Stones: Between the Buttons
Jefferson Airplane: Surrealistic Pillow
The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground & Nico
Grateful Dead: Grateful Dead
The Rolling Stones: Flowers
The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Pink Floyd: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Big Brother and the Holding Company: Big Brother and the Holding Company
Jimi Hendrix Experience: Are You Experienced?
Arlo Guthrie: Alice's Restaurant
The Beach Boys: [I]Smiley Smile[/I]
[I][B]The Doors: [I]Strange Days[/I][/B]
[B][I][B]Cream: [I]Disraeli Gears[/I][/B]
[B][I][B]Buffalo Springfield: [I]Buffalo Springfield Again[/I][/B]
[B][I][B]The Beatles: [I]Magical Mystery Tour[/I][/B]
[B][I][B]The Moody Blues: [I]Days of Future Passed[/I] [/B]
[B][B]Love: [I]Forever Changes[/I][/B]
[B][I][B]The Jimi Hendrix Experience: [I]Axis: Bold As Love[/I][/B]
[B][I][B]The Who: [I]The Who Sell Out[/I] [/B]
[B]The Rolling Stones: Their Satanic Majesties Request

There are a lot of all time classics on this list.[/B][/I][/B][/I][/B][/B][/I][/B][/I][/B][/I][/B][/I][/B][/I]

 

The songs on Pepper don't have to be connected for it to be a concept album - the concept is the fictional band.

Also I think this quote by Timothy Leary ties in with the whole Pepper thing

“I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.”

 

I think that Leary quote pretty much sums it all up.

 

Whatever you think of the album, its release in '67 was an enormous event. I was 12 years old and it was talked about everywhere I went. And one of my favorite memories of living in Baltimore was hearing that album played from so many apartments up and down the streets I walked. My upstairs neighbors played it over and over and over for what seemed like a week. I never completely fell in love with Sgt.Pepper , but I always gave it my utmost respect for that sense of musical camaraderie it generated - something I never experienced before or since that album.

 

While obviously the concept is loose - yeah, the rest of Paul's songs don't go into the concept either. Getting Better, etc. John could have easily said, yeah, great fun concept, and changed the subject in whatever interview it was. Instead he had to trash it because people made a big deal of it, and made a big deal of crediting Paul. Had it been John's idea, Paul would have been, yeah, good one mate! instead of trying to tear it down after the fact.

 

Nevermind - Nirvana (same impact, different generation, but same....changed everything)

 

Nirvana had a huge impact - as did The Sex Pistols,but they don't come close to the impact of Pepper.

 

I quote the OP in its near-entirety for two reasons. 1) I don't see any reference or link to "these articles" specifically, and 2) I find the whole premise utterly ridiculous. Not "every city in Europe" was playing the album because many of them were behind the Iron Curtain where "decadent" and "bourgeois" stuff like the Beatles was verboten. And I'd love to know how many stations played Sgt. Pepper "virtually non-stop" -- unless we're talking about college stations I'm just not buying it.

Not saying it wasn't a big deal, as every Beatles record was, but this rapturous ecstasy narrative is gone off the deep end.

 

The article referenced is by Langdon Winner of Rolling Stone, and only slightly hyperbolic. And I clearly remember my brother and I listening to a local (Baltimore) station play the entire album, and it was no college station. I would be enormously surprised if most major radio stations in the U.S. didn't make some event out of the release of Sgt. Peppers.

And never be surprised by a Beatles fan going off the deep end - we like it there!

 

Timothy Leary's dead.
'Laughing freemen' indeed.

 

Huge impact, yes, but changed everything? I mean Neil Young is called the grandfather of grunge for a reason. He and Crazy Horse were doing it long before Nirvana, and where is grunge today? There are traces of it out there but it was largely a fad that came and went quickly.

 

....when i get to the bottom of the slide..


Also thought the white album was the grungefather.

 

I agree. The only music album that probably had a bigger impact is Thriller, primarily because musically, the world was a much smaller place in the 80's, connected by a constant rotation of music videos, but without the freedom of choice afforded by the Internet.

I still remember in 1984, I was in a bar in Londrina, a small city in Brazil and they were playing Thriller; three months later, I'm sitting in a small family run coffee shop in Kyoto, Japan, and above the silver-haired woman serving the coffee was a small television playing the Thriller video.

 

Thriller was but a ripple in the ocean compared to Pepper's impact.

 

Thriller was massive but don't think the music was revolutionary - remember hearing Billie Jean etc in '82 and it was of it's time.

It's interesting that the world went berserk over Pepper and yet a year earlier "Tomorrow Never Knows" - perhaps their most futuristic track - is released and .....

 

Depends on who and where you were. In my mind, the impact of Pepper wasn't nearly as great as the impact of Meet The Beatles or the film A Hard Day's Night. I saw the movie at the Cascade Drive-In. All the kids were sitting on the hoods of the cars while mom and dad cuddled-up inside. Throughout the film girls would scream when their favorite Beatle did something cute or winked at the camera or whatever... right there in a graveled-over farm field in Northern Illinois. Kids were talking about The Beatles non-stop in 1964. By comparison, I remember Sgt. Pepper as being another mind-expanding album in the summer of '67 and I honestly didn't know anyone who liked it all that much. We were into The Doors.

 

No comparison. "Evolution" is a decent LP but it's not "psych drenched". "Butterfly" (US: "Dear Eloise / King Midas In Reverse") is a vast improvement as it was most certainly influenced by "Sgt. Pepper".

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Because the Beatles were the biggest pop group in the world, the mere fact that they made the kind of album that Pepper's was was very significant. But among the older guys that I hung out with, guys who were moving in the direction that the psychedelic vibe of Pepper's represented, though Pepper's was certainly one of the stars in the musical constellation that they navigated by, Pepper's was not the largest star. That was Hendrix, the Doors, the Airplane, or Cream.

 

I said that myself when I did my "First listen" review a few weeks back. I did not even see most of the songs as anything special really.

Perhaps the listener base, had a very narrow view of music, and had never heard anything that was mildly different?

Just guessing, as I was born in the 80's, but It mostly appeared to be Pop music songs, trying to emulate a few old style nostalgic slightly funny sounding at the time genres of music, but with a bunch of echo on the singing.
I hear very little that I would term psychedelic, unless singing into megaphones and echoing voices is all there is to psych.

 

While gathering material for his 1979 anthology, Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, the editor Greil Marcus polled the 20 rock critic contributors regarding their choice for the best rock album of all time, and while Rubber Soul was mentioned, Sgt. Pepper was not.[249] He asserts that by 1968 the album appeared vacuous against the emotional backdrop of the political and social upheavals of American life, describing it as "a triumph of effects", but "a Day-Glo tombstone for its time".[250] He characterises the LP as "playful but contrived" and "less a summing up of its era than a concession to it".[223] Marcus believes that the album "strangled on its own conceits" while being "vindicated by world-wide acclaim

 

It's crazy how many artists on the list released more than one album in the year. How times have changed.

 

What is even crazier is how great those albums were. No filler.