Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
From BeatlesWiki
This article is about the album. For other uses, see Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (disambiguation)
| Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | ||
| ||
| Studio album by The Beatles | ||
| Released | June 1, 1967 | |
| Recorded | December 6 1966 – April 21 1967 at Abbey Road Studios | |
| Length | 39:43 | |
| Label | Parlophone, EMI | |
| Producer(s) | George Martin | |
| Professional reviews | ||
|---|---|---|
| The Beatles chronology | ||
| Revolver | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) | Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
|
Contents |
[edit] Track list
[edit] Side one
- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band – 2:04
- With a Little Help from My Friends – 2:46
- Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds – 3:30
- Getting Better – 2:49
- Fixing a Hole – 2:38
- She's Leaving Home – 3:37
- Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! – 2:39
[edit] Side two
- Within You Without You (Harrison) – 5:07
- When I'm Sixty-Four – 2:37
- Lovely Rita – 2:44
- Good Morning Good Morning – 2:43
- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) – 1:20
- A Day In The Life – 5:33
- The Inner Groove 0:02 (repeats)
[edit] Quotes
[edit] Inspiration and Concept
"We were now in another phase of our career, and we were happy. We'd been through all the touring, and that was marvellous; but now we were more into being artists. We didn't have to be performing every night, so instead we couldbe writing or chatting with our mates or visiting an art exhibition. (For instance, John and Yoko would never have met if we hadn't had all that time spare for him to look around exhibitions and 'bang a nail in.') Having the time off gave us a lot of freedom to come in with crazy ideas. I spent a lot of time listening to avant-garde artists and going to places like Wigmore Hall. where I saw composer Luciano Berio (I remember meeting him afterwards, and he was a very unassuming bloke). George was into Indian music. We were all opening our minds to different areas, and the we'd come togeher and share it all with each other. It was exciting, because there was a lot of cross-fertilisation."
-Paul McCartney, quoted in The Beatles Anthology
"The first thing I remember was flying back from America with our road manager Mal Evans. Over our meal we were talking about salt and pepper, which was misheard as Sgt. Pepper. I then hd the idea for the song Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and thought it would be interesting for us to pretend, during the making of the album, that we were members of this band rather than The Beatles, in order to give us a fresh slant."
-Paul McCartney, June 3, 2008, booklet of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 2009 reissue.
"'Sgt. Pepper' is Paul after a trip to America and the whole West Coast long-named group thing was coming in. You know, 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 - so there was this identity of Sgt. Pepper. Intellectually, it's the same thing he did by writing She Loves You instead of 'I love you.'""
-John Lennon, 1980
"It was an idea I had, I think, when I was flying from L.A. to somewhere. 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."
-Paul McCartney, 1984
""We were getting a little fed up of being The Beatles… It was all getting so bloody predictable. I said, why don’t we pretend that we’re another band. Make up a name for it and make up an identity, make up alter egos, just pretend, so we can make a whole album from the point of view of this other band."
-Paul McCartney, 1989
"It was the start of hippy times, and there was a jingly-jangly hippy aura all around in America. I started thinking about what would be a really mad name to call a band. At the time there were lots of groups with names like 'Laughing Joe and His Medicine Band,' or 'Colonel Tucker's Medicinal Brew and Compound'; all that old Western going-round-on-wagons stuff, with long rambling names. And so, in the same way that in I Am The Walrus John would throw together 'choking smokers' and 'elementary penguin,' I threw those words together: 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.' I took a idea back to the gus in London: 'As we're trying to get away from ourselves - to get away from touring and into a more surreal thing - how about if we become an alter-ego band, something like, say, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts"? I've got a bit of a song cooking with that title."
-Paul McCartney, quoted in The Beatles Anthology
"We were fed up with being Beatles. We really hated that fucking four little mop-top boys approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn't want anymore, plus, we'd now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers... then suddenly on the plane I got this idea. I thought, 'Let's not be ourselves. Let's develop alter egos so we're not having to project an image which we know. It would be much more free.'"
-Paul McCartney, circa 1994
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band didn't start out life as a 'concept album,' but it very soon developed a life of its own. I remember it warmly, as both a tremendous challenge and a highly rewarding experience. For me, it was the most innovative, imaginitive and trend-setting album of its time."
-George Martin, Beatles producer, booklet for 2009 reissue of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
"The idea came about gradually. Basically it was Paul's idea-, he came in and said he had the song Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and that he was identifying it with the band, with The Beatles themselves. We recorded the song first, and then the thought came to make it an idea for for the album. It was at atime when they wanted to concentrate on the studio, and that probably fomented the idea of th alter-ego group: 'Let Sgt. Pepper do the touring.'"
-George Martin, Beatles producer, The Beatles Anthology
"We would be Sgt Pepper's band, and for the whole of the album wed pretend to be someone else. So, when John walked up to the microphone to sing, it wouldn't be the new John Lennon vocal, it would be whoever was in the new group, his fantasy character. It liberated you - you could do anything when you got to the mike or on your guitar because itwasn't you."
-Paul McCartney, quoted in The Beatles Anthology
"The album was always going to have 'Sgt Pepper' at the beginning, and if you listen to the first two tracks, you can hear it was going to be a show album. It was Sgt. Pepper ad his Lonely Hearts Club Band with all these other acts, and it was going to run like a rock opera. It had started out with a feeling that it was going to be something totally different, but we got as far as Sgt. Pepper and Billy Shears (singing With A Little Help From My Friends), and then we thought 'Sod it! It's just two tracks.' It still kept the title and the feel that it's all connected, although in the end we didn't actually connect the songs up."
-Ringo Starr, quoted in The Beatles Anthology
"Sgt Pepper is called the first concept album, but it doesn't go anywhere. All my contributions to the album have absolutely nothing to do with this idea of Sgt. Pepper and his band; but it works, because we said it worked, and that's how the album appeared. But it was not put together as it sounds, except for Sgt. Pepper introducing Billy Shears, and the so-called reprise. Every other song could have been on any other album."
-John Lennon, 1980
"I can't really get into writing Tommy. I read that Pete Townshend said that he had just a bunch of songs and they sort of melted into Tommy in the studio. It's like Sgt. Pepper - a bunch of songs, and you stick two bits of Pepper in it and it's a concept."
-John Lennon, 1975
"I felt we were just in the studio to make the next record, and Paul was going on about this idea of some fictitious band. That side of it didn't really interest me, other than the title song and the album cover."
-George Harrison, quoted in The Beatles Anthology
[edit] Making of Sgt. Pepper
"How can we tour when we're making stuff like we're doing on the new album? We can only do what we're doing. We've toured - that was then. If we do another tour, we'll probably hire London for one big happening, and we'd have us and The Stones and The Who, and everybody else on it. Unless that happens, forget it. I don't want to be a moptop. For those who want moptops, The Monkees are right up there, man."
-John Lennon, 1967
"At the moment we haven't an act to suit the ordinary type of tour that goes on. If we can think of a way of getting four flying saucers landing on the top of the Albert Hall, it would be possible. But at the moment there isn't much happening in that direction."
-Paul McCartney, 1967.
"Our attitude now was that of a completely different set of individuals and not the attitude that we would normally have had as The Beatles. The making of the record became a wild, colourful fairground ride where all things were possible."
-Paul McCartney, June 3, 2008, booklet of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 2009 reissue.
"Sgt. Pepper was our greatest endeavor. It gave everybody—including me—a lot of leeway to come up with ideas and to try different material. John and Paul would write songs at home, usually - or wherever they were - and bring them in and say, 'I've got this.' The actual writing process was getting to be seperate by now, but they'd come in with bits and help each other, and we'd all help. The great thing about the band was that whoever had the best idea (it did't matter who), that would be the one we'd use. No one was standing on their ego, saying, 'Well, it's mine,' and getting possessive. Always, the best was used. That's why the standard of songs always remained high. Anything could happen, and that was an exciting process. I got to hang out and listen to it unfolding, although I wasn't there every day."
-Ringo Starr, quoted in The Beatles Anthology
"I used to share a flat in Sloane Street with Mal. One day in February Paul called, saying that he was writing a song and asking if he and Mal could come over. The song was the start of Sgt. Pepper. At my place he carried on writing and the song developed. At the end of every Beatles show, Paul used to say, 'It's time to go. We're going to go to bed, and this is our last number.' Then they'd play the last number and leave. Just then Mal went to the bathroom, and I said to Paul, 'Why don't you have Sgt. Pepper as the compere of the album? He comes on at the beginning of the show and introduces the band, and at the end he closes it.' A bit later, Paul told John about it in the studio, and and John came up to me and said, 'Nobody likes a smart-arse, Neil.'"
-Neil Aspinall, Beatles road manager, as quoted in The Beatles Anthology
"I could go on and on about that period and the fun we had but I think it's better for now to say no more and simply let the album speak for itself."
-Paul McCartney, June 3, 2008, booklet of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 2009 reissue.
"The Beatles definitely had an eternal curiosity for doing something different,"
-George Martin, Beatles producer, quoted by Mark Lewisohn for the 2009 reissue of the album.
"I'd been involved in a lot of avant-garde type recordings, and I did a lot of experimenting in the early days - long before The Beatles - with electronic tracks and musique concrete. I introduced The Beatles to some new sounds and ideas, but when Sgt. Pepper came along, they wanted every single trick brought out of the bag. Whatever I could find, they accepted."
-George Martin, Beatles producer, from The Beatles Anthology
"The Beatles insisted that everything on Sgt Pepper had to be different. Sounds were either distorted, limited, heavily compressed or treated with excession equalisation. We had microphones right down in the bells of the brass instruments and headphones turned into microphones attached to violins. We plastered vast amounts of echo onto vocals, and sent them throughthe circuitry of the revolving Leslie speaker. We used giant primitive oscillatorsto vary the speed of instruments and vocals, and we had tapes running backward as well as forward."
-Geoff Emerick, Beatles engineer, quoted by Mark Lewisohn for the 2009 reissue of the album.
"As we got up to Sgt. Pepper, George Martin had really become an integral part of it all. We were putting on strings, brass, pianos, etc., and George was the only one who could write it all down. He was also brilliant. One of them would mention: 'Oh, I'd like a violin to go "de de diddle",' or whatever, and George would catch it and put itdown. He became part of the band. John, Paul, and George - the writers - were putting together whatever they wanted on the tracks, and we were spending a long time in the studio. We were still recording basic tracks as we always did, but it would take weeks to do the overdubs for th strings or whatever, and then the percussion would be overdubbed later and later. Sgt. Pepper was great for me, because it's a fine album - but I did learn to play chess while we were recording it (Neil taught me)"
-Ringo Starr, quoted in The Beatles Anthology
"In terms of asking me for particular directions, John was the least articulate. He would deal in mood, he would deal in colors, almost, and he would never be very specific about what instruments or what line I had. I would do that myself. Paul, however, would actually sit down at the piano with me, and we'd work thins out. John was more likely to say (as in the case of Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!): 'It's a fairground sequence. I want to be in that circus atmosphere; I want to smell the sawdust when I hear that song.' So it was up to me to provide that."
-George Martin, Beatles producer
"It was becoming difficult for me, because I really wasn't that into it. Up to that time, we had recorded more like a band; we would learn the songs and then play them (although we were starting to do overdubs, and had done a lot on Revolver). Sgt Pepper was the one album that things were done slightly differently. A lot of the time it ended up with just Paul playing the piano and Ringo keeping the tempo, and we weren't allowed to play as a band so much. It became an assembly process - just little parts and then overdubbing - and for me it became a bit tiring and a bit boring. I had a few moments in there that I enjoyed, but generally I didn't like making that album much. I'd just got back from India, and my heart was still out there. After what had happened in 1966, everything else seemed like hard work. It was a job, like something I didn't really want to do and I was losing interest in being 'fab' at that point. Before then, everything I'd known had been in the West, and so the trips to India had really opened me up. I was into the whole thing, the music, the culture, the smells. There were good and bad smells, lots of colors, many different things - and that's what I'd become used to. I'd been let out of the confines of the group and it was difficult for me to come back into the sessions. In a way, it felt like going backwards. Everybody else thought Sgt. Pepper was a revolutionary record - but for me it was not as enjoyable as Rubber Soul or Revolver, purely because I had gone through so many trips of my own and I was growing out of that kind of thing. Throughout that period I was quite close to John (although peoplealways saw the Lennon-McCartney aspect). We were the ones that had The Dental Experience together."
-George Harrison, quoted in The Beatles Anthology
"Spending six months on Sgt. Pepper did allow them to experiment more, and take more time over the record. Sometimes being stuck together in the same place for too long can have an adverse effect, it can tend to be a bit disruptive rather than pulling things together. But that didn't really happen, everything was OK - although it did get a bit boring for me, really."
-Neil Aspinall, Beatles road manager, quoted in The Beatles Anthology
"[John] took some LSD to keep him awake for a while. At that point, the session was effectively over."
-George Harrison, referring to March 21, 1967
"I never took [LSD] in the studio. Once I did, actually. I thought I was taking some uppers and I was not in the state of handling it. I took it and I suddenly got so scared on the mike. I said, 'What is it? I feel ill.' I thought I felt ill and I thought I was going cracked. I said I must go and get some air. They all took me upstairs on the roof, and George Martin was looking at me funny, and then it dawned on me that I must have taken some acid. I said, 'Well, I can't go on. You'll have to do it and I'll just stay and watch.' I got very nervous just watching them all , and I kept saying, 'Is this all right?' They had all been very kind and they said, 'Yes, it's all right.' I said, 'Are you sure it's all right?' They carried on making the record."
-John Lennon, 1970
"I was aware of them smoking pot, but I wasn't aware that they did anything serious. In fact, I was so innocent that I actually took John up to the roof when he was having an LSD trip, not knowing what it was. If I'd known it was LSD, the roof would have been the last place I would have taken him. He was in the studio and I was in the control room, and he said he wasn't feeling too good. So I said, 'Come up here,' and asked George and Paul to go on overdubbing the voice. 'I'll take John out for a breath of fresh air,' I said, but of course I couldn't take him out the front because there were 500 screaming kids who'd have torn him apart,. So the only place I could take him to get fresh air was the roof. It was a wonderful starry night, and John went to the edge, which was a parapet about 18 inches high, and looked up at the stars and said, 'Aren't they fantastic?' Of course, to him I suppose they would have been especially fantastic. At the time they just looked like stars to me."
-George Martin, Beatles producer
"I would be stupid to pretend that I didn’t know drugs featured quite heavily in the Beatles’ lives at that time, but at the same time they knew that I, in my schoolmasterly role, didn’t approve, and like naughty boys they would slope off into the canteen, lock the door and have their joints. They always used to disappear to have a little puff, he explained. They never did it in front of me, you see. They always used to go down to the canteen, and Mal Evans used to guard it."
-George Martin, Beatles producer
[edit] Cover
"I did a lot of drawings of us being presented to the Lord Mayor with lots of dignitaries and lots of friends of ours around, and it was to be us in front of a big northern floral clock, and we were to look like a brass band. That developed to become the Peter Blake cover."
-Paul McCartney
"From that came the idea of a life size constructed collage. We thought that if we did that we could have anyone in the crowd. That opened up a whole magical area."
-Peter Blake, artist who designed the cover
"I suggested to the guys that we each create an alter ego for ourselves and have uniforms made by a costumier. To help this process, we would all make a list of the people that our newly-created characters might have admired. Everyone seemed to like the idea and with this in mind, we made the album."
-Paul McCartney, June 3, 2008, booklet of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 2009 reissue.
"Brian was in America with his business partner, Nat Weiss. Being a bit nervous — as you sometimes are before flying - he left a note with Nat about the cover for the new album."
-Neil Aspinall, Beatles road manager
"Brian had a premonition that his plane was going to crash, so he sent a letter saying: 'Brown paper bags for Sgt Pepper.'"
-George Martin, Beatles producer
"This album was a big production, and we wanted the album sleeve to be really interesting Everyone agreed. When we were kids, we'd take a half-hour bus ride to Lewis's department store to buy an album and then we'd come back on the bus, take it out of the brown paper bag, and read it cover to cover. They were full-size albums then (not like CDs) you read them and you studied them. We liked the idea of reaching out to the record-buyer, because of our memories of spending our own hard-earned cash and really loving anyone who gave us value for money. So, for the cover, we wouldn't just have our Beatle jackets on, or we wouldn't just be suave guys in turtlenecks (looking like we did on Rubber Soul). It would be much more pantomime, much more 'Mr. Bojangles.' For our outfits, we went to Berman's, the theatrical costumiers, and ordered up the wildest things, based on old military tunics. That's where they sent you if you were making a film: 'Go down to Berman's and get your soldier suits.' they had books there that showed you what was available. Did we want Edwardian or Crimean? We just chose oddball things from everywhere and put them together. We all chose our own colors and our own materials: 'You can't have that, he's having it...' We went for bright psychedelic colours, a bit like the fluorescent socks you used to get in the Fifties (they came in very pink, very turquoise, or very yellow). At the back of our minds, I think the plan was to have garish uniforms which would actually go against the idea of uniform. AT the time everyone was into that 'I Was Lord Kitchner's Valet' thing; kids in bands wearing soldiers' outfits and putting flowers in the barrels of rifles."
-Paul McCartney
"Pepper was just an evolvement of the Beatle boots and all that. It was just another psychedelic image. Beatle haircuts and boots were just as big as as flowered pants in their time. I never felt that when Pepper came out, Haight-Ashbury was a direct result. It always seemed to me that they were all happening at once. Kids were already wearin army jackets on the King's Road, all we did was make them famous."
-John Lennon, 1972
"To help us get into the character of Sgt Pepper's band, we started to think about who our heroes might be: 'Well, then, who would this band like on the cover? Who would my character admire?' We wrote a list. They could be as diverse as we wanted; Marlon Brando, James Dean, Albert Einstein - or whoever. SO we started choosing... Dixie Dean (an old Everton football hero I'd heard my dad talk about, I didn't really know him), Groucho Marx and so on. It got to be anyone we liked."
-Paul McCartney
"I remember being in the studio, and everybody was asking: 'Who do you want in the band?' All these crazy suggestions were coming out. John was talking about Albert Stubbins - and nobody quite knew who he was. He was a Liverpool center forward."
-Neil Aspinall, Beatles road manager
"Sgt Pepper was a special album, so when the time came for the sleeve we wanted to dress up, and we wanted to be these people, all the 'Peppers'. It was Flower Power coming into its fullest. It was love and peace; it was a fabulous period, for me and the world."
-Ringo Starr
"We got artistic people involved. I was very good friends with Robert Fraser, the London art-dealer; a guy with one of the greatest visual eyes that I've ever met. It was great thrill, being a friend of his at the time, and I took the whole album cover idea to him. He represented the artist Peter Blake, and he was very good friends with the photographer Michael Cooper. Robert said, 'Let Michael take some pictures. We'll get Peter to do a background, and then we'll collage it all together. I went down to Peter's house and gave him a little drawing of mine as a starting point. The cover was going to be a picture of a presentation somewhere up north. The Beatles were given the key to the city by the mayor beside a floral clock like the one they have in the municipal park. And then, inside the cover, we were going to be sitting there, with pictures of our favorite icons around us. That was the original plan, but then Peter collaged it into one big idea. It all came together and we had the photo session in the evening. We had all the plants delivered by a florist; people think they're pot plants - marijuana plants - but they're not, it was all straight."
-Paul McCartney
"The sleeve was the result of conversations with Peter Blake. They had a list of the people they wanted standing in the background, so Mal and I went to all the different libraries and got prints of them, which Peter Blake blew up and tinted. He used them to make the collage, along with the plants and everything else you see on the cover."
-Neil Aspinall, Beatles road manager
"The Fool were part of our crowd. They were a group of artists who later painted the Baker Street shop and used to make clothes for us. They had wanted to do a big psychedelic painting for the gatefold, and The Beatles loved the idea. But Robert Fraser hated it. He said, 'It's not good art.' And I said, 'Well, I don't car about you, mate. You may not like it, but it's our bloody cover.' We stuck out, so The Fool did the painting. Robert kept saying, 'No, it's just not a good painting.' He did have a great eye for it, and I agree with him now, but it would have been OK for the time. Instead, Robert told us we had to have one of the big four-head photographs from the Michael Cooper session for the gatefold, and he was right. There was a lot of crossover with our friends, with everyone throwing in their twopenny worth. When we started dreaming up ideas for the cover, the main problem was that people thought it would be too expensive. They'd never paid so much to have a cover put together. Normally it was about seventy quid: a good photographer like Angus McBean would come in and take your snap, and that would be his fee, seventy pounds."
-Paul McCartney
"Simon and Marijke painted a dream landscape of stylised mountain peaks and wonderful birds, like an LSD-influenced Chinese willow-pattern design. The sky was rainbow-ed with two oval panels for text, one of which was filled with stars and comets. A further empty panel had a flower border with a peacock draping its tail over the side. Tiny figures of the Beatles peeped out from among the flora. The style was Euro-psychedelic, owing much to Mucha, Beardsley, art nouveau and nineteenth-century children’s book illustrations. Unfortunately they got the dimensions wrong, but even with a border added, the work looked somehow second-rate. The Beatles, however, loved it."
-Barry Miles, author of Many Years From Now, Paul McCartney's authorized biography
"The Beatles already had a cover designed by a Dutch group called the Fool, but my gallery dealer, Robert Fraser, said to Paul, "Why don't you use a 'fine artist', a professional, to do the cover instead?" Paul rather liked the idea and I was asked to do it. The concept of the album had already evolved: it would be as though the Beatles were another band, performing a concert, perhaps in a park. I then thought that we could have a crowd standing behind them, and this developed into the collage idea. I asked them to make lists of people they'd most like to have in the audience at this imaginary concert. John's was interesting because it included Jesus and Ghandi and, more cynically, Hitler. But this was just a few months after the US furor about his 'Jesus' statement, so they were all left out. George's list was all gurus. Ringo said, "Whatever the others say is fine by me", because he didn't really want to be bothered. Robert Fraser and I also made lists. We then got all the photographs together and had life-size cut-outs made onto hardboard. EMI realized that because many of the people we were depicting were still alive, we might be sued for not seeking their permission. So the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, who was very wary of all the complications in the first place, had his assistant write to everyone. Mae West replied, "No, I won't be in it. What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?" So the Beatles wrote her a personal letter and she changed her mind. Robert Fraser was a business partner of Micheal Cooper, an excellent photographer, so he was commissioned to do the shoot. I worked in his studio for a fortnight constructing the collage, fixing the top row to the back wall and putting the next about six inches in front and so on, so that we got a tiered effect. Then we put in the palm tree and the other little objects. I wanted to have the waxworks of the Beatles because I thought they might be looking at Sgt. Pepper's band too. The boy who delivered the floral display asked if he could contribute by making a guitar out of hyacinths, and the little girl wearing the 'Welcome the Rolling Stones, Good Guys' sweatshirt was a cloth figure of Shirley Temple, the shirt coming from Michael Cooper's young son Adam. The Beatles arrived during the evening of March 30, 1967. We had a drink, they got dressed and we did the session. It took about three hours in all, including the shots for the center fold and back cover. The album sleeve was the first to feature printed lyrics, and it was one of the first to hav a gatefold sleeve. It was also the first to have anything other than a plain inner bag too, the first pressing coming in a slightly psychedelic sleevedesigned by Simon and Marijke of The Fool. And we also had a card with cut-outs, which I had originally intended to be a small packet with badges and pencils and such like. That was stopped because it would have caused EMI big marketing problems. I'm not sure how much it all cost. One reads exaggerated figures. I think Robert Fraser was paid 1500 pounds by EMI, and I got about 200 pounds. People say to me, "You must have made a lot of money on it" but I didn't because Robert signed away the copyright. But it has never mattered too much because it was such a wonderful thing to have done."
-Peter Blake, artist who designed the cover, the booklet of the 2009 reissue of the album.
"When the cover was finished, Sir Joseph Lockwood had a meeting with Paul. I was there when he brought the album cover in. It had the flowers, the drum, the four Beatles - and a big blue sky. They'd wiped out all the people behind, because he was frightened that they might all sue or not wantto be on the cover."
-Neil Aspinall, Beatles road manager
"I said, 'Don't worry, Joe - it's going to be great, man.' He said, 'We'll have dozens of lawsuits on our hands - it will be absolutely terrible. The legal department i going to get mad with it.' I told him, 'Don't worry, just write them all a letter. I bet they won't mind. So write to them, and then come back to me."
-Paul McCartney
"Paul refused and said that no way would they lose all the people. In the end Brian's office wrote to everybody, saying: 'Sign here if you agree.' Everybody did, except Leo Gorcey of the Bowery Boys who wanted $500. He was on the back row, so they just put a bit of blue sky where he had been. Brian thought the sleeve was wonderful. It gave him a bit of a headache having to ask everybody's permission, but he thought the idea was great."
-Neil Aspinall, Beatles road manager
"I spent many hours and pounds on calls to the States, Fred Astaire was very sweet; Shirley Temple wanted to hear the record first; I got on famously with Marlon Brando, but Mae West wanted to know what she would be doing in a Lonely Hearts Club."
-Wendy Hanson, assistant to Brian Epstein
"There were those who refused to be on there, saying, 'I'm not a lonely heart,' or, 'I don't want to be on there.' Letters had to go out to get permission from everybody, and some people did turn us down."
-George Harrison
"At that time, EMI was very much a colonial record company. It still is - they sell records in India and China - so they were/are very aware of Indian sensibilities. I remember Sir Joe (a good old mate, actually) coming round to my house in St. John's Wood, and saying, 'I say, Paul, we really can't do it, old chap. You can't have Gandhi.' I said, 'Why not? We're revering him.' - 'Oh, no, no. It might be taken the wrong way. He's rather sacred in India, you know.' So Gandhi had to go."
-Paul McCartney
"Gandhi was sitting under the palm tree, so they just put another palm frond there in his place."
-Neil Aspinall
"I still have no idea who chose some of those people. I think Peter Blake put a lot of the more confusing people in there. It was just a brod spectrum of people. The ones I wanted were people I admired. I didn't put anybody on there because I didn't like them (unlike some people...)"
-George Harrison
"To be perfectly honest, Peter and I chose about 60 percent of what's there because they didn't come up with enough. So we're to blame for some of the inequalities that were there. But having said that, the Beatles chose no women. The only women chosen were by Peter and I."
-Jann Haworth, wife of cover designer Peter Blake
"I'm the person who didn't do 50 percent of the Sgt. Pepper cover. I did the other 50 percent. It's sort of invisible, but in a way it's the whole thing: It was to build it like a set. The idea of the front row being three dimensional, leading into a two-dimensional flat frame was very much the territory of my work."
-Jann Haworth, wife of cover designer Peter Blake
""I hand-tinted all the photographs for color, and nailed them to batons on the back wall, then put the front row in 3-D. That's an old movie trick."
-Jann Haworth, wife of cover designer Peter Blake
"John wanted a couple of far-out ones like Hitler and Jesus, which was John just wanting to be bold and brassy. He was into risk-taking, and I knew what he was doing. I didn't agree with it, but he was just trying to be far out, really. Robert Fraser and Michael Cooper were mates with The Rolling Stones, aswe were, and they said 'It would be great to have a reference to the Stones on there.' So we slung that in the corner."
-Paul McCartney
"If you look closely at the album cover, you'll see two people who are flying, and two who aren't. (That's just a little 'in' joke. Two of them didn't share it with two others.)"
-John Lennon, 1975
"Have a look at the cover and come to your own conclusion! There's a lot of red-eyed photos around."
-Ringo Starr
"We wanted the whole of Pepper to be so that you could look at the front cover for years, and study all those people and read all the words on the back. And there were little hand-outs, little badges. We originally wanted to have an envelope stuck inside the sleeve with gifts in, but it became too hard to produce. It was hard enough, anyway, and the record company were having to bite the bullet: it was costing a little bit more than their usual two pence cardboard cover."
-Paul McCartney
[edit] Release and Reception
"It took nine months. It wasn't nine months in the studio, but we'd work then stop a bit, work it out, rest, work... I just like to get in and get out. I get a bit bored. Generally, our other albums took three intensive weeks of work. Afterwards, we would slow down for one week, and then we could judge the whole thing. It was the most expensive [album] and, of course, the record company was screaming. They screamed at the price of the record cover, etc., etc. And now it's probably pinned all over the walls."
-John Lennon, 1974.
"Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is one of the most important steps in our career. It had to be just right. We tried, and I think succeeded in acheiving what we set out to do. If we hadn't, then it wouldn't be out now."
-John Lennon, 1967
"After the record was finished, I thought it was great. I thought it was a huge advance, and I was very pleased because a month or two earlier the press and the music papers had been saying, 'What are The Beatles up to? Drying up, I suppose.' So it was nice, making an album like Pepper and thinking, 'Yeah, drying up, I suppose. That's right.' It was lovely to have them on that when it came out. I loved it. I had a party to celebrate - that whole weekend was a bit of a party, as far as I recall. I remember getting telegrams saying: 'Long live Sgt Pepper.' People would come round and say, 'Great album, man.' It certainly got noticed. It was released on the Friday, and on the Sunday Jimi Hendrix opened with Sgt. Pepper when we saw him at the Savile Theatre. That was the single greatest tribute for me. I was a big fan of Jimi's, and he'd only had since Friday to learn i. John was very pleased with the album. It fitted with what we were doing, and he certainly had some great tracks on it. A Day In The Life is a classic."
-Paul McCartney
"I remember clearly a music critic surmising that because no one had heard from us for a while, The Beatles had dried up! We worked on happily in the knowledge that this one gentleman was about to be proven well and truly wrong!"
-Paul McCartney, June 3, 2008, booklet of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 2009 reissue.
"I liked Sgt Pepper when it was finished. I knew it was different for the public, and I was very happy with the concept of the cover. 'A Day In The Life' had the big orchestra and the big piano chord, and 'Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds' I liked musically. But the rest of it was just ordinary songs."
-George Harrison
"When you get down to it, it was nothing more than an album called Sgt. Pepper with the tracks stuck together. It was a beautiful idea then, but it doesn't mean a thing now. I actively dislike bits of them which didn't come out right. There are bits of Lucy in the Sky I don't like. Some of the sounds of Mr. Kite isn't right. I like A Day In The Life, but it's still not as nice as I thought it was when we were doing it. I suppose we could have worked harder on it, but I couldn't be arsed doing any more. Sgt. Pepper is a nice song, Getting Better is a nice song, and George's Within You Without You is beautiful. But what else is on it musically besides the whole concept of having tracks running into each other?"
-John Lennon, 1967
"Looking back on Pepper, you can see it was quite an icon. It was the record of that time, and it probably did changethe face of recording, but we didn't do it consciously. I think ther was a gradual development by the boys, as they tried to make life a bit more interesting on record. They felt: 'We don't have to go up onstage and do this, we can do it just for ourselves, and just for the studio.' So it became a different kind of art form - like making a film rather than a live performance. That affeced their thinking and their writing, and it affected the way I put it together, too. I think Pepper did represent what the young people were on about, and it seemed to coincide with the revolution in young peoples thinking. It was the epitome of the Swinging Sixties. It linked up with Mary Quant and miniskirts and all those things - the freedom of sex, the freedom of soft drugs like marijuana and so on."
-George Martin, Beatles producer
"The mood of the album was in the spirit of the age, because we ourselves were fitting into the mood of the time. The idea wasn't to do anything to cater for that mood - we happened to be in that mood anyway. And it wasn't just the general mood of the time that influenced us; I was searching for references that were more on the fringe of things. The actual mood of the time was more likely to be The Move, or Status Quo or whatever - whereas outside all of that there was this avant-garde mode, which I think was coming into Pepper. There was definitely a movement of people. All I am saying is: we weren't really trying to cater for that movement - we were just being part of it, as we always had been. I maintain The Beatles weren't the leaders of the generation, but the spokesmen. We were only doing what the kids in the art schools were all doing. It was a wild time, and it feels to me like a time warp - there we were in a magical wizard-land with velvet patchwork clothes and burning joss sticks, and here we are now soberly dressed."
-Paul McCartney
"Sgt. Pepper seemed to capture the mood of the year, and it also allowed a lot of other people to kick off from there and to really go for it. When that album came out the public loved it. It was a monster. Everybody loved it, and they all admitted it was a really fine piece of work. Which it was. While we were making the album, they thought we were actually in there self-indulging, just in the studio as the Fabs. Like in the movies, where people get famous and then end up in the studio writing huge operas that never work out, We, however, were actually in there recording this fine body of work, and making, I believe, one of the most popular albums ever."
-Ringo Starr
"All the differences in Pepper were in retrospect. It wasn't sittingthere tinking, 'Oh we've had LSD,' so tinkle, tinkle..."
-John Lennon, 1967
"In those days, the reviews weren't very important - because we had it made whatever happened. Nowadays, I'm as sensitive as shit, and every review counts. But those days, we were too big to touch. I don't remember the reviews at all. We were so blasé, we never even read the news clippings. I didn't both with them or read anything about us. It was a bore."
-John Lennon, 1970
"I'd like to meet the man who banned [A Day In The Life]. I'd like to turn him on to what's happening. Why don't they charge the Electricity Board with spreading drugs because to get electricity you have to 'switch on'? Hidden meanings. Everything depends on the way you read a thing. If they wanted to read drugs into our stuff, they will. But it's them that's reading it, them!"
-John Lennon, 1967
"People think things are hidden on the album. Well, I didn't think anything was hidden. We did put a lot of animal noises on, but a lot of the talking that was on there was only there because the stat of the art was pretty primitive at the time. If we talked on one track, you could never get rid of it, and it would bemoved to the next track as we jumped across. We did some talking that was absolutely upfront. We all went out and talked on a mike and turned it backwards. It was not as if it was secretive; all those people who play records backwards and get something rude should play it the right way and it probably says something really nice."
-Ringo Starr
"Other people were starting to get interested in what we were doing. I always felt that the Stones took our lead and followed. We would do a certain thing like Pepper, then a year later they would do Satanic Majesties. There were others, Donovan for example, who were making some funky little records at the time, but I don't think anyone was getting into the art and craziness of instrumentation as much as we were. The biggest influence, as I've said a lot of times, was the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album, and it was basically the harmonies that I nicked from there. Again it wasn't really avant-garde, it was just straight music, surf music - but streched a bit, lyrically and melodically."
-Paul McCartney
[edit] Sources
- LENNON, J., MCCARTNEY P., HARRION G., STARKEY R., 2002, The Beatles Anthology, Chronicle Books -- Buy it on Amazon.com
