Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Louis Rosen under the aegis of the 92Y

In which we discover not only the origin and intended meaning of many lyrics, but the extraordinary techniques employed to create an entirely new sound. You may want to have your copy handy for listening.

Host Louis Rosen calls Sgt. Pepper “perhaps the most talked about album in rock history.” It was the first rock album to print lyrics on its sleeve, won Grammys for Best Engineered Album, Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Contemporary Rock and Roll Performance, Best Album Cover and Album of the Year, and stood out as the industry’s most expensively produced record to date. 1967 was a year of tremendous opposites. America’s build up and the death toll in Vietnam contrasted with an emerging peace movement and flower power leading to The Summer of Love.

In San Francisco, rundown Haight Ashbury had become hippie central. People were, as Timothy Leary recommended, tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. Marijuana and recently illegal LSD were embraced for mind-expanding experience. Bands began to disseminate counter culture ideas through music and lyrics.

That February, under pressure from parent company EMI to showcase something new from The Beatles, Parlaphone Records (run by George Martin) released “Penny Lane”and “Strawberry Fields” as a single. “The songs were initially meant to be foundation for an album about growing up in Liverpool. As it was politically imprudent to choose one as the A and one as the B side, it was released as a double A record so radio stations would be encouraged to play both songs equally.

In 1966, due to exhaustion, poor sound, and security threats – not the least of which was reaction to John’s remarking they were “more popular than Jesus” – The Beatles declared they would no longer tour and took three months off before their next project. John acted in, How I Won the War, Paul scored a film, George studied sitar with Ravi Shankar and explored new interest in Hinduism, Ringo spent time with his wife and son. London’s newest craze was what the host calls “Edwardian Militaria.” McCartney’s song, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” inspired the concept to create an LP as if a performance by the fictional group, a variety show.

Rosen points out that Sgt. Pepper represented many firsts: 1. Assuming a different identity than Beatles, the musicians felt free to reach beyond expected style or subject matter. 2. Almost all the songs were arranged with no thought to being performed live, which meant technical transformation was possible to a degree that let the artists feel let loose in a toy store. 3. The work was an LSD album. With Paul the last one to try the drug, the band was sampling and bonding in a new way. They even brought psychedelic lighting into the studio space.

Something of a father figure, producer George Martin, would come to work in a suit and tie. Perhaps because of this, the band found itself hiding in the men’s room to smoke. A record producer, arranger, composer, conductor, engineer, and trained musician, he was initially skeptical of the group insisting on an audition before signing them. Martin said then that EMI had “nothing to lose” as it offered one penny for each record sold, which was split among the four band members.

Martin’s early objections were weakness of material and (pre-Ringo) Pete Best’s drumming. When he asked the four if there was anything in particular they didn’t like about first recordings, George said, “I don’t like your tie.” John and Paul jumped in with natural wit and according to engineer Norman Smith, Martin changed his mind about them. He became a paramount influence and was commonly called “the fifth Beatle.” “Revolver took 120 hours to record. Sgt. Pepper took between 700 and 800 hours. In essence, they almost had a lock on a door of the Abby Road Studios. It was the last album they’d make with no underlying tensions.”

Sgt. Pepper opens with ten seconds of the combined sounds of a pit orchestra warming up and an audience waiting for a concert, creating the illusion of a live performance. Martin has been quoted as saying the applause/background atmosphere was from a recording he made in Cambridge with the Beyond The Fringe crowd, Dudley Moore and company. The title song is reprised in a more driven fashion at the end.

“Let’s talk about recording methods,” Rosen begins. “Back 20 years earlier, most recordings were one track mono, then eventually two track stereo. Engineers mixed the volume balance between instruments and voices and adjusted sound to brighten or warm up in real time. What went on tape was unchangeable.               

Sgt. Pepper was recorded on four-track machines. With four track recording, you can, for example, record guitar, piano and drums on Track 1 while mixing them in real time; then add (overdub) bass onto Track 2, and organ and lead guitar on Track 3. These tracks would then be mixed together and recorded (bounced or dumped down) onto Track 4, which frees up Tracks 1, 2 & 3 for additional parts to be added, e.g. lead vocal, harmony vocals, additional instruments etc…

“This process of layering sounds can be repeated multiple times, but with each additional bounce, you’re adding another generation to the recording. Each generation degrades slightly. For this album, they also figured out how to connect two four-track machines together, so the bouncing of tracks went from one machine to the other. It’s a complex and lengthy process. If they could imagine it, they could do it.”

Apparently the group was unaware that Atlantic Records’ head engineer Tom Dowd had already invented an eight-track. (The competitor kept things close to the vest.) Within a year or two, that became sixteen, then thirty-two. Today, digital tracks are infinite. “My goal this afternoon is to open the door to listening a little differently to this very familiar album,” the host tells us.

We hear excerpts from a deconstructed version of “A Little Help From My Friends.” (Found on YouTube.) It was the last song on the album, written especially for Ringo by Lennon and McCartney. Unlike other cuts, it’s symmetrical – refrain, chorus, bridge. One track has just drums and tambourine with faint bass at the back. Then we hear only bass, then guitar, then piano and crowd sound effects (from the EMI library).

“I think that was probably the best of our songs that we wrote for Ringo actually. I remember giggling with John as we wrote the lines, ‘What do you see when you turn out the light/ I can’t tell you but I know it’s mine.’ It could have been him playing with his willie under the covers…” (Paul McCartney)

Lead and harmony vocals are separate. This kind of clarity reveals wrong notes which are hidden in the eventual mix. Background music, we’re told, is that which each singer hears in his headphones. The original lyric for this song was, “What would you do if I sang out of tune/Would you throw tomatoes at me?” Imagining live performance, Ringo understandably vetoed it.

Rosen points out that “in order to create the effect of a show, the band moved from one song to the next without a pause…In many ways the primary lead instrument is McCartney’s bass. He often recorded after everyone else left to perfect what he wanted. The album is nostalgic. Everyone had a character.” “It’s much easier to tell the truth behind a mask,” McCartney said. We’re played the track in full. Enriched by what we’ve just learned, it’s still unadulterated fun.

“Right from the first song, adding horns, we’re into postmodernism, a term that comes into play in the 1960s,” the host observes. Some of composer/ music theorist John Kramer’s tenets for postmodern music are: it challenges barriers between “high” and “low'”styles, shows disdain for structural unity,  does not want entire pieces to be tonal or cast in a prescribed formal mold,  considers technology not only as a way to preserve and transmit music but also as deeply implicated in the production and essence of music, embraces contradictions.

Many, if not most, fans interpreted “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” to be an acronym for LSD. In fact, Lennon’s son Julian had a classmate named Lucy on whom he had a crush. The boy drew a picture of her against stars with what would become the song title written above. A mashing of styles, it begins ethereally with a studio-affected Lowrey organ and a drone manifest by Harrison playing an Indian tambura (a large four-stringed lute used in Indian music) We listen with where-were-you-when mindset. It’s definitely spacey.

There was a period early on when The Beatles had to start a tour without Ringo who was ill. Drummer Jimmy Nichols sat in. Press would commonly ask the replacement, “How’s it going?” His response, “It’s getting better…” became notably darker in the song written by McCartney’s with Lennon’s interjections.

“Fixing a Hole” was attacked for being a metaphor for shooting up. In reality, McCartney had bought a ramshackle home in Scotland and the idea was likely at least partially literal. The artist himself said, in part, It’s about “wanting to be free enough to let my mind wander, let myself be artistic, let myself not sneer at avant-garde things…” The tune begins like music hall followed by contrasting minor key vocals. Though drums usually highlighted song differences, electric guitar is featured here. Since Ringo’s tracks were laid down first, he had a lot of time on his hands. “I thought it was a good record,” he later said, ”but you know it gave me the opportunity to learn to play chess.”

The poignant “She’s Leaving Home” was inspired by a true event in the newspapers. Years later, the girl in question realized the song was about her. Its avowed intention was to show the generation gap, a lack of understanding between parents raised during the Depression and WWII and children who were then given everything the previous generation had wanted. An outside string section was brought in.

An antique circus poster Lennon bought in a junk shop in Kent became impetus for “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” The songwriter said “it was a straight lift,” indicating that he pulled almost all the lyrics off the 1840’s advertisement. “I want to smell sawdust,” he told arranger George Martin. Distinction is achieved by an organ that sounds like accordion, harmonium and harmonica. Engineer Geoffrey Emerick was instructed to record calliope tunes and Sousa marches from the archives, make tapes of varying lengths, cut them up, throw them on the floor, then arbitrarily put the excerpts together. This is the cacophony we hear.

George Harrison is the only Beatle who played on “Within You, Without You” which was performed by The Eastern Music Circle of Finchley, London. Martin added western strings. “In some ways, this was the first full fruit of his studies. It was the beginning of popular awakening to World Music.” Paul McCartney wrote the music for “When I’m Sixty-Four” when he was 16, the lyrics in 1966 when his father turned 64. Its tongue-in-cheek sound was augmented by a clarinet quartet arranged by Martin who also provided the barrelhouse piano solo. McCartney’s amusement with the fact that American female traffic wardens were called meter maids inspired “Lovely Rita.” “To me a ‘maid’ is always a little sexy thing,” he commented.

For “Good Morning, Good Morning,” stimulated by a Kellogg’s Cornflakes commercial, animal sounds were taped in an order that has each successive creature capable of frightening or devouring its predecessor. How can you learn all this and not listen with new ears? “A Day in the Life” features reference to Guinness heir Tara Browne who killed herself in a car crash. A 41 piece orchestra was hired, dressed in funny hats and clown noses, then asked to fill in 24 measures with anything “it” wanted. The only direction were specifics on where the parentheses should open and close. Lennon requested a crescendo that would “rush to the end of the world.” It took from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. to lay down the loop. “That track is a wonderful accident of how things fit together.”

“EMI wanted something ordinary for the cover, but The Beatles hired pop artist Peter Blake who put them all in absurd uniforms. (The image of the band in suits are Madame Tussaud wax figures.) Sixty-two pictures of people they ostensibly admire are in the art. The record company was sure it would never get permission and be sued.

Paul circumnavigated its legal department going directly to the head of the company, Sir Joseph Lockwood, who agreed to let it run if they’d take out Gandhi in deference to the Indian market. In addition, the company was indemnified for 20 million dollars against suits by Marlon Brando and Tom Mix, celebrities it thought most likely to come after them. An associate started making phone calls (no email then) and, in the end, secured almost every permission.

Louis Rosen

Rosen reads some outstanding reviews. “Of course, there was backlash. The New York Times panned it. `A Day in the Life’ was banned from BBC Radio for being about drugs. `Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was repeatedly censored for assumed LSD connection. The John Birch Society declared the band a Communist plot.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band changed the recording business with both content and method. It creates a unified whole, but isn’t unified by anything but its creators’ anything goes attitude.”

All unattributed quotes are Louis Rosen

Click for more information about Louis Rosen’s lecture on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

About Alix Cohen (1706 Articles)
Alix Cohen is the recipient of ten New York Press Club Awards for work published on this venue. Her writing history began with poetry, segued into lyrics and took a commercial detour while holding executive positions in product development, merchandising, and design. A cultural sponge, she now turns her diverse personal and professional background to authoring pieces about culture/the arts with particular interest in artists/performers and entrepreneurs. Theater, music, art/design are lifelong areas of study and passion. She is a voting member of Drama Desk and Drama League. Alix’s professional experience in women’s fashion fuels writing in that area. Besides Woman Around Town, the journalist writes for Cabaret Scenes, Broadway World, TheaterLife, and Theater Pizzazz. Additional pieces have been published by The New York Post, The National Observer’s Playground Magazine, Pasadena Magazine, Times Square Chronicles, and ifashionnetwork. She lives in Manhattan. Of course.