It Was Twenty Years Ago Today (film)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  It Was Twenty Years Ago Today premiered on the 1st of June 1987, exactly two decades after the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The date was no coincidence. Director John Sheppard and Granada Television had built the entire film around that anniversary, treating the album not as a piece of music to be celebrated but as a detonator. What had it set off? And did anyone who lived through it actually agree on what happened?

  The film gathered survivors and witnesses: two Beatles, a poet, a political provocateur, a former Harvard professor turned counterculture prophet, and a dozen others. Their disagreements are as revealing as their memories. When the final question arrives, asking whether love really is all you need, the answers fracture in every direction. That argument, still unresolved in 1987, is what the documentary is really about.

• 2. A Summer With a Soundtrack

  ›

  Sociomusicologist Simon Frith described 1967 as the year that "it all came together", meaning the point when a decade's worth of generational restlessness finally crystallised into something visible and named. The Summer of Love had a geography: its main centre was the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, with parallel movements running in London, Los Angeles, New York, Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris.

  Historians typically mark its beginning at two events. One was the Monterey International Pop Festival, held in California on the 16th to the 18th of June 1967. The other was the release of Sgt. Pepper just weeks before. Derek Taylor, who served as consultant on the documentary and whose companion book accompanied its release, had co-founded the Monterey festival after building a career as a leading publicist in Los Angeles following his work with the Beatles in 1964.

  What Monterey demonstrated, and what the documentary argues Sgt. Pepper had already signalled, was that pop music had crossed a threshold. In the United States, that threshold had been marked in June 1966 by the appointment of Richard Goldstein as the first rock critic at The Village Voice. In April 1967, classical composer Leonard Bernstein hosted a television documentary called Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, explicitly seeking to explain contemporary pop music to a mainstream audience. The generational divide had become visible enough that the establishment felt it needed a translator.

• 3. The Film Sheppard Made

  ›

  John Sheppard came to this project with an unusual background for a documentary filmmaker. His earlier television work included directing musical performances on Ready Steady Go!, the 1960s pop programme, and making pioneering segments for Granada's World in Action current affairs shows. He described 1967 in terms that left no room for ambiguity: "That summer there was a social, sexual and musical revolution and Sgt. Pepper was at the heart of it."

  The film opens its account of the album's creation with ITN footage shot outside EMI Studios on the 20th of December 1966, early in the recording sessions. Each of the Beatles is asked on camera about rumours of a split following their retirement from live performance. The footage grounds the film in a specific, documented moment rather than mythology.

  Paul McCartney, recalling the album twenty years on, described how the band began incorporating what he called "the crazy life that we were living at the time into the music", and how they came to believe there were "not too many barriers, really." Allen Ginsberg, the American poet, provided a song-by-song account of Sgt. Pepper's themes, remarking on the joyous celebration of life expressed throughout. George Harrison, Timothy Leary, Taylor and Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman all offered their own retrospective readings.

• 4. The World the Film Reconstructs

  ›

  Beyond the Beatles, the documentary draws on a wide archive to rebuild 1967's texture. Footage of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Buffalo Springfield and Janis Joplin appears alongside the more overtly political material.

  The era's relationship with India is represented through archival film of Ravi Shankar and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose Transcendental Meditation technique the Beatles turned to as an alternative to LSD. Footage of the Human Be-In and hippie gatherings in Haight-Ashbury sits alongside anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. The ideological gap between generations is made concrete through clips of tourist coach trips around Haight-Ashbury, where outsiders came to observe the counterculture as if it were a zoo exhibit.

  The British dimension of the crackdown on the underground is represented through Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' drugs case, including film of Jagger arriving by helicopter, following his acquittal, to meet with figures including the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Times had responded to the arrests with an editorial titled "Who Breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?" The film also documents the attempted levitation of the Pentagon in Washington, DC, an event Hoffman initiated in October 1967. One of the film's most striking clips comes from Inside Pop, in which Bernstein turns to the camera and asks, referencing a character from Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man": "You know who Mr Jones is, don't you? Us!"

  The Beatles' own moment in the archive is their performance of "All You Need Is Love" on the Our World satellite broadcast, before an audience estimated at up to 400 million.

• 5. Agreement and Its Limits

  ›

  Michelle Phillips, the only female interviewee in the documentary, recalled the ethos of the Summer of Love in terms that were both expansive and specific: "We were going to take care of the world and its problems, and we were going to do it through a unified front of people who cared." Peter Coyote, who had been a countercultural playwright in 1967 and a member of the San Francisco Diggers, pushed back against the interpretation that the 1960s were merely "a drug-induced euphoria... a failure", and closed with a line from Dylan: "The times they are changing. They really are."

  The documentary's final question, posed to several interviewees, asked whether they believed the Beatles' contention that love is all you need. Harrison and McCartney agreed that it is. Ginsberg offered a qualification: "awareness is all you need... love stems from awareness." Hoffman disagreed flatly: "Justice is all you need."

  In a Q magazine interview in late 1987, Harrison was asked why he had been the only participant to agree with the sentiment without condition. He replied: "They all said All You Need Is Love but you also need such-and-such else. But... love is complete knowledge. If we all had total knowledge, then we would have complete love and, on that basis, everything is taken care of. It's a law of nature."

• 6. Reception and Dissent

  ›

  Richard Harrington of The Washington Post described the film as "much more than musical nostalgia or a Beatles memorial", calling it "a thoughtful, expansive look back at the times, the dreams, the rude realities and the untarnished aspirations of many of its key players." He singled out Harrison as offering the most insightful commentary.

  Writing in The New York Times, John Corry welcomed the insights of the two former Beatles but was cooler about Leary, Hoffman and Peter Fonda. He also questioned the film's central claim, noting a paradox: McCartney and Harrison themselves "claim a good deal less than their apostles."

  The sharpest dissent came from Jonathan Gross of the Toronto Star, who wrote that the documentary "unfortunately loses more perspective than it creates as it blindly slashes through the enchanted forest that was the '60s." He found the veteran interviewees out of touch and the core argument, that Sgt. Pepper was "ground-zero for the socio-political youthquakes of 1967", unconvincing: "Suffice to say the links are tenuous."

  Hoffman's verdict went in the opposite direction entirely. He called Sheppard's film "simply brilliant" and "the only thing I'm ever going to recommend to anybody about the 60s." The documentary's North American premiere had aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on the 3rd of June 1987, two days after the British broadcast. PBS showed it in the United States on the 11th of November. Meanwhile, the Sgt. Pepper album, reissued on compact disc to coincide with the anniversary, peaked at number 3 on the UK Albums Chart, prompting Taylor to tell an interviewer: "I have a feeling of dread that we have Beatlemania back again."