Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

• 1. Introduction

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  Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band arrived on the 26th of May 1967, and within days it was playing from open windows across London at six in the morning while neighbours listened without complaint. That is how Derek Taylor, the Beatles' friend and former press agent, remembered it: the four members of the band had taken an acetate disc of the finished record to an American singer's flat off King's Road in Chelsea, set speakers in the open window frames, and turned the volume up. What they broadcast that morning was not just an album. It was something closer to a shared dream.

  The record is the Beatles' eighth studio album, and it entered the world already carrying enormous expectations. The group had permanently retired from touring at the end of August 1966 and had spent three months apart, pursuing individual lives. When they reconvened, what they built together in the studios of EMI would spend 27 weeks at number one on the UK chart and 15 weeks at the top in the United States. It would win four Grammy Awards in 1968, including Album of the Year, the first rock LP ever to receive that honour. More than 32 million copies had been sold worldwide as of 2011.

  But the numbers only hint at what happened. Rolling Stone's Langdon Winner wrote that the week Sgt. Pepper was released came closer to unifying Western civilization than anything since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. What drove four musicians from Liverpool to build something of that scale? And what were they actually trying to do?

• 2. A Group Reaching Its Limit

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  By late 1965, John Lennon had reached a clear conclusion about what the Beatles' live performances had become. In his view, they could send out four waxworks and the crowds would be satisfied, because "Beatles concerts are nothing to do with music anymore. They're just bloody tribal rites."

  The final confirmation came during the tour of 1966. Two days after finishing Revolver, the group set off for West Germany and then Japan, where 35,000 police were mobilised to protect them and they were transported between hotels and venues in armoured vehicles. In the Philippines, they were threatened and physically manhandled for failing to visit First Lady Imelda Marcos. Back in the United States, Lennon's earlier remark about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus drew protests across the Bible Belt. A public apology eased tensions, but the August US tour was marked by reduced ticket sales compared with their record attendances in 1965. Not a single song from the just-released Revolver was attempted on stage; the arrangements were impossible to reproduce with the limitations of their two-guitars-bass-and-drums lineup.

  George Harrison informed manager Brian Epstein that he was leaving the band, and was persuaded to stay only on the assurance that there would be no more tours. The three-month break that followed sent each Beatle in a different direction. Harrison spent six weeks in India studying sitar under Ravi Shankar. Lennon acted in the film How I Won the War and attended art events, including one at the Indica Gallery where he met Yoko Ono. Paul McCartney collaborated with producer George Martin on the soundtrack for the film The Family Way and holidayed in Kenya with tour manager Mal Evans. Ringo Starr stayed home with his wife Maureen and son Zak.

  When McCartney and Evans flew back from Kenya in November 1966, McCartney had an idea forming: a song involving an Edwardian-era military band. Evans invented a name for the fictional group in the style of contemporary San Francisco acts such as Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service. That name, and that idea, would become the conceptual seed of everything that followed.

• 3. The Studio as a New Instrument

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  Sessions began on the 24th of November 1966 in Studio Two at EMI Studios, the first time the four Beatles had come together since September. They arrived with a nearly limitless recording budget, no absolute deadline, and open-ended booking that let them start at 7 pm and work as late as they chose.

  The album was recorded entirely on four-track equipment, because eight-track tape recorders were not yet operational in commercial studios in London. To work around this constraint, engineer Geoff Emerick and producer George Martin made extensive use of reduction mixing, combining tracks from one recorder and dubbing them down onto a master machine to create the effect of a virtual multitrack studio. EMI's Studer J37 machines proved well suited to this, producing high-quality recordings that minimised the noise that reduction mixing typically introduces.

  Among the specific innovations that emerged from the sessions: engineer Ken Townsend devised a method of synchronising two separate four-track recorders using a 50 Hz control signal, used to layer the orchestral overdub on "A Day in the Life" against the Beatles' backing track. Townsend also invented the direct injection technique used on the album's title track, allowing McCartney's bass to be plugged directly into the recording console, which in the view of author Kenneth Womack afforded the bass part richer textures and tonal clarity. Automatic double tracking, or ADT, a system Townsend had invented during the Revolver sessions specifically for the Beatles, was used on several songs.

  Varispeeding, the deliberate manipulation of tape speed, appears prominently throughout the record. On "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", the tape speed during the recording of Lennon's vocals was reduced from 50 cycles per second to 45, producing a higher and thinner-sounding track when played back at normal speed. Martin cites that song as having the most variations of tape speed on the album. On "When I'm Sixty-Four", varispeeding raised the pitch by a semitone to make McCartney sound younger.

  Emerick estimates the group spent 700 hours on the LP, more than 30 times the hours spent on Please Please Me, the first Beatles album, which cost £400 to produce. The final cost of Sgt. Pepper was approximately £25,000. He recalls that during the Revolver sessions, the team had "got used to being asked to do the impossible, and we knew that the word 'no' didn't exist in the Beatles' vocabulary." That disposition carried directly into Sgt. Pepper.

• 4. The Songs and What They Carried

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  Lennon's inspiration for "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" came from an 1843 circus poster for Pablo Fanque that he purchased at an antique shop in Kent on the day of filming the promotional clip for "Strawberry Fields Forever". Tasked by Lennon to make the production so vividly atmospheric that listeners could smell the sawdust, Martin and Emerick assembled a sound collage from randomly arranged recordings of harmoniums, harmonicas and calliopes.

  "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" drew Lennon's title from a pastel drawing made by his four-year-old son Julian, though widespread suspicion that the title concealed a reference to LSD was difficult to dispel. The atmosphere of the song was shaped by a hallucinatory chapter from Lewis Carroll's 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, a favourite of Lennon's since childhood. Harrison's lead guitar on the track doubles Lennon's vocal over the verses in the style of a sarangi player accompanying an Indian khyal singer.

  "She's Leaving Home" was inspired by a piece in the Daily Mail about teenage runaways, and is the first track on the album to abandon guitars and drums entirely, featuring a string nonet and harp. Music historian Doyle Greene identifies it as the first song on Sgt. Pepper to address the crisis of middle-class life in the late 1960s, and notes its surprisingly conservative sentiments given McCartney's deep involvement in the London avant-garde scene.

  Lennon wrote "Good Morning Good Morning" after watching a television commercial for Kellogg's Corn Flakes and adapting its jingle. The fade-out features a series of animal sounds sequenced, at Lennon's specific request, so that each successive animal could conceivably scare or devour the preceding one. A chicken's cluck at the end overlaps with a stray guitar note at the start of the next track.

  Harrison's "Within You Without You" was recorded with London-based Indian musicians from the Asian Music Circle; none of the other Beatles played on it. The song's pitch derives from the eastern Khamaj scale, related to the Mixolydian mode in the West. Author Ian MacDonald considers it "the most distant departure from the staple Beatles sound in their discography".

  "A Day in the Life" closes the album. Lennon drew its lyrics from a Daily Mail report about potholes in the Lancashire town of Blackburn and an article on the death of Beatles friend and Guinness heir Tara Browne. The final thunderous piano chord was produced by recording Lennon, Starr, McCartney and tour manager Mal Evans simultaneously striking an E major chord on three separate pianos, with Martin adding a harmonium. A 15-kilohertz tone follows, added at Lennon's suggestion so that it would annoy dogs. Shortly before the album's release, the BBC banned the song from British radio, citing the phrase "I'd love to turn you on" as likely to encourage a permissive attitude toward drug-taking.

• 5. The Cover and Its Crowd

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  Pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth designed the album cover. Blake described the central idea as placing the Beatles just after a fictional park concert, surrounded by the crowd who had just watched them, with cardboard cut-outs making it possible for that crowd to include almost anyone.

  Art director Robert Fraser and photographer Michael Cooper produced the shoot. The result was a colourful tableau featuring the Beatles in satin military-style uniforms manufactured by the London theatrical costumer M. Berman Ltd., each of them wearing heavy moustaches, which Harrison had first grown as a disguise during his visit to India. Wax sculptures of the band in their Beatlemania-era suits and moptop haircuts, borrowed from Madame Tussauds, stand alongside the living musicians.

  The final collage included 57 photographs and nine waxworks. Among those represented were writers H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde and Dylan Thomas; philosophers and scientists Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung; film stars Marlon Brando, Tyrone Power, Tony Curtis, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and Marilyn Monroe; singers Bob Dylan and Bobby Breen; boxer Sonny Liston; and footballer Albert Stubbins. Harrison chose the Self-Realization Fellowship gurus Mahavatar Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, Sri Yukteswar and Paramahansa Yogananda. Stockhausen and Lewis Carroll were also included. EMI rejected Lennon's request for images of Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ, and Harrison's suggestion of Mahatma Gandhi.

  When McCartney was asked why Elvis Presley was absent, he replied: "Elvis was too important and too far above the rest even to mention."

  The cover cost nearly £3,000, at a time when album covers typically cost around £50. The album's lyrics were printed in full on the back, the first time this had been done on a rock LP. The inner sleeve, designed by the Dutch collective the Fool, replaced the standard white paper with an abstract pattern of maroon, red, pink and white waves. A bonus sheet of cardboard cut-outs, also designed by Blake and Haworth, included a fake moustache, sergeant stripes, lapel badges and a stand-up figure of the band.

• 6. Reception and Lasting Reach

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  Norrie Drummond of the NME noted that before the launch party, the Beatles had been "virtually incommunicado" for close to a year, and a national newspaper had complained they were "contemplative, secretive and exclusive". Music journalist Ray Coleman recalled that Lennon at the party looked "haggard, old, ill" and was clearly under the influence of drugs. Biographer Howard Sounes compared the group's presence to a gathering of the British royal family.

  The album sold 250,000 copies in the UK during its first seven days on sale. In the United States, according to figures published by former Capitol executive David Kronemyer, it had sold 2,360,423 copies by the 31st of December 1967, and 3,372,581 copies by the end of the decade. With 2.5 million copies sold within three months of release, its initial commercial success exceeded that of all previous Beatles albums.

  Critical response was almost uniformly positive. Tom Phillips in The Village Voice called it "the most ambitious and most successful record album ever issued". Wilfrid Mellers, writing in New Statesman, praised its elevation of pop music to fine art. Kenneth Tynan, the theatre critic for The Times, called it "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation". Jack Kroll in Newsweek labelled it a "masterpiece" and compared "A Day in the Life" to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The New Yorker placed the Beatles alongside Duke Ellington as artists who operated "in that special territory where entertainment slips into art".

  The lone prominent dissenter was Richard Goldstein, who wrote in The New York Times that the album was "an album of special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent". His review was so widely attacked that four days later The Village Voice published a highly favourable counter-review, and Goldstein spent months justifying his position, including writing a defence for the Voice in July. Composer Ned Rorem, responding to Goldstein in The New York Review of Books, credited the Beatles with a "magic of genius" akin to Mozart.

  American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg said of the album: "After the apocalypse of Hitler and the apocalypse of the Bomb, there was here an exclamation of joy, the rediscovery of joy and what it is to be alive." The album's impact was felt directly at the Monterey International Pop Festival, held over 16-the 18th of June in county fairgrounds south of San Francisco, where Sgt. Pepper played from kiosks and stands, and festival staff wore badges carrying Lennon's lyric "A splendid time is guaranteed for all". In 2003, the Library of Congress inducted the album into the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".