May 19, 1967, Chapel Street, Belgravia, London
On May 19, 1967 the Belgravia home of Brian Epstein opened its doors to a select group of journalists, DJs and photographers. Unbeknown to his visitors, Brian had just spent several days at The Priory clinic recovering from his latest drug binge. After today’s soirée he would return to rehab to continue his recovery. No one suspected a thing, and anyway they were not there to check on Epstein’s wellbeing. They were there to hear an album that would change history. Its name—Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Present at the party would be the makers of this extraordinary work—The Beatles. The journalists and photographers (including a young American named Linda Eastman who would later become Mrs. Paul McCartney) were excited. Many of them knew the band personally and were sympathetic to them (hence their invitation to attend) but had not spoken to them for quite sometime.
Now that touring had stopped, access to the band had become limited. All anyone knew was that for the past five months they had been hidden away recording and that their last single, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” had not given them their customary number-one hit. As they sipped champagne and nibbled canapés, a noise suddenly came from above. The crowd looked up and there were The Beatles.
Paul was dressed in a gray pinstripe jacket and long scarf (very Small Faces actually), Ringo wore a thin pinstripe suit with huge lapels, George went for purple Edwardian-style jacket with a psychedelic patterned shirt but it was John who drew the most attention. Dressed in a green flowery frilly shirt, maroon cords, a sporran and bright yellow socks, he looked gaunt, he looked elsewhere, he looked like he was on something. Biographer Ray Coleman would later write, “John looked haggard, old, ill and hopelessly addicted to drugs. His eyes were glazed, his speech slow and slurred.”
The band posed for photos and then came down the stairs and started mingling with the guests. According to Coleman, Lennon kept enthusing about a record he could not stop playing. The only thing was he could not recall its name—it turned out to be “Whiter Shade Of Pale” by Procol Harum. Lennon was also worried about the reception the band’s audience would give their new work. “Do you think they will like it, or have we gone too far?” he kept asking. He would know the answer within the week, and he would not be disappointed.
Sgt. Pepper was inspired by the art of disguise. On tour the band always carried wigs, glasses and hats for anyone wishing to deceive the fans or the press and go walkabout. Paul was always the most successful at getting away with this ruse. In fact, in Sweden, so good was his disguise that he fooled George and the press pack into thinking he was a photographer.
McCartney had holidayed in France, gone unrecognized among the locals, thanks to his use of hats and sunglasses. His success at doing this sparked an idea. Given that The Beatles were so successful, given the enormous pressure on them to produce magic, what could they possibly do to satisfy the world? Answer: do what Paul had just done—adopt a disguise and create an alter-ego band. In one stroke that idea opened up the world—The Beatles no longer had to be The Beatles. They could be who or what they liked.
The Beatles’ debut album took a single day to make. By contrast Sgt. Pepper had taken five months. To turn their ideas into reality, they literally took over Abbey Road, working all kinds of hours, using all kinds of instruments and machines, turning the studio into their own personal playground to arrive at their dreams.
Interestingly, making their debut album in one of the other studios was a band called The Pink Floyd Sound. The Floyd were a major presence at London’s leading psychedelic club, The UFO on Tottenham Court Road. Their unique mix of English whimsy and lengthy freak-out had won them a large following among many of the capital’s serious LSD users. The Beatles would have taken note of The Floyd and their work, Lennon especially.
Despite frequently being under the influence of LSD, the drug had not yet subdued Lennon’s fierce competitive streak. The band’s demand that they forge ahead by creating new sounds had kept him busy composing songs such as “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” inspired by a picture his son Julian had drawn at nursery; “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!,” inspired by a 19th-century circus poster; and “Good Morning Good Morning,” inspired by a cornflakes commercial.
As with Revolver the band looked to George Martin for extraordinary effects to create music never heard before. For example, Lennon wanted a fairground organ to feature on “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!” and McCartney inquired whether it was possible to make his voice sound considerably younger on “When I’m Sixty-Four.” The pressure placed on George Martin and his assistants was enormous.
The climax of all this creativity began the day John walked into Abbey Road in mid-January with a new song entitled, “A Day In The Life.” This was his new “Tomorrow Never Knows.” To realize the song’s stunning potential, to really lift it out of the ordinary, 40 classical musicians were hired. Their job was to go from the bottom note of a scale to the top in just 24 bars. George Martin tried to explain. “The orchestra just couldn’t understand what George was talking about,” recalled Geoff Emerick. “It didn’t make any sense to them because they were all classically trained.”
It did not make much sense to them either when they were asked to don various masks. During the session, the band and entourage—also wearing novelty items such as joke spectacles and so on—wandered round with cameras, as did their guests for the night, which included the obligatory Mick and Keith from The Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, Donovan, and Mike Nesmith from The Monkees. The presence of the latter musician was quite symbolic.
The Monkees, a band manufactured as America’s answer to The Beatles, had supplanted The Fabs as the main object of UK female attention. The girls no longer swooned and screamed over The Fabs. They did that instead about The Monkees. In response to this shift, girls’ magazines such as Fab 208 had drastically reduced their coverage of The Beatles and filled their pages up with The Monkees instead. The Beatles had lost their place as the girls’ favorite pin-ups. They were no longer cute, they were—well—weird.
After five months of toil the band declared their work ready for release. That the album had been driven forward by McCartney is evident in his absolute determination to create a sleeve to match the music. His initial ideas were mapped out in sketches and drawings, depicting the band holding clarinets and trumpets and wearing military-style jackets. The location would be an Edwardian living room with a picture of people they admired pinned to the wall behind them.
The band in their famous Sgt. Pepper outfits, which were hired from theatrical outfitter Berman’s on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue.
McCartney’s next idea was to depict the band in front of huge floral clock being presented to a local Mayor with all their heroes and friends gathered round them. Paul showed these drawings to art dealer Robert Fraser who told him he should bring in a real artist to execute the idea. Peter Blake, one of the founders of the Pop Art movement, was suggested. Together, Blake and McCartney came up with an image of The Beatles standing in front of a collage of their heroes. EMI Records were not pleased when they heard the idea. It would mean getting clearance from everyone the band selected. McCartney remained unfazed. He argued that everyone would be happy to be on a Beatles cover. And he was right.
“They gave us an indemnity for 10 million dollars royalties in the light of any legal action and set about contacting people,” recalled EMI head, Sir Joseph Lockwood. Leonard Bernstein was the first to receive the telegram, and said he would be “delighted” to be on the cover. Astonishingly, considering The Beatles didn’t bother to contact everybody, there has never been a claim on that sleeve.
Because of the cover, because The Beatles touted the album as a concept LP, and because the sleeve broke new ground by carrying the lyrics—the first LP ever to do so—many believe that Sgt. Pepper was the album that turned pop into art. Despite Bob Dylan’s Blond On Blond and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper grabbed that honor thanks mainly to its presentation.
Despite the album’s weaknesses there is a mood and a style, a sense of purposeful imagination, which creates space and allows Sgt. Pepper to somehow triumph when it shouldn’t. An album that has as its second track, Ringo—never the world’s greatest vocalist—singing an average song (“With A Little Help From My Friends”) should not work. But it does because there is huge goodwill behind every part of this album and therein lies its secret. On Sgt. Pepper there is no darkness, no aggravation, just fairytale lands where newspaper taxis take you away, and songs that talk about bettering yourself, songs that conjure up fairgrounds and circuses, all childhood fantasies that stir the mind positively.
At the photo session for the cover, McCartney urged his bandmates to gaze into Michael Cooper’s camera and think the word “love.” He later fought EMI to have cut outs inserted, for the cardboard to be thicker than on other albums, for the sleeve to be in full color. And why? Because of his debt to music.
In the Barry Miles biography of McCartney, Many Years From Now (1997), Paul recalled how all of the Beatles had memories of being kids and taking their long-saved pocket money to the record department of Lewis’s where they would rifle through the 45s and 78s to find the gems. Paul recalls how he was burned by purchasing a record by The Ray Charles Orchestra, which he had assumed to be Ray Charles, whose records he loved. He was bitterly disappointed when the record turned out to be an instrumental. So when it came to Sgt. Pepper he was adamant that the band would create the record they had always wanted to make. “We’ll really do it all this time,” he said. “We’re in no hurry. There’s no tour we have got to be on, we’re getting stoned, we’re feeling great; we were being cool about this whole thing. We wanted it to be very very full of value.”
Paul meets Linda Eastman for the second time at the press launch for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at Brian Epstein’s house on May 19, 1967. Not long after, Paul and Linda became an item, eventually forming a marriage that would last until Linda’s tragic passing in 1998.
Sgt. Pepper spent a total of 27 weeks at number one. In 1968 it was nominated for seven Grammys and won four. To date, it has sold 32 million copies worldwide, which certainly answers John’s urgent question as to whether The Beatles had gone too far.
