The "Best" Beatles Album — Was It Sgt. Pepper?

What was the "best" Beatles album? It seems like just about every new album by the Beatles was deemed "the best one yet" when it first came out. Looking back, every Beatles fan has his or her own favorite. I think most people would find their own personal favorite in the following list:

• Rubber Soul
• Revolver
• Sgt. Pepper
• The Beatles (The "White Album")
• Abbey Road

In this series of posts, I'm taking a look back at all five of those. In the previous post, it was Revolver. Right now, it's ...


Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt. Pepper revolutionized the world of popular music when it appeared in the United Kingdom on Thursday, June 1, 1967. It was released one day later in the United States. Time magazine, according to Wikipedia, "declared it 'a historic departure in the progress of music.'"

In 1967:

U.S. astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee were killed when fire broke out in their Apollo 1 spacecraft during a launch pad test. On January 3, 1967, Jack Ruby, American killer of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, died. On February 18, J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American physicist who was one of the "fathers of the atomic bomb," died. North Sea natural gas was first pumped ashore at Easington, East Riding of Yorkshire. U.S. labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa began serving an 8-year prison sentence for attempting to bribe a jury. Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, defected to the United States. New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison claimed he could "solve" the John F. Kennedy assassination; his theory as based on a conspiracy that he said was planned in New Orleans. JFK's body was moved to its permanent burial place at Arlington National Cemetery. 

At historically black Howard University in Washington, DC, students protesting the Vietnam War draft shouted down the head of the U.S. Selective Service System, Gen. Lewis Hershey, with cries of "America is the Black man's battleground!" Martin Luther King Jr. denounced the Vietnam War during a religious service in New York City. Boxer Muhammad Ali refused military service on religious grounds and was stripped of his heavyweight title and not allowed to fight again for three years. Six days of race rioting in Newark, NJ, left 26 dead. Nine days of race rioting in Detroit left 43 dead. Race riots spread to other U.S. cities. Thurgood Marshall was nominated as the first African American justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional all U.S. state laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

Murderer Richard Speck was sentenced to death in the electric chair for killing 8 student nurses in Chicago. The Six-Day War was fought between June 5 and 10 by Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt (known at the time as the United Arab Republic), Jordan, and Syria. The British Parliament decriminalized homosexuality.  A bill legalizing abortion passed in the British Parliament.

American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell was assassinated in Arlington, Virginia. Communist guerrilla leader Che Guevara was captured and executed in Bolivia. Joan Baez and 38 others were arrested in Oakland, CA, for blocking the entrance to a military induction center. When tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters marched in Washington, DC, poet Allen Ginsberg symbolically chanted to "levitate" the Pentagon. 

Navy pilot John McCain, now a U.S. senator, was shot down over North Vietnam and made a POW. U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, in opposition to the Vietnam War. In Cape Town, South Africa, Dr. Christiaan Barnard carried out the world's first heart transplant. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a bill establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Once again, the Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded. 

The Doors released their first album, The Doors. Later, the Doors would sing "Light My Fire" on the "Ed Sullivan Show" in the U.S. and would defy network censors by including the word "higher," seemingly a drug reference. On February 20, Kurt Cobain was born. The "Summer of Love" took place in San Francisco; it came in the wake of a "Human Be-In" in Golden Gate Park. The Velvet Underground's first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, was released in the United States. The classic "Pirates of the Caribbean" attraction opened at Disneyland in California. Elvis Presley and Priscilla Beaulieu were married in Las Vegas. The Jimi Hendrix Experience released their debut album, Are You Experienced. The three-day Monterey Pop Festival occurred in California. 400 million viewers watched "Our World," the first live, international, television broadcast via satellite; it featured the debut of the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love." 

The Bee Gees released their first album, Bee Gees' 1st, in 1967. Pink Floyd released their debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The original lineup of Fleetwood Mac made its live debut in the U.K. at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival. Beatles manager Brian Epstein was found dead of a barbiturate overdose in his locked bedroom. The final episode of the TV series "The Fugitive" aired in the U.S. The TV series "The Prisoner" had its world broadcast premiere in Canada. The musical "Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical" opened off-Broadway. The Jimi Hendrix Experience released their Axis: Bold as Love album. The only psychedelic rock album by the Rolling Stones, Their Satanic Majesties Request, was released. On October 3, American folk singer Woody Guthrie died; the father of folk musician Arlo Guthrie, he was an early hero of Bob Dylan's. The Beatles released their Magical Mystery Tour LP.

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The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper was manifestly a concept album. The idea was that the Beatles would wear uniforms and adopt the imaginary identities of four members of a once well-known marching band. This "Lonely Hearts Club" band, led by the fictional "Sgt. Pepper," would now cease "going in and out of style" and accordingly make its big comeback: "... may I introduce to you / The act you've known for all these years ... ." That song, the first track on the album, segued into "With A Little Help From My Friends," in which a sad-voiced band member, Billy Shears —portrayed by Ringo — tells us exactly how he "gets by" in life.

Sgt. Pepper was the first Beatles album to be issued with the same song lineup in the U.S. as in the U.K.:

1. Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
2. With A Little Help From My Friends
3. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
4. Getting Better
5. Fixing A Hole
6. She's Leaving Home
7. Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!
8. Within You Without You
9. When I'm Sixty-Four
10. Lovely Rita
11. Good Morning Good Morning
12. Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
13. A Day In The Life

The rest of songs in the lineup, starting with "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," did not exactly carry forward the original idea of portraying members of Sgt. Pepper's fictional band. Yet all were exceptional songs that showcased musical ideas never before used in popular music. Often the songs segued aurally from one to the next, and they all seemed to form a whole greater than the sum of the parts. Along the way, you heard (says Wikipedia) "a range of stylistic influences, including vaudeville, circus, music hall, avant-garde, and Western and Indian classical music."

Once you got to the final track on the album, "A Day In The Life," you were reveling in ecstasy, thinking it couldn't get much better than this. But then it did get better.

"A Day In The Life" commented on news stories John Lennon had read in the newspaper: "a lucky man who made the grade" and "blew his mind out in a car"; later "a crowd of people turned away," even though "the English army had just won the war." After several verses like that, John indicates "I'd love to turn you on" and steps aside, and we hear a seeming non sequitur from Paul:

Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, I noticed I was late 

Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream

So both song motifs turned out to be about drugs! Then John returns to his main theme:

I read the news today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall 

And again he sings:

I'd love to turn you on ...

Then comes a musical cacophony, followed by a slowly fading piano chord ... and finally some incomprehensible voices occupying the "inner groove" of the vinyl LP. There have been many theories about who is saying what in that gobbledygook groove; I have no real thoughts on the matter. However, the main idea was to make the record player keep playing this incomprehensible hash over and over, instead of lifting the tone arm and stopping play of the record. Yet the record player I used would quit playing the record even before reaching the inner groove, so I had no idea of this behavior until years later. And on a CD or digital version of the recording, there is of course no mechanical way to keep playing the "inner groove" over and over and over ...

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Sgt. Pepper was the first popular music LP whose (back) cover featured song lyrics:

Notice that the photo of Paul has him with his back to the camera. In 1966 a rumor had started that Paul was dead and had been replaced by a near-lookalike. Many fans thought this photo, inasmuch as it didn't show his face,  confirmed that!

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Now: I invite you to listen to all the great stuff on this album ...