Gabriel Lugo Mrs. Shane Mcelrath Engl 202 April 15, 2017 Sgt. Pepper: the Album That Has Endured Music Reflects Th
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Gabriel Lugo Mrs. Shane McElrath Engl 202 April 15, 2017 Sgt. Pepper: The Album that has Endured Music reflects the feeling of the people from that time and this is evident in the music from the late 1960s. A time where the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Love Movement and the U.S. being in the Vietnam War were all happening at the same time. A band that was about to capture the feeling with their music were The Beatles. By 1967 the biggest band in the world was tired of being the biggest band in the world. The Beatles at this point had released seven studio albums, won two grammys, had a cartoon about them, been featured in films and had toured all around the world. The Beatles decided that maybe what they needed to do was just stick to working in the studio. With the decision to no longer tour they believed it would allow them to experiment further with their next album than they had before. They would experiment with not just the music but the album has a whole. The packaging, the inside and the cover art. Ideas that had been touched on in previous albums would be given more time to fully develop into an album that is still talked about over fifty years after its release. Sgt. Pepper is an album that has made people ask many questions over the years. Like why try to be a different band on this album? What affect them in coming up with ideas for the album? Why are certain people on the album cover? Is this truly the first great concept album? Did this capture the spirit of the times or is just remember so well, because it is another Beatles album. By analyzing the album I will be able to give my thoughts on all of these questions. It is an album that was made to be a cohesive image so the answer to one question affects the answer to another. The early stages of creating the album’s sound focused on technology and the music of peers. The 1960s were a time were recording technology was improving at a rapid pace allowing the group to experiment. The group, particularly Lennon and McCartney, also began experimenting with the sounds of avant-garde music, especially tape loops, reversed tapes and altered sounds achieved by altering the playback speed of the tapes. Inspired by avant-garde composers such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, The Beatles included heavy use of tape loops on their previous album Revolver which they would use once again of Sgt. Pepper(Spitz, 2005). The group was also listening to many different types of music at the time. George Harrison was still heavily interested in Indian music after a trip to India in 1965. He liked it so much he picked up the satar and had already used it on previous albums, Rubber Soul and Revolver. While John Lennon and Paul McCarthy cited The Beach Boys album Pet Sounds as a huge influence on Sgt. Pepper. Other artists they were listening too at the time include Bob Dylan, Love, and The Byrds. The used these different tastes in music to their advantage. McCartney would later recall in a 2004 interview: "But we were just doing our own thing. It wasn't that we set out to make groundbreaking albums. The reason those records were so musically diverse was that we all had very diverse tastes" (McCartney, p.247, 2004). The different types of tastes colliding on Sgt. Pepper would help make the record stand out from what other contemporaries were doing with pop and rock music. The Beatles had decided after taking a three month break from recording and touring it was time to get back into the studio. No in the band had a complete idea of what they wanted the album to be yet. McCartney recalls that on the trip back from vacation is when the first ideas for Sgt. Pepper started forming: “Yeah! Well, what really happened was I was coming back from a trip abroad with our roadie, Mal Evans, just the two of us together on the plane. And we were eating and he mumbled to me, asked me to pass the salt and pepper. And I misheard him. He said [mumbles] “saltandpepper”. I go, “Sergeant Pepper?” I thought he said, “Sergeant Pepper”. I went, “Oh! Wait a minute, that’s a great idea!” So we had a laugh about it, then I started thinking about Sergeant Pepper as a character. I thought it would be a very interesting idea for us to assume alter egos for this album we were about to make.”(McCartney, 2017) The idea was that by forming alter egos the band could think differently about the way they made a song. They wouldn’t have to make a song the way The Beatles would, but they way Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band would. This would help make the band feel more free and comfortable to do whatever they wanted on the album. They began recording the album on November 24, 1966 with the first song recorded being Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Lennon wasn’t satisfied with this version and the group returned to it in December were the mix two versions of the song together to become the one that is known today. "Strawberry Fields" did in fact serve as what producer George Martin proclaimed to be the "agenda of the whole album" (Heylin, p.117, 2007). Afterwards the band work on McCartney's song ‘Penny Lane’ the songs were released as singles in February of 1967 and since they were released as singles they would be included on the album. Martin would later regret that decide since he loved the tracks and believed they were something special. Then the work began for the rest of the album the song “When I’m Sixty-Four” was the first song made that would be included on the album. After that work on what would be the first two tracks of the album, the track “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “With a Little Help From My Friends” were meant to introduce the listen to the concept of the album. They introduce themselves as a different band and when transitioning into the next song they called Ringo Starr by his alter ego the leader of Sgt. Pepper Billy Shears. The first tracks were fitting into the idea that this album was kind of a stage show. Since every track on the album is mixed in a that it sounds like it connects to the next one, helping to make the stage show idea seem more clear. Even though in most the tracks on the album they do not sound like they are playing on a stage. The sound of playing on a track do not reappear till the end of the album on a reprise of the title track which leads into “A Day In the Life” which is like a goodbye from the band. A track that include an orchestra edited in way to make it appear as if 200 instruments were playing at once. The group finishing recording the songs in April of 1967. To finish the album Martin then had to sequence the songs into an order that made sense. He would later admit that the album seemed to fall together much by itself, "When it came to compiling the album, I tried to edit it together in a very tight format, and in a funny kind of way when I was editing it it almost grew by itself; it took on a life of its own" (p.150, 1994). An estimate 700 hours went into the recording of the album around 45 days of the band in studio and the production side of the album cost around £25,000 unheard amount for a pop record at the time. After completing the record work went into the album cover. The cover design alone cost £1500. They wanted the album cover to reflect the music inside. “The Beatles and their entourage took exceptional pains to create for the Sgt Pepper jacket a collage as colorful, imaginative and intriguing as the record itself”(Schaffner 1977, p. 81). The wanted to present themselves as not The Beatles of the past but as the Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band. McCartney came up with the idea to have them dress in military style clothing. “And yeah, I started doing drawings of how the band might look. I sort of got this military look thing going and one of my ideas was that they were being presented by the Lord Mayor of some Northern town in a park. And in the old days they used to have floral clocks, they called them. It was like a clock that was made out of flowers. So I did drawings of the floral clock and then, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band”, AKA The Beatles, getting an award.”(McCartney, 2017) The album cover was designed by album cover was designed by the pop artist Peter Blake and Jann Haworth from an ink drawing by McCartney. “Blake’s idea was that the band should be surrounded by its audience, which should include people the Beatles considered important or influential.”(Kozinn, 1999) They were surrounded by comedians, artists, musicians, actors, and gurus. Including people like Shirley Temple, Bob Dylan and Albert Einstein. They also include wax models of themselves. The were place right beside the band as the currently looked to help give contrast to how much they’ve changed.