Letters to the Editor
stoprobbers
Published Letters: 2
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Your approach to the album misses the point, because it misses the context
[Read the article: Why is "Sgt. Pepper" so overhyped?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think you would be hard-pressed to find a music scholar, or even an old-school music fan, who places Sgt. Pepper at the top of the list for Beatles albums, based on music alone. The styles, while ground-breaking for various reasons at the time, sound archaic and even trite now ("A Day in the Life" excepted, for obvious reasons). But the music of "Sgt. Pepper" is not what places it at the top of these "Top 100 Albums in Rock" lists. What the album did, as a cultural force, is what makes it so important and still so relevant.
When the Beatles released "Sgt. Pepper" on June 8, 1967 (*NOT* June 1, as everyone seems to remember; the album was only released to radio stations for play on June 1, exactly one week before it would be in stores), they shook the very foundations of American youth culture. Let's break it down:
1. Recording techniques. EMI in England, in 1967, had not yet switched over to the 8-track mixing boards which Tom Dowd had invented for Atlantic Records, and was still using 4-track boards. "Sgt. Pepper" is a 16 track album. To do that, Geoff Emerick and George Martin recorded four tracks, merged them into one track on a re-recordable master, then repeated the process three more times. The three re-recordable masters were then compressed into one final master. It had never been done before, and hasn't been done since -- Tom Dowd, after meeting Martin shortly after "Pepper"'s release, traveled to England to install his 8-track boards for EMI.
2. The event. Greil Marcus wrote, back in the 1970s: "It was only in the context of the Beatles event that their music was perceived for what it was. The event was a pop explosion; the second, and thus far the last, rock 'n roll has produced. A pop explosion is an irresistable cultural explosions that cuts across lines of class and race...and, most crucially, divides society itself by age. The surface of daily life...is affected with such force that deep and substansive chages in the way large numbers of people think and act take place." When the Beatles released "Sgt. Pepper," Brian Epstein told radio stations that they would be allowed to play the album a full week before it could be bought (following several leaks of unfinished tracks), he tacked on a brilliant caveat: it would be released at midnight, and any station playing it even one second beore midnight would lose the right to play it at all.
Recalls Marcus: "The fact that many stations habitually went off the air at Sunday midnight in order to service their transmitters was of no consequence...At any rate, the stations stayed on. They played the record all night and all the next day, vying to see which station could play it the longest, putting in calls to John and Paul in London that never went through, tracking every last second of the endless final chord of "A Day in the Life"...generating an unprecedented sense of public euphoria, excitement, satisfaction and joy... Sgt. Pepper, as the most brilliantly orchestrated manipulation of a cultural audience in pop history, was no less than a small pop explosion in and of itself."
On June 1, 1967, America quite literally stopped in its tracks for this album. THAT is why Sgt. Pepper is important, THAT is why it tops those lists. It may have become musically more and more distant, but the fact remains that America before Sgt. Pepper was a different American than what came after it. And there is no other band, and no other album, that can even remotely touch that.
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I'm surprised no one mentioned Schiphol!
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I rather like Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. Nevermind that it's my gateway to my favorite city, but it's also beautifully modern, easy to navigate, and very convenient to the city itself. I've never had less than an excellent experience there.