Amen. The grey men, the souldead ones, have taken over again, and we need all the optimism we can get. And the Beatles, all in all, were an adrenalin rush of optimism, coming on Sullivan two months after Kennedy was murdered, and taking us all along on an all too brief mystery tour. I still believe it, too, all of it, despite the heaviness and heartache in the world. I still play in two bands at 60, and there isn't a republikan to be found anywhere in our family. Change is not only possible; it's inevitable. The question is, are we going to be agents of change, or victims of it? "we were talking about the space between us all/ and the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion/never glimpse the truth/'til it's far too late and they pass away." If you have a pulse, it's not too late.

what a pointless and terrible "conversation". painful.

it might have been a bit more illuminating to have a couple of musicians talking about one of the finest collections of pop composition and arranging of all time. you would be hard pressed to find a single serious song writer (not just lyric writer, they have to write music as well) who could say anything negative about this album.

really poor choice of critics there guys. they blather generalities about "the 60s" and miss the entire point.

When I was 15, in early 1978, that I purchased an album for the first time -- Sgt. Pepper's. Yep, I became a Beatlemaniac several years after they broke up. To be honest, I didn't even become aware of them until circa 1972 when I saw Yellow Submarine on tv. My parents were of the same age range as the Beatles -- my dad was born in 1940, same year as John & Ringo, and mom was born on June 18, 1943, exactly a year after Paul and just a few months after George. But my dad was into country music and my mom mostly listened to very easy listening, hit songs as performed by anyone but the artists who made them famous. They actually had several Jim Nabors albums. I only really started to listen to rock music in the my early teens, listening to Top-40 stations that played a mix of all sorts of stuff, old and new, and I heard and loved a lot of Beatles' songs I heard on the radio even before I realized they were Beatles songs. I also got to love the old songs I heard by the Stones, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, CCR, the Kinks and on and on, more than most of what was new on the radio in the late 1970s -- I loved Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, but the Bee Gees didn't do much for me. Personally, I would agree that Rubber Soul, Revolver and the White Album are in many ways better than Sgt. Pepper, but I still love it, maybe for personal nastolgiac reasons that have nothing to do with 1967 (I was a Navy brat living in Japan that year). There were many great albums released during that era, including many unjustly overlooked ones, such as the Kinks' wonderful Face to Face, from 1966. It was an era when artists were learning from and influencing one another in numerous ways, lyrically and musically in ways that would have seemed outrageous just a few years before. Sgt. Pepper was just the most high profile exemplar of the new, more mature sensibility of rock, a signal that what had formerly been dismissed as just a "passing fad" could produce lasting art, and in fact had been doing so all along. None of us alive now can know for certain what will still be highly regarded 100 or, heck, 1000 years from now, assuming human civilization hasn't wiped itself out by then. At the least, however, the fact that so many of those albums from over 4 decades ago, even ones that didn't sell so well at the time (like those Kinks' or Velvet Underground lps) are still available and are still purchased by old and new fans alike proves they have had lasting value.

re: "Sgt Pepper":

you had to be there.

I loved, loved, loved Sgt. Pepper when I was a kid. But damn if it doesn't do a damn thing for me these days. I think I've died a bit.

The problem with a lot music criticism is that it has no sense of time or place. In the summer of 1967 I was 20 years old and on top of the world. Khe Sanh and Tet hadn't happened yet, and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were still alive. There was a spirit of optimism that we could change the world and make it a better place. Sgt. Pepper captured that spirit. That's why, even though I was never a big-time Beatles fan, I can still remember exactly where I was and what I was doing the first time I heard it playing on somebody's stereo. Sure, if I want to listen to the Beatles now, I'll usually reach for Abbey Road or Revolver. But if I really need a break from post-9/11 paranoia, Sgt. Pepper can still take me back to a time when the future looked a whole lot better than it does today.

This all too brief article reveals a certain pathology in the music-listening community, something which I will call Grounder-Breaker Backlash. The pattern is this:

1. Ground breaking album is created

2. Due to the stature of the band, historical accident, placement in a movie soundtrack, knowing the right people, etc. far more people know about the album than would normally know about a ground breaking album.

3. LOTS of people with no experience in ground breaking music buy album.

4. People listen to album or the band's following album later and discover to their surprise that they can't: Dance to it, Feel romantic to it, Get in touch with the artists' feelings, Go "Woooo" while it's playing, "Rock out". These are all things they can do while listening to other albums with comparable sales.

5. Listeners consider album or atists' following album as "overrated" and feel more bitterly towards it than if it were just an experimental album they had not bought.

Some victims of this tendency:

Beatles

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Radiohead

Pavement

Tortoise

It's weird when this happens, ideally a ground breaking album is heard by those it's meant for. This kind of perfect balance has been achieved by say Built to Spill or the Pixies or My Bloody Valentine. But when an album achieves both critical and commercial success, many are confused about how to listen to it. Sgt Peppers is the ultimate example of this. When a list of the reasons it's important are listed, they are all music geek reasons: Song structure, concept album, sound production, unusual instruments and influences, tape loops etc. That such an album should also be known by everyone alive in the western world is actually kind of odd.