‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ worked its magic

It was 1967, the year that brought the “Summer of Love,” when baby boomers came of age and fully embraced the power of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. I wasn’t born until the tail end of the postwar baby boom so I was only 7 going on 8 that year, and much more interested in toy guns and watching television.

For me, nothing could be more exciting than tuning into “Green Hornet” on a Friday night and watching Bruce Lee as Kato giving American kids their first real exposure to the martial art known as Jeet Kune Do.

One night, I happened to be watching ABC when an even more exciting program came on the air. It was a Beatles concert film recorded during their famous August 1965 show at Shea Stadium. For a number of reasons, it had taken until January 1967 for the documentary to premiere on American television.

I certainly knew who the Beatles were, but this was far different from the Saturday morning cartoon version of them I was used to seeing. I sat with my mouth agape, watching as all four, in matching tan Nehru suits, played their hearts out and whipped 55,000 fans, especially the girls, into a frenzy. The screaming, teary-eyed, well-dressed young ladies were everywhere, from the netting behind home plate, where they hung like pesky insects, all the way to the far reaches of the upper deck.

The smiling Beatles were having a blast and glistening with sweat as they briskly ran through a set list of early hits like “I Feel Fine” and “Ticket to Ride” and playing nothing more complicated than “Help!” I wondered if I might be able to do something like that one day. Little did I know as I watched from our living room in Pittsburgh on that cold winter night, that the Beatles were busy across the Atlantic, working on an album designed to blow that image right out of my head.

On June 2, 1967, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was released in the United States. It was an album that would be considered a masterpiece, the defining work of the Beatles post-touring period. But if the record had an immediate impact in Pittsburgh, I missed it. Kids like me were listening to KQV and WAMO in those days, but this was like no other Beatles music anyone had ever heard. It was dark and complex, with no traditional, radio-friendly hit singles. Most stations either ended up playing the whole album or none of it and in the Summer of ’67, we were more likely to hear “Pleasant Valley Sunday” by the Monkees.

So, several months went by and it was probably close to a year after it was released that I finally got to listen to Sgt. Pepper. My mom was dating a man who would eventually become a dad to me and my two brothers. One day we were visiting him at his hip, chic and trendy Shadyside apartment when he asked me if I wanted to play a record on the stereo. I rifled through a stack of LPs and there it was.

That amazingly colorful cover just seemed to jump out at me. The Beatles were front and center and looked both odd and cool in those day-glo military band uniforms. The wax figures of George, John, Ringo and Paul to the immediate left of them were kind of spooky looking but were clearly meant to symbolize the end of the Beatles’ buttoneddown, suit-and-tie era. And who were all those glamorous faces in the background? The only ones I recognized were W.C. Fields and Huntz Hall of the Bowery Boys.

I immediately decided my favorite song was “Lovely Rita” because I loved the part that sounded like kazoos playing. I also enjoyed the way the songs ran together, especially “Good Morning Good Morning” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise).” There were layers of sound and mysterious effects and Ringo’s drumming had a bold and bouncy quality to it. I found myself playing it over and over and hearing something new each time.

While it was a smash hit with a lot of us, Sgt. Pepper was not without its critics. Upon the album’s release in 1967, Richard Goldstein famously wrote in The New York Times that “[w]e need the Beatles, not as cloistered composers, but as companions. And they need us. In substituting the studio conservatory for an audience, they have ceased being folk artists, and the change is what makes their new album a monologue.”

Clearly, the Beatles no longer wanted to be “folk artists” and felt they could take us on a musical journey without standing in front of us. Mr. Goldstein was wrong. The Beatles no longer needed us. But we still needed them, then and now. Fifty years later, the Sgt. Pepper CD never leaves my car.

Paul Guggenheimer is a freelance writer and discussion moderator living in Pittsburgh (paulguggenheimer50@gmail.com).