From pop group to studio experimenters
The Beatles’ psychedelic phase did not begin in 1967. Its roots lie in the period from late 1965 to 1966, when their records began to sound unlike their earlier work. Rubber Soul, released in December 1965, showed a more reflective songwriting style and new instrumental colours. Revolver, which appeared in August 1966, went much further. Its closing song, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, was built on tape loops, a drone and a heavily treated vocal, and is often named as an early example of psychedelic experimentation in British pop. The same album included orchestral writing, a song for a string octet and a children’s song about a yellow submarine, which shows how varied the band’s interests had become.
The term psychedelic is usually linked with hallucinogenic drugs, in particular LSD, and members of the group did take them in the mid-1960s. But the sound cannot be reduced to drug use. It also came from curiosity about Indian music, modern classical composition, tape techniques and the arts scene in London.
The end of touring
In August 1966 the Beatles gave what turned out to be their last paid concert, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on 29 August. Several things led to the decision: poor sound at huge venues in which the band could barely hear themselves, the physical strain of travel, safety worries after a difficult tour of the Philippines and the United States earlier that summer, and controversy over remarks by John Lennon about Christianity. The band also wanted to make records that could not be reproduced on stage with four musicians.
Once they were off the road, they gained time. They took a break, and then, from late 1966, began work on the album that became Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The sessions lasted around five months.
Sgt. Pepper
The Sgt. Pepper album was released in the UK at the end of May 1967 (some sources give 1 June) and in the United States in early June. It was recorded at Abbey Road under George Martin, using four-track tape machines and a great deal of ingenuity. Many writers have cited its sound as a high point of studio craft. The concept that the Beatles were an imaginary band, led by Sgt. Pepper, gave them a way to step away from their public identity. In practice the idea was loose, appearing mainly in the title track, its reprise and the framing of the album.
The songs range widely: “With a Little Help from My Friends”, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, “Getting Better”, “Fixing a Hole”, “When I’m Sixty-Four”, “Lovely Rita”, Harrison’s Indian-influenced “Within You Without You” and the final “A Day in the Life”. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was widely taken to be a coded reference to LSD, because of the initials. Lennon said that the title came from a drawing by his young son Julian, and the band consistently denied any intention. Both claims have been repeated for decades.
The album was an immediate commercial success and received strong reviews, though a few critics were more guarded. At the Grammy Awards in early 1968, it won Album of the Year, which was the first time that award had gone to a rock album.
The cover
The sleeve was designed by artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth with the band. It shows the four in brightly coloured band uniforms, standing in front of a crowd of cut-outs and wax figures of famous people, with flowers arranged in the foreground. The collage of figures included writers, film stars, philosophers and musicians, among them Bob Dylan, and it also shows wax models of the Beatles from the Madame Tussauds museum. A few suggested faces were left out, and the choice of people remains much discussed.
Equally unusual was the packaging. The lyrics were printed on the back, there was a cut-out insert, and the record had no gaps between some of the tracks. Together these made the album seem like a complete object, and they helped establish the album sleeve as an art form in its own right.
A moment shared with others
The Beatles were not alone. In San Francisco, bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were developing their own psychedelic rock, with the Haight-Ashbury district as a gathering place. The Summer of Love, as the season of 1967 came to be called, was partly a media creation but drew real numbers of young people, and Sgt. Pepper became closely associated with it, even though it was made in London and was less rooted in the American scene. In June, the Monterey Pop Festival offered another showcase for the music. The wider American counterculture was moving in the same direction, and London had its own underground scene built around clubs and magazines.
George Harrison visited Haight-Ashbury in August 1967 and reportedly came away disillusioned by what he saw as the poor conditions and drug use, a reminder that the ideals of the period did not always match the reality.
After the summer
Brian Epstein died in late August 1967, and the group’s direction became less certain. The television film Magical Mystery Tour followed in December. In 1968 the band travelled to India to study meditation, a trip that produced many of the songs for the double album known as the White Album. The sound of that record is leaner and more varied, and in some respects a rejection of the elaborate production of Sgt. Pepper.
It is tempting to call 1967 the high point of the group’s psychedelic phase and to see everything afterward as a retreat. A more careful view is that their approach continued to change, and that the studio habits they developed in this period remained part of their work until the end. The legacy of Sgt. Pepper is still argued over, with some critics ranking it very highly and others preferring Revolver or Abbey Road, but the album remains the central document of the band’s psychedelic years.