Vacationing in France just before recording had started, McCartney slicked his hair back with Vaseline and wandered the streets in a fake mustache and clear-lens glasses, an experience he called “quite liberating.”įor all its experiments (“A Day in the Life”) and invocations of the counterculture (“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”), it’s probably the band’s most conservative album: the beer hall sing-alongs of the title track and “With a Little Help From My Friends,” the old-timey entertainments of “Being for the Benefit of Mister Kite!,” the domestic contentment of “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Like The Kinks circa “Waterloo Sunset” and The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and The Beach Boys of Smiley Smile, Sgt. In other words, they didn’t want to just exorcise the group that made “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” they wanted to smother them with a pillow. McCartney had even come up with an alter ego and pseudo-unifying backstory-a move Lennon later said only worked because the band said it worked.
Where The Beatles had once sought to distill and consolidate, now they were looking to expand. McCartney in particular had been fascinated by things like Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention’s 1966 debut, Freak Out!, a double album whose hodgepodge of songs, noise, skits, and sound gags mirrored conceptual art’s breaking of the painterly frame. Pepper’s, Bob Dylan had released Blonde on Blonde, an album so expansive it had to literally be pressed onto two records, while The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds stretched the dimensions and possibilities of the three-minute pop song. A few months before The Beatles were set to record Sgt.
Songs got longer, albums grew concepts, and the idea of the LP as a concise product meant to showcase a performer’s talents gave way to the suspicion that commercial concerns ultimately only served The Man. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band helped set the precedent that rock bands could (and should) do more or less whatever they wanted.
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