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I submit for inclusion in our time capsule, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in June of 1967. This album is one of the most important works of its time because of its sonic brilliance, the lyrics and the messages within, as well as the band's immaculate crafting of a concept album.<!--more-->

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles is an album comprised of 13 tracks for a combined 40 minutes. The sound of the album compared to the band previous releases is a decidedly more experimental sound and more mature take on some of the same topics that the group had already explored, along with a few new questions to ponder thrown in as well. The album was in line with its contemporaries in a time of psychedelic sentiments and sounds that reflected the culture of the 60's and the 1967 'Summer of Love' in particular. The thing that set this work apart from the others of its time were the brilliant  musicality that the band displayed as well as the compelling songwriting, mostly by band members John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Tony Hicks, in an article for the Contra Costa Times, wrote, “The music inside mixed in classical psychedelia sounds, electronic effects, was full of offbeat instrumentation and arrangements, and somehow heightened the band’s personality and songwriting genius while sill being easy to follow. The record connected the listener to a perceived continuous performance, powerfully sequenced for one great moment to set up the next.” The result was apart from a musical masterpiece, a quintessential concept album. The Beatles were huge stars in the eyes of the world, and their popularity along with the quality of the music and the mood of the time made for a cultural phenomenon in the form of what is widely considered the greatest rock and roll album of all time.

The 1967 'Summer of Love' revolved around the expanding of the hippie counter culture, experimental drug use, and the general abandonment of the straight laced attitude of the 1950's. Bands like The Grateful Dead, The Doors, The Byrds, The Mamas and the Papas, and Jimi Hendrix along with The Beatles sang songs that provided the background for this shift in attitudes and documented the growth of new ideas and the questioning of authority of this era. In the July issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Mikal Gilmore recalled that "Sixties rock, along with the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements and a mass willingness to experiment with marijuana and LSD, had given young people a new sense of empowerment." The possibilities of how one could go about living life were expanding as boundaries of resisting established forms of authority were pushed. Gilmore goes on to state, "The Beatles had been introduced to marijuana by Bob Dylan in 1964 and had used the drug steadily since. But psychedelics -- which they were now taking -- proposed chancier, more intense possibilities. [...] Lennon felt his songwriting initially benefited from psychedelic experience." Former psychologist turned 1960s counterculture icon, Timothy Leary coined the catchphrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out" (Collis, Brunner, Halperin, Johnson, and McCaffery 1). He was a fixture in the culture that now was what the adolescent, teenybopper audience that The Beatles had begun to distance themselves from, has evolved into. The young people of this era had begun to grow up and experiment with new ideas which is part of what made the Sgt. Pepper's album such a huge phenomenon. The Beatles, the largest mainstream rock and roll act of the time, put out a classic album, expertly navigating the most pressing social issues of the time, at the exact time that their audience was ready to hear it.

The era of the 1960's revolved around the hippie counter culture and the ideas of free love. Along with these events came experimental drug use, an almost childish rebelliousness, and a spacey, hypnotic aesthetic related to the music of some of the most popular artists of the era. The band grasp of music and their ability and willingness to step outside of the normal boundaries of expression helped set them apart from their peers. In the studio, the band employed many innovative forms of technology into their creative process to expand the pallet of sounds that they used to create the Sgt. Pepper's album. They employed the idea of a concept to build the albums sound around that gave them even more room to experiment. In their book, The Beatles Anthology, Paul McCartney says, “We would be Sgt. Pepper’s band, and for the whole of the album we’d pretend to be someone else. So, when John walked up to the microphone to sing, it wouldn’t be the new John Lennon vocal, it would be whoever he was in this new group, his fantasy character. It liberated you - you could do anything when you got to the mike or on your guitar, because it wasn’t you.”

The work was received with wide acclaim, with many in the music media deeming it an instant classic. Sgt. Pepper's was a true studio album, as the band had stopped performing live, and dedicated themselves to making a meaningful work of art, and separate themselves from the Beatlemania that had dominated their careers from the inception. That's where the complexity of sounds in the album stem from. Today the album is widely believed to be the best rock and roll album of all time and is generally considered the band's seminal work. Today most of the novelty of Beatlemania has worn off, and their work is appreciated a little more than it was then. The albums detractors usually attributed the praise of the album to the hype surrounding the band, but the albums legacy has persevered through the years and still stands as one of the most popular musical works of all time.

I bought this album about a year ago because I had stumbled upon Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. I wanted to start my way down the list and experience all of these acclaimed albums over time. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the number one album on the list and I had always meant to get into The Beatles, so I decided to start there. On the first listen I loved a few songs, but as a person that favors listening to albums in their entirety, I wasn't impressed. Eventually, after acquiring a higher quality set of headphones, I went back to it, and it pulled me in quickly. Lately I've been listening to it at least a couple times a week, and while its still not my favorite album, I have begun to understand how this album as well as The Beatles as a band influenced the culture of their time, as well as many of the other artist that I enjoy from that era. This album inspired an era of musical artists that were only then being introduced to the recording technology that is standard today.

In 1967, as The Beatles were arguably at the top of their success, The Doors made their debut. Both bands were successful at crafting music that both centered around and centered on the biggest societal issues of the time. Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s lyrical artistry was rivaled by Jim Morrison’s psychedelic intellectualism. In a May 2003 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine, Parke Puterbaugh writes an article about The Doors’ debut album in which he states, “The Doors arrived in 1967, the same year as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; both were psychedelic touchstones and among the first major rock discs that truly stood as albums, rather than collections of songs. But whereas The Beatles took a basically sunny view of humanity, the Door’s debut offered the dark side of the moon.” In my opinion, The Doors debut was just as important as far as the impact of the album itself. I strongly considered submitting The Doors’ album for consideration to be included in our time capsule. The thing that put The Beatles over the top for me was the mainstream success that they were at the time and the accessibility that their notoriety had given them. In a TIME Magazine article titled “The Messengers”, the an unnamed author writes, “All the successes of the past two years were a foreshadowing of Sgt. Pepper, which more than anything dramatizes, note for note, word for word, the brilliance of the new Beatles.” Their popularity gave them access to as wide of a channel of listeners as any band had ever garnered. This made their album that much more impactful. They brought their new sounds and ideas to the large audience that they already had, as well as pulling in a more mature and enlightened audience that had dismissed them before.

Future generations should look back on this work and primarily view it as a seminal example of a complete musical work of art. The musicality of the band as well as the lyricism and the messages that they convey show how an album should ultimately be approached. Not matter how different the music might be, the ambition to express thoughts in a unique and sonically beautiful way should be held by all musical artists. Future generations should also note how successful Sgt. Pepper’s was as a concept album. Personally, I have heard and enjoyed many concept albums, Sgt. Pepper’s stands out, because of the musicality it possesses as well as the stylistic variance of the songs therein. The songs stand well on there own, and possess their own unique sounds that go together well as an album. That is a balance that is hard to achieve for any artist or band that is trying to convey a message or tell a story though a collection of songs, especially in an industry that even in 1967 was driven by singles. In an article titled <em>Rereading: Sgt. Pepper’s Words</em>, David Michaelis stated, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band revolutionized pop music as the airplane revolutionized warfare. Until Sgt. Pepper, the pop single dominated the recording industry.” There were many cases of radio stations playing the album in its entirety after its release. Every song on the album received radio play either by itself or in succession with other tracks from the album. This signifies how Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band contains some of the most important music of one of the most important musical eras, and deserves to be preserved for future generations to enjoy.

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<p style="text-align: center;">Works Cited</p>
Beatles, The. <em>The Beatles Anthology</em>. San Francisco: Chronicle Books Llc, 2002. Print.

Michaelis, David. "Rereading: Sgt. Pepper's Words." <em>American Scholar</em>. 2002: 130. Print.

Hicks, Tony. "'Sgt. Pepper's' Still Turns Us On: Beatles Album Forever Changed Way Music Made, Played." <em>Contra Costa Times</em> [Walnut Creek] 28 05 2007, n. pag. Print.

Gilmore, Mikal. "Making Sgt. Pepper." <em>Rolling Stone</em>. 12 2007: n. page. Print.

Collis, Clark, Rob Brunner, Shirey Halperin, Beth Johnson, and Damien McCaffery. "Summer of Love Revisited." <em>Entertainment Weekly</em>. 06 2007: n. page. Print.

"The Messengers." <em>Time</em>. 22 1967: n. page. Print.