As an aside, I once read (no cite) that Brian Wilson was recovering from a bout of depression, heard SPLHCB, and had a relapse.
Sure. but few thought it was the best song on the album when it came out. It was a curiosity, not a song anyone ever listed as the best.
I figure ADITL doesn’t need my vote, and like someone else said, it’s easy to appreciate it, but it’s not my favorite. I’m going to go with Getting Better. Fixing a Hole was a close runner up.
Here’s not-quite-“fun” fact, more a “make you feel incredibly untalented” fact: “When I’m Sixty-Four” was written early on in Paul McCartney’s career. How early, you ask? Maybe he was twenty five? Twenty, at the youngest?
He was sixteen. :eek:
Apparently, they’d never recorded it previous to Sgt. Pepper because, at first, their image was too much of a rock band to accommodate such a “soft” piece, and after a while they kind of forgot about it.
One of the weakest Beatles albums, in my opinion. Lucy in the sky with Diamonds is a great song along with Getting Better.
It’s critic-driven, I think. Having seen retrospectives of the album over the years, I get the sense more and more people started to write and talk about A Day in the Life as a groundbreaking song that nobody else in rock music would have attempted: the foreboding material John gets out of reading the morning newspaper, Paul’s complementary, lighthearted sections about the same morning routine, the strange, dreamy vocal parts, and the crazy orchestral stuff. I think John and Paul combined two unfinished pieces a few different times, but this time they wound up with something that didn’t feel like any other Beatles song before it.
Interesting. I never sat down and tried to make a playlist with those songs added (or with two others taken out), but it might be fun.
::Head explodes::
I had this on in the car one day and my wife blurts out “Did anybody ever tell them that this album is just plain weird? It’s not even rock and roll!”
No, honey. No it’s not.
It is, however, my favorite Beatles album and my favorite album of all time. I have no problem with it being called the greatest album in rock and roll history even though it rocks less than most.
ADITL is the obvious answer, a song that brings chills to my spine 30+ years after my first hearing, and I was born on the day Ringo laid the vocal track for With a Little Help From My Friends (as well as the same day they shot the album cover), but for my dollar, the most “Sergeant Peppery” song is Being For the Benefit of Mister Kite, the song over which, while I was singing along to it, my wife made the above remark.
I’m astonished to see two other votes for Within You Without You. All these years I’ve thought I was alone.
Another “damn, I’ve gotta choose ONE?!” album.
I went with “She’s Leaving Home”, but “Within You Without You”, “A Day in the Life” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” were strong contenders.
Ditto
“Fixing a Hole” would be my second choice.
“A Day in the Life” is their supreme achievement, however, with the two contrasting parts of the song setting each other off perfectly.
Although, apart from ADITL, Revolver is, for the most part, better song for song, Sgt. Pepper is still the better album. There may be little or no obvious thematic relation between the songs, but it nevertheless does hang together as an artistic whole in a way that none of their other albums do. There is an emotional journey through the whole album, with each song setting off the feeling of the previous one, something they only attempted one other time, with side two of Abbey Road (and that is not made up not of songs at all, but of song fragments - well, apart from “Here Comes the Sun”, which, arguably, is not part of the sequence anyway). Revolver is a collection of great songs, but they are quite unrelated to one another, and, as with the rest of their albums, seem to be just thrown together randomly. Indeed, as albums, Please, Please Me and maybe even A Hard Day’s Night hang together better than Revolver does. Pepper, however, is, uniquely, a coherent work of art.
I am also someone who has never really “got” where the stand-alone singles would have fit in this. One of the original concepts of a fantasy of growing up in Liverpool was abandoned more in the direction of the carnival/fair vibe.
And in a way that was the point and that is what makes it so notable: at this point they are no longer just a (very good, innovative) pop/rock band. They now span genres – they had anticipated a lot of that in Revolver (and they’ll take it maybe too far in the “White Album”), now it’s clear that whether it rocks or not will be subordinate to the overall work of the album.
As a collection of music Revolver stands at the summit but yes, as a total package Sgt. Pepper 's place and influence is hard to dispute. And yes, that impact is hard to entirely dissasociate from the overall happening, it just was one of the first albums by anyone to be far more than “just” a release of new music.
My vote? I’m with the overwhelming majority here. What I see in ADITL is it kind of sums up a lot of all that leads into it, the combination of thoughtful reflections with light slice-of-life with absurdities with arrangement experimentation thrown in.
Indeed. It was a revelation to me, growing up in the 80s, when I heard Sgt. Pepper’s (and a few of its contemporaries, like the Kinks’ Village Green and Face to Face): “You can do that (musically and lyrically) on a rock/pop album??”
IMO, “Strawberry Fields Forever” is easily the best Beatles song. Not even ADITL can compete with it. Just freaking beautiful.
I had to go with A Day In The Life. I don’t really care for the melody in Lennon’s part, but the arc of the arrangement is so far-reaching, and so conclusive on that final piano chord, it’s like a whole novel in one piece of music. (Calling it a “song” doesn’t do it justice.)
“A Day in the Life”, no contest.
The closest runner-up is “When I’m Sixty-four”, though it suffers from the excessive pitch-correction on the vocals, making it sound “chipmunky”.
My feelings about Day in the Life as well – important, but not a fave. I went with Lovely Rita, which I’ve loved since Day 1 and still do.
(She’s Leaving Home struck me as treacly and heavy-handed when I first heard it in 1967, and it hasn’t grown on me).
This is undoubtedly a better topic for its own thread – but what’s the deal with Paul McCartney song fragments? I believe I’ve heard that the middle section of ADITL was a Paul fragment that didn’t stand on its own, so they dropped it into the middle of John’s song.
And then there’s the little “Can you take me back where I came from…” at the end of “Cry Baby Cry” on the White Album.
And virtually all of side 2 of Abbey Road. And much of Paul’s Wings – “Band on the Run” and “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” are multiple fragments stuck together.
Well, with “A Day in the Life,” it wasn’t anyone’s fragments being added to an actual song - both John and Paul had fragments (the “I read the news today” and “woke up , fell out of bed”) that they knew couldn’t be songs on their own. One day, they just stuck them together with some transition music and that was that.
I’ve always found the “Can you take me back” thing a bit weird, it apparently was improvised during a recording for “I Will” and was then stuck on the end of “Cry Baby Cry”. Almost the same thing happened with “Her Majesty”- Paul originally discarded the recording, but one of the engineers (who was strictly instructed to never throw away anything by the Beatles) put it right after “The End” on Abbey Road, and they liked it. In general, I think that fragments are just bits that can’t be stretched out to make whole songs, but if you can kind of “coordinate” them with other fragments, it works.
My feelings, word for word (I could have gone with “Lovely Rita,” but I went with “Fixing a Hole.”)