Help identifying weird variant Beatles Sgt. Peppers.

Factual Questions
1

This is going to take a bit to explain, but I am trying to find a list of the songs that were on a particular version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and/or find out what that version is.

My older brothers owned every version of that album they could get, and got a record store to order foreign releases from Europe for them, so it could be just about anything. I know for certain they had the one with the blue label in the center, the one with the red label in the center, the one where the label in the center was the photo from the album cover, and the one where the cover photo was pressed into the vinyl.
By the time I was old enough to use the turntable by myself, my brothers had moved out and taken their collections with them, but my stepfather had a copy of Sgt. Peppers that I played over and over until I could sing it from memory. I’m pretty sure the label in the center was red.

Years later I found a tape in some of my brother’s stuff that was labeled “Beatles - SGT Peppers” on one side, and when I played it, it had the first side of Sgt Peppers followed by a bunch of Beatles songs that weren’t on the Sgt. Peppers I knew.
Now, I would normally write that off as just a homemade mix tape, but the second-to-last song was a reprise of the song Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band which I had never heard before, and which would be REALLY out of place on some other Beatles album. Then the last song was the song I knew as the first song on the B side: A Day In The Life.

So, I went to my brother and asked him what the (expletive) this tape was, and that’s when I found out what you’ve probably guessed: it was a tape of the album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It wasn’t the tape that was a weird version, it was the one I’d played a million times a decade before, which was long gone by then but had been on actual vinyl and wasn’t something somebody just made with home stereo equipment.

The worst part is, in the intervening decades my memory has gotten a bit fuzzier and now I am not at all certain which songs were on that weird version. But I’m pretty sure a bunch of them are songs that Wikipedia says were on Rubber Soul: Girl, Michelle, Nowhere Man, Norwegian Wood, and In My Life.
But Wikipedia doesn’t list any variant releases of Sgt Peppers at all, at least as far as songs on it.

So, my options are:

  1. I “remember” something that isn’t real.
  2. I have slipped into a parallel dimension, so while all that really happened to me, it never happened in this universe.
  3. There was a weird variant of Sgt Peppers released somewhere in the world, members of my family obtained copies of it, but my google-fu is too weak to uncover any mention of its existence on the internet.

I figure that if anybody out there has heard the same weird variant as me it would be a Doper, so please come and tell me I’m not crazy.

2

The song appears in various forms (including a sort of dreamy reprise) in the movie Yellow Submarine. Could it have been one of these?

3

Not sure if your Google-Fu took you to this site:

“The Beatles insisted that the album be issued identically worldwide, so for the first time Capitol in America fell into line and didn’t split tracks over different L.P.'s”

I’m not sure how reliable the info on the site is however it appears to be geeky enough to be obsessively accurate.
However, I wonder if you considered bootlegs? There must have been literally hundreds of Beatles bootleg records such as this: Have you heard the new Sgt. Pepper bootleg tracks? | I read the news today: All Beatle news. (it’s newer but gives you an idea).

4

I’ve seen cassettes like this, usually originating from places such as Indonesia,Thailand, etc… The explanation I’ve heard is that due to their economies and disposeable income, LPs don’t sell nearly as well as greatest hits compilations, so they stack a bunch previously successful songs onto the release to help bolster sales.
I have a buddy who grew up overseas who has a whole collection of “greatest hits” albums, compilations, and weird track lists from a number of artists who haven’t officially released them.

5

The first thing I thought of was an indivdual disc from the World Records box set, but that contains tracks from Magical Mystery Tour filling up side two, not the earlier songs described by the OP, and also has “A Day in the Life” at the end of side one, not the beginning of side two.

There was also an edition of Pepper released in Hong Kong and Singapore that had the most overtly drug-related songs removed, but again they were replaced by Magical Mystery Tour songs (which sounds like a case of the cure being worse than the disease if you ask me).

6

Argh. It looks like bootlegging might be the best explanation, which saddens me deeply.

A fact I failed to mention about my stepfather’s copy: After I had listened to it many times, For The Benefit of Mister Kite became an instrumental. I was not certain the song had ever played with lyrics on that disc, but I WAS sure the song was supposed to have lyrics, and they could be faintly heard if you played it loudly.
The Beatles liked to put the vocals in one channel (right or left) on stereo recordings, so I just assumed that I had somehow damaged one groove and not the other, and wiped out the vocals.

But maybe I had a copy that had been made from only parts of the master tapes, or something.

The time frame here would be … my (older) brothers moved out by 1979, I played my stepfather’s version roughly 1980-82?, I found the tape with the correct songs in 1987.

7

Actually, I think it was the other way around: you start with a photograph printed on thick paper, and then press a layer of transparent vinyl onto each side.

8

This isn’t true. The Beatles themselves mixed their recordings in mono, and preferred those releases. They didn’t see the point of stereo, the mixing for which they left to George Martin and the engineers. ISTR there are interviews with Lennon and Harrison, late in their lives, where they pretty much say that they consider the mono versions definitive and that they never really listened to the stereo versions themselves.

9

Could be a bootleg or fan based compilation album. If I remember correctly, Strawberry Fields, Penny lane and Only A Northern Song were originally meant to be on the Sgt Pepper Album.

10

Well, setting aside an argument that George Martin could be considered to be one of the Beatles, or that “The Beatles” as a collective entity may have included people beyond John, Paul, George, and Ringo, I will simply point out that the core of my statement is true: on the vast majority of the Beatles songs as released in stereo, all of the vocals will be found in one channel or the other, making it fairly easy to do Beatles karaoke.

There are many reasons to prefer the mono versions, though.

11

Maybe the OP was listening to the soundtrack to the Bee Gees movie?

12

I can think of one counter-example to the identical LP story: Sgt. Pepper’s Inner Groove

13

It was irritating when listening to them on headphones, though. With no crossover, the two sides felt disconnected.

14

I had the original album since it first came out, played through some low-re**nt mono amp/receiver thing and speakers.

Now one of my new oh-so-fancy speakers is on the blink, and all I can hear is John’s backup and Ringo.*

PS: Since someone mentioned the Beach Boys, the CD I have of Pet Sounds has both the original mono step-down for release and a stereo version supervised by Wilson, who always wanted it, unlike the Beatles, whose Sgt. Pepper was conceived as a direct response to Pet Sounds.

But I’m sure as a commentator I could be mince-meated by any aficionado with passing skill.
*Oh, who shall hinder me to wail and weep,
To chide my fortune, and torment myself?

15

Hey, me too. Peace and love, man! :slight_smile:

Through stereo speakers (both speakers working;)), it sounded fine. I wasn’t aware of the total separation of the sides till I listened through headphones. It sounded artificial and contrived, as if it had been recorded on separate tracks in a studio. Okay, it was, but it destroyed the illusion of a single cohesive unit that a band is supposed to sound like.

But that’s about the only knock against the Beatles that I can think of. I’ll still be listening to them when I’m 64.