Let’s say the Beatles decided to resume touring to promote Sgt Pepper. How much of the album could they have performed live?
Within you Without you would require Indian musicians to join the Beatles on tour. A Day in the Life would need an orchestra as well as She’s Leaving Home. I’m not sure the Beatles would want to pay the extra expenses of bringing all those musicians along on a tour. But, I also can’t imagine going to a 1967 Beatles concert and not hearing A Day in the Life.
Sounds like you’re asking if they could have recreated the album versions of all of those songs, with the instrumentation and arrangements as they appeared on the recordings. But that’s not the only way to approach live performance; and I think it would have been more interesting to see what they would have come up with if they tried playing those songs live with just the four of them.
If any pop/rock band could have afforded to bring an orchestra with them on tour, it would have been the Beatles. But instead of doing that, they could have arranged to have local orchestras join them in their various concerts.
Or, alternately, go with a smaller version of the orchestra.
On a number of their albums, Electric Light Orchestra (which was strongly influenced by the later Beatles albums) used a large string section in the studio (I remember reading somewhere that it was a 30-piece section), but when they toured in the '70s, they used one violinist and two cellists for the strings. It, of course, didn’t sound exactly like it did on the albums, but I suppose that wasn’t the point.
It’s interesting that most of my knowledge about touring with an orchestra is from Emerson, Lake & Palmer who toured with an orchestra to promote the Works album and said that the orchestra almost bankrupted them.
I wonder what venue they could have played that would preclude all the screamers. Imagine trying to play anything subtle with all that going on.
The Beatles cover band “Rain” does post-‘66 songs for the second part of their act. I recall they came up with clever ways to make the songs sound somewhat like the originals, but played by a 4-piece band. I don’t recall the details, but things like “John” playing a mellotron (period-appropriate keyboard with many taped sampled sounds), or “George” playing guitar licks with a sound setting that somewhat resembles other instruments.
This gives a sense of this:
Since a good deal of the recordings on Sgt. Pepper’s were studio creations, that would be amazingly difficult to do accurately. It would be interesting if they had tried, but not nearly the same thing.
Their studio work was cutting edge experimental stuff that could not be reproduced on stage. As an example, they would record at different speeds to produce a unique sound on playback.
But that doesn’t mean they can’t play it live. It just means it’s going to sound different which is pretty much what happens anyway.
It’s why I like cover bands such as Get the Led Out. They have more musicians on stage specifically to recreate the studio sound. When I listen to live music I want it to be as good as the studio version. That doesn’t mean it has to be the same but it should be of the same quality.
Cover bands are good indicator for the accessibility of music. Especially the standard 4 piece bands that used to play bars and clubs all over the US.
I usually heard cover bands playing the early Beatles stuff. The later stuff was spun by DJ’s at Clubs.
With their traditional outfit of two guitars, bass and drums it’d be impossible to adequately play the album, especially things like “She’s Leaving Home”, “A Day In The Life” and “For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite”. They should have had at least an additional keyboard player (Sgt. Pepper was before their stint with Billy Preston, so maybe THE session man of the times, Nicky Hopkins?), a horn section (for Sgt Pepper and Good Morning, Good Morning) and a string section (maybe sufficient as a substitute for a complete orchestra, as mentioned above). And Mr. Kite would have been unplayable without prerecorded tracks. The only thing unnecessary would’ve been background singers, the boys could have handled all the vocals themselves.
Of course such a blown up line-up was still unthinkable for a rock’n’roll show in 1967, though a few years later existed (listen to Van Morrison’s live masterpiece “It’s Too Late To Stop Now” from 1974 which has a string and a horn section). But who else but the Beatles could have pulled that off first in theory? So I think with these additions (and a MUCH better PA than they used to have until 1966), it indeed would’ve been possible to perform the album.
ETA: oops, forgot about “Within You, Without You”. Yeah, they also would’ve needed Indian percussion.
Given all the overdubs of extra guitar/percussion/keyboard parts, the Beatles alone could have done a lot of it but you would need more than four of them.
"Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!"
Every song, of course. I can play “Within You, Without You” on my acoustic guitar, and I’m no George Harrison. Between the four of them they could have cobbled together fine arrangements of every song. Different from the studio versions, of course, but terrific nonetheless.
Not to hijack my own thread, but I’m also now thinking if the Beatles would have done a mix of Pepper and the older stuff had they toured in 1967? Would they have done Pepper in its entirety and then a couple of older rockers? Would they have done shows costumed in their Sgt Pepper costumes?
Interesting alt history.
I think so, just like the Who did with Tommy and Pink Floyd with the Wall. At least that’s the way I would have preferred, and it also could’ve been a first for any band, to play an album in its entirety on stage.
What I’ve always been curious about was the fact that most of their latter day output was put together specifically for the album and then never played again, as opposed to the early output that was constantly replayed on tour. Thirty years or so later, when Paul started playing those songs again (he refused to for years due to the legal disputes), was there much of an issue relearning those songs? They did not read or write music, so it wouldn’t be as easy as just re-reading the transcriptions and recreating the time changes and complex arrangements for a song that you might have played just enough to get it recorded.
Yes, but when the Who recorded Tommy, they made sure that there was nothing on it that they couldn’t reproduced on stage. Everything is guitar, bass, and drums, with the exception of a little French horn, an instrument that Entwistle could play.
But you are right that a tour would include songs not on Sgt. Pepper, and leave off other songs from it. That was standard for concerts of that era. Groups would introduce the new material while still playing some of their more familiar songs.
There’s also an unspoken assumption in this thread that audiences at the time wanted to hear renditions that matched the record exactly. Back then, I expected a live concert to be different from the recording, with variations on the versions you could listen to at home. The Beatles would have played the songs without trying to match the recordings 100%.
I’m not sure how clever they needed to be. In that clip there is an extra musician–a keyboard player (there could be more back stage). He sits behind a sort of shell which hides all his equipment. I figure they do that to unclutter the look of the stage, not to trick anyone. But, there could be keyboards, sound modules and sequencer software back there capable of reproducing Sgt. Pepper and most other albums.
Thousands of cover musicians have no problem picking these tunes up… I don’t see why it would trouble McCartney.
id imagine they would do the concerts as the stones did on tour for the longest time
they’d sing the new album for about the first 90 minutes or so and then say good night and thanks for coming and leaving people who have never been to a Stones concert confused… about 5 minutes later he came out and says " well I’ve just been informed traffics backed up so we might as well play a few more and then they’d play a few of the old hits and say good night … then come out again cracking jokes like " don’t you people have homes to go to? " then play a few more … they did that for the better part of 3 hours apparently the fans knew that after 12:30 they’d play a 10-minute jam of satisfaction and that was the last song … on the voodoo lounge tour mick signed off with "so now that most of you are sobered up we can get something to eat and go to bed "
The biggest problem would be training the chicken to BAWK! on cue at the end of Good Morning, Good Morning.