Although
most of the next two weeks would be taken up by recording the two songs
for their next single, Strawberry
Fields and Penny
Lane, recording for Sgt.
Pepper's started on December 8, 1966 with take one of When
I'm Sixty-Four. The last track recorded was violins and cellos
for Within You Without You
on April 3, 1967, and mixing was completed April 20. Almost as an
afterthought, the sounds for the Sgt. Pepper's ending groove were recorded
the next day.
The original working title of A
Day In The Life was "In
The Life Of..." A rare session outside of Abbey Road
occurred during the time of the Sgt. Pepper sessions at Regent Sound
Studio in London for part of Fixing
A Hole on February 9, 1967. Also during this period, the
long-lost avant-garde Beatles recording called Carnival
of Light was recorded on January 5, 1967.
Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
was officially released in
both mono and stereo on June 1, 1967, although it was rush released in the
UK on May 26. It was actually played on the radio in Britain on the BBC
show Where It's At,
the week before on May 20, except for A
Day In The Life, which had been banned by the BBC the day
earlier, on the grounds that it could encourage a permissive attitude
towards drugs.
The Beatles
already had a cover designed by a Dutch group called the Fool, but my
gallery dealer, Robert Fraser, said to Paul "Why don't you use a
'fine artist', a professional, to do the cover instead?" Paul rather
liked the idea and I was asked to do it. The concept of the album had
already evolved: it would be as though the Beatles were another band,
performing a concert. Paul and John said I should imagine that the band
had just finished the concert, perhaps in a park. I then thought that we
should have a crowd standing behind them, and this developed into the
collage idea.
I asked them to make lists of
people they would like to have in the audience at this imaginary concert.
John's was interesting because it included Jesus and Ghandi and more
cynically, Hitler. But this was just a few months after the U.S. furor
about his 'Jesus' statement, so they were left out. George's list were all
gurus. Ringo said "What ever the others say is fine by me",
because he didn't really want to be bothered. Robert Fraser and I also
made lists. We then got all the photographs together and had life-size
cut-outs made onto hardboard.
EMI realized that because many
of the people we were depicting were still alive, we might be sued for not
seeking their permission. So the Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, who was
very wary of the complications in the first place, had his assistant write
to everyone. Mae West replied "No, I won't be on it. What would I be
doing in a lonely hearts club?" So the Beatles wrote her a personal
letter and she changed her mind.
Robert Fraser was a business
partner of Michael Cooper, an excellent photographer, so he was
commissioned to do the shoot. I worked in his studio for a fortnight
constructing the collage, fixing the top row to the back wall and putting
the next about six inches in front and so on, so that we got a tiered
effect. Then we put in the palm
tree and the other little objects. I wanted to have the
waxworks of the Beatles because I thought they might be looking a Sgt.
Pepper's band too. The boy who delivered the floral display asked if he
could contribute by making a guitar
out of hyacinths, and the little girl wearing the "Welcome the
Rolling Stones, Good Guys" sweatshirt was a cloth figure of Shirley
Temple, the shirt coming from Michael Cooper's young son, Adam.
The Beatles arrived during the evening of March 30. We had a drink, they got dressed and we did the session. It took about three hours in all, including the shots for the center-fold and back cove
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart
Club Band is rife with "Paul is
dead" clues. It was Paul's idea that the Beatles immerse themselves
in another identity for this 1967 release. The name "Sgt. Pepper's
Lonely Heart's Club Band" was a play on verbose hippy era band names,
such as "Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band." The cover
photo, then, shows the Beatles assuming this new identity and laying to
rest their earlier image as the Fab Four. People looking for clues of
Paul's death, however, interpreted the cover of Sgt. Pepper as
representing Paul's burial and the end of the Beatles as we had known
them. The wax images of the younger Beatles look mournfully on the
gravesite because the Beatles were no longer the same band.
Looking at the older,
psychedelic Beatles, you'll notice a couple of odd things. While the rest
of the Beatles are standing at an angle, Paul is facing the camera as
though he were being supported by his band mates standing at his sides.
The Beatles are all holding band instruments, but Paul's is black (he's
holding a cor anglicise) while the rest are holding brass
instruments. A hand is over Paul's head, as though he were
being blessed by a priest before being interred
Across the gravesite is a bass
guitar oriented the way Paul, who was left-handed,
would play it. The strings of the instrument are made of sticks but there
are only three sticks rather than four, just as there would only be three
Beatles without Paul. With a little imagination you can see that the
yellow hyacinths spell out "PAUL?" or, looked at another way,
the flowers form the letter "P".
The lyrics themselves seem to
be revealing information about Paul's death and replacement by a
look-alike. The title song introduces Billy Shears, who then tells the
audience in "With a Little Help from My Friends" "Lend me
your ears and I'll sing you a song/And I'll try not to sing out of
key". Paul's replacement, William Campbell, but here referred to as
"Billy Shears," was still working on perfecting his singing
voice. Several songs have references to a tragic accident. "Good
Morning, Good Morning" opens with the line "Nothing to do to
save his life call his wife in." One story of Paul's fatal accident
was that he had picked up a woman named Rita and she became so excited
when she realized she was in a car with Paul McCartney that she threw
herself on him. As told in the song "Lovely Rita," "I took
her home/I nearly made it". In "A Day in the Life" John
sings "He blew his mind out in a car/He hadn't noticed that the
lights had changed/A crowd of people stood and stared/They'd seen his face
before/Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords".
(How would they know they had seen his face before if he'd been
decapitated with such disfiguring injuries?)
