I will be of course listening to Pepper on repeat!! It's amazing how an album that's 40 years old still gives you that wonderful feeling, like "oh, i can't wait to listen to it again"! It's the best musical experience i've ever experienced!
HAPPY 40TH BIRTHDAY TO THE WHITE ALBUM! you say its your birthday!
These^ are the ones about the subjet ... there are some more with a reference here and there (a post or two) but mainly as a joke ... have a good time reading them ...
That's something you needn't to tell me ... it's a pleasure! (oh, and I like your "balloon") Note for readers -guests, most of them-: that smily is called "balloon", right?
Sgt Pepper celebrates 40th anniversary on the BBC with a little help from some friends.
It looks like the BBC is celebrating the Sgt. Pepper anniversary in the own right. They are broadcasting a "new" cover version of Sgt. Pepper in it entirity on June 2nd to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Beatle's landmark album.
The British radio service has marked a group of rock and roll superstars to pay tribute to the album that birthed the LP. It seems that they are gearing up for what looks to be a summer long celebration of all-things Fab, as well as remembering the Summer of Love. I wish we could say that we were there when it all happened, but we are second-generation Beatle fans. We'll tune into the Pepper special on the BBC, and hope that you do too. It looks like a splendid time is guaranteed for all.
Sgt Pepper's 40th Anniversary can be heard on BBC Radio 2 in a two-hour special on Saturday 2 June 2007, 4.30-6.30pm
Sgt Pepper celebrates 40th anniversary with a little help from his 21st century Lonely Hearts Club friends
Oasis, Kaiser Chiefs, The Killers, Razorlight, James Morrison, Travis and The Fratellis are amongst the special guests helping BBC Radio 2 celebrate the 40th anniversary of the iconic Beatles album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Artists are going back to the studio to record tracks from the album as part of Radio 2's Sixties Season - a series of programmes to be broadcast over the summer to mark the network's 40th birthday in September, and the anniversary of the "Summer of Love".
Geoff Emerick, the album's multi award-winning audio engineer who recorded the original version at Abbey Road, will be using his ground-breaking techniques to record the new interpretations on the analogue, one-inch four-track equipment used back in 1967.
Lesley Douglas, Controller, Radio 2, says: "This will be, not only a unique radio event, but a very special musical moment.
"The range and quality of artists involved ensure that this will be a fitting tribute to one of the great albums of all time."
Des Shaw, from Ten Alps, the company producing the programme, says: "The documentary will highlight how important this album was to each artist and capture their feelings as they record their interpretation of one of the Sgt Pepper tracks."
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was The Beatles' eighth album and is often cited as their most influential by critics.
It was recorded by The Beatles at Abbey Road over 129 days and was released on 1 June 1967.
The album was an immediate critical and popular sensation - innovative in every sense, from structure to recording techniques and Sir Peter Blake's stunning cover artwork.
Sgt Pepper's 40th Anniversary can be heard on BBC Radio 2 in a two-hour special on Saturday 2 June 2007, 4.30-6.30pm
The BBC is going nuts over Pepper. It's been on the news and Radio (4) every day. It's like Auntie is getting her old holiday snaps out. I don't think Christ gets this much coverage at Christmas. Just for some balance and sanity; this from the MSN music editor. I have to agree with him on some points. I don't think it's the greatrest collection of music by The Beatles, let alone in the world. Nor is it the most influential (Pet Sounds?). But it does sum up magnificently what was going on and what was possible in what most people seem to accept as rock/pops golden era. It brought the flower power/drug movement into the world of the masses, and maybe only The Beatles had the power to do that.
WHY THE NATIONS FAVOURITE ALBUM WAS NO MUSICAL REVOLUTION:
To paraphrase the album's title track, it was 40 years ago today that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club band was released. Universally acclaimed as a revolution in rock music at the time, it regularly tops 'greatest ever albums' polls to this day and was, until overtaken by Queen's Greatest Hits just this year, the UK's best-selling album ever.
I know this isn't going to be very popular (that's obvious from the paragraph above) but I think it may well be the most overrated album of all time.
OK, before we get into this, let's just back up a minute. Regular readers will know I have a bit of form here. I got the slating of my journalistic career on the MSN Music messageboards some months ago for daring to suggest the Beatles themselves were overrated. In hindsight, my biggest mistake then was in failing to be absolutely crystal clear about what I meant by overrated.
So in the vain hope that I might avoid being similarly misinterpreted this time, I'm going to have another crack at that before going all blue meanie about the Fab Four's supposed masterpiece.
First things first. I do not think Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band is a bad album. Far from it, I think it is often brilliant. However, I do believe it is deeply flawed in a number of respects. And that's the only point I am trying to make; simply that it doesn't deserve to be called the greatest album ever made, if only because it’s not even the greatest album the Beatles ever made (I would give that honour to Abbey Road).
OK, now that's out of the way, let's get down to business. Much is made of the fact that Sgt. Pepper's was the first concept album, the first to treat rock music as art. There are two things to be said about this: no it wasn't, and concept albums are a rubbish idea anyway. The Beatles may well have realised this themselves because the much vaunted unifying theme of Sgt. Pepper's Band being their alter-egos gets ditched after precisely two songs.
Yes, the title track establishes the idea and segues neatly into Ringo in the guise of Billy Shears singing With A Little Help From My Friends and then… that's it. Then it's a collection of songs like any other. Obviously, being a Beatles album, these are very good songs (how many times do I have to say I like them?) but it's nonsense to claim the concept works in any meaningful way.
If there's any unifying theme to Sgt. Pepper, it's that the music is frequently drowned in studio trickery and effects. These may have been innovative at the time but have dated very badly and threaten to obscure the songs as surely as any Phil Spector string section.
And what of the songs? Frankly, they're not up there with the Beatles' best. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds isn't a patch on Strawberry Fields (geddit?) Forever when it comes to affecting psychedelia, When I'm 64 and Lovely Rita are Paul at his most glibly sentimental, Within You Without You is George at his most impenetrable, and Ringo… well, Ringo gets the nursery rhyme one as usual. And don't get me started about A Day In The Life. It's two half-arsed songs welded together with a stupid ending.
The one truly great track on Sgt. Pepper is She's Leaving Home. It's beautiful, clever, sad, hopeful, tragic, and darkly humorous. And guess what? It's got no silly studio effects on it and it's got bugger all to do with any concept beyond that of a brilliant song. If they'd produced 11 more like it, we might be talking about a genuine masterpiece.
Mmm, but then, it has had an influence on many things.
Quoted Text
40 years ago Friday, 'Sgt. Pepper' taught radio to play LPs
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," the landmark record released 40 years ago Friday, may or may not have been a good thing for lonely hearts. But it was definitely a bad thing for singles. Remember singles? Those cute little 45-revolutions-per-minute records with the big holes that, several media lifetimes ago, were the common currency of the music world? After the Beatles released their history-making album on June 1 (in the United Kingdom) and June 2 (in the United States) in 1967, the focus shifted to LPs, said North Jersey radio veterans. "I think it was a watershed for radio and the recording industry, because from that point on they began marketing albums, as opposed to marketing singles with the album as a sort of afterthought," says media consultant Larry Berger, a Fair Lawn native. As program director in the early 1970s, he was one of the pioneers of a new radio format that grew directly out of "Sgt. Pepper" and its successors: AOR (album-oriented radio). "Now it's gone full circle, because people are back to a more singles mentality with the iPod," Berger says. Before "Sgt. Pepper," record buyers and deejays thought in terms of individual songs. Sure, there were rock LPs -- even a few stabs at concept albums -- but the single remained the basic unit of currency. Once "Sgt. Pepper" hit the record racks, and Beatles fans had their minds blown by the celebrated Mr. Kite, Lovely Rita the meter maid and a high-flying Lucy and her diamonds, many listeners were no longer satisfied with AM radio's top 40 hits, tinny sound and motormouthed deejays who jabbered about "7 SOARING SINGLES!" and "WHERE THE HITS GO ROLLING OUT!" "["Sgt. Pepper"] pointed the way forward," says Roseland's Vin Scelsa. Post-"Sgt. Pepper," listeners began taking rock records with a new seriousness: listening to them cover to cover, as it were, and analyzing why cut X was at the beginning of Side Two and why cut Y closed the album. "Sgt. Pepper," which became the first rock record to win a best-album Grammy, proved that an album could be more than just a piece of vinyl with 12 songs. Everything in it could be unified by a story, a theme, a concept. For instance, A Lonely Hearts Club Band, led by a certain Billy Shears (Ringo Starr). "The Beatles are taking you on a ride," says Shelli Sonstein, a Ringwood resident. "Or a trip, as we would call it then." And there was more: the packaging, the famous cover photograph of the Beatles surrounded by their cult heroes, the cardboard cutouts inside the album sleeve, the printed lyrics (a new idea for a rock album) all made "Sgt. Pepper" seem very different from any previous rock record. So did the carefully crafted sound. Those weird tape-loopings in "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" and the nuclear-accelerator climax of "A Day in the Life" helped push rock radio in the direction of FM. "What happened is, a lot of people would hear 'Sgt. Pepper' on their home stereo and then hear it on AM radio and realize what was missing," says Lee Abrams. "That was the case with many albums. They're unlistenable on AM. On FM they sounded great." It was a 16-year-old Abrams who, as a Chicago high school student in the late 1960s, wrote a 20-page manifesto that many consider the basis for the AOR format. "I was constantly nagging stations out there that were not targeting me and my friends and my whole generation," Abrams says. There had already, in the wake of "Sgt. Pepper," been pioneering "free form" stations like New York's WNEW-FM. The AOR format, Abrams says, codified what these free-form deejays had been doing by instinct. The key ingredients: an artist-based (rather than song-based) playlist, a 16- to 24-year-old target audience and low-key, conversational deejays. Once AOR made its commercial debut on Jan. 1, 1971,it was a whole new ballgame. "We were able to respect the album as a whole," Scelsa says. "Frequently you'd find features on radio stations where they'd have the album of the week, and they'd play the whole album, respecting the artist's vision for the sequencing of the songs." At the height of the format, around 1979, nearly 1,000 stations -- 10 percent of the nation's airwaves -- were AOR, Abrams estimates. Taking their cue from "Sgt. Pepper's" wall-to-wall hits, none of which had been released as singles, AOR deejays took to culling albums for breakout songs that might catch on with listeners, 45 or no 45. Indeed, many of the songs that AOR helped turn into top hits were never issued as singles, including Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," Elton John's "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" and that anthem of anthems, Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." Many radio veterans look at the short golden age of albums and AOR -- roughly 1971 to 1989 --, a brief shining hour that may never come again. "After that, it really became more about the single again," says Jonathan Clarke, a Glen Ridge native. Starting in the 1980s, new venues and formats like MTV, CD and ultimately iPods and downloading made the concept of the "album" increasingly irrelevant. At 80 minutes long, CDs became bloated with filler that made any unifying "concept" difficult to sustain. And futile besides -- listeners could shuffle or skip songs at the touch of a button. As for radio, Abrams says, only about 100 to 200 stations nationwide could today be described as AOR (in New York, which still has occasional "album side weekends," is virtually the only one). Could another "Sgt. Pepper" emerge in today's single-serving pop-culture environment? Maybe, says Sonstein. But only if the pendulum swings the other way, and a new age of albums begins. "It might be discovered online," Sonstein says. "But if an album as good as 'Sgt. Pepper' emerged, I think it would have just as much penetration and be just as powerful."
[...]I know this isn't going to be very popular (that's obvious from the paragraph above) but I think it may well be the most overrated album of all time.
OK, before we get into this, let's just back up a minute. Regular readers will know I have a bit of form here. I got the slating of my journalistic career on the MSN Music messageboards some months ago for daring to suggest the Beatles themselves were overrated. [...]
I agree with that ... and I've already said it a long time ago ... this album is down there in my list of their albums ... and Abbey Road is in my top3 ... overrated band? I said it too ... does anybody want the links?
Good article. For the record (da dah) I don't agree with the MSN critique of the songs. LSD is magnificent and A Day In The Life may be the greatest song ever. Good Morning Good Morning is mediocre.Fixing A Hole/Getting Better/Lovely Rita are good, but belonging to the greatest set of music ever? Nah. Re the influence thing - I guess albums like Pet Sounds influenced other musos but were missed by Joe Average, whereas Pepper influenced the masses who were listening.
1. Guys For Sale 2. Abbey Road 3. Let It Be 4. The Guys 5. Please Please Me 6. Revolver 7. Rubber Soul 8. Yellow Submarine 9. Help! 10. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 11. Magical Mystery Tour 12. A Hard Day's Night 13. With The Guys
The 'Most Overrated Band' is the guys, tho we don't like to admit it, but if we think about it's the kind of thing associated to them and we should be proud of it. They were (and will be) the best band ever but even being the best they were not gods, tho usually they seem to be gods by the way and the things that are said. Everything about them has been exaggerated so much that they are overrated, and at such a level that no other band could ever be (or ever imagine). I do think we must open our eyes and minds a little more and don't be fundamentalists like some religious are.
P.S. I think I'm not suspect. They asked me 'Love Me Do' and I do.
That's all brothers and sisters, ... peace and humility.
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