#Song sergeant windows full
#Song sergeant windows windows

The result was “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” With Sgt. Sure, “Lucy in the Sky” has the trippy spiraling keyboard figure and acid-washed words, but McCartney’s eerie little domestic miniature “Fixing a Hole” is more convincingly psychedelic, with the syntactic ambiguities of its lyric mirroring the fractured flitting of an altered consciousness: “I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in/ And stops my mind from wandering/ Where it will go.” (Is the hole in the roof? Or in his mind?)Īfter Revolver, Lennon and McCartney got the idea to write some songs about their childhood in Liverpool. Pepper’s sessions but released as a double A-side single with “Penny Lane.” Meanwhile, those who embrace the cliché that Paul was a spunky and shallow tunesmith-that McCartney composed nostalgia-trip music while Lennon wrote visionary drug anthems-should listen again to Sgt. You’d be hard-pressed to find more canonical Lennon songs than “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “A Day in the Life,” to say nothing of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” recorded during the Sgt. Yes, McCartney took hold of the reins at Abbey Road, but it was ever thus with Paul, the Beatles’ resident musical cosmopolitan and most dedicated studio rat.

But again, the myth disintegrates on inspection.

#Song sergeant windows full

Pepper’s is a McCartney album, a pop confection, full of cute noises and neo–music hall pop, recorded while the drug-addled Lennon was lost in a half-conscious haze. The backlash is based on the wide disdain for Paul McCartney among critics.

But the fact remains that there would have been no Dark Side of the Moon, and no dragons-and-warlocks-themed prog rock epics, had the Beatles not decided to don epaulets for their lark of an album cover and impersonate a vaudeville band. It’s unfair to blame a record so based in the rigors of pop songcraft, and so full of jokes and mischief and fun, for the ponderous music that was unleashed on listeners in the decades following. Pepper’s influence on subsequent rock and soul concept albums.

Pepper’s “concept” is, to say the least, loose-the claim is based mainly on the framing device of the title track, which opens the album and is reprised before the stupendous finale, “A Day in the Life.” What cannot be denied is Sgt. Frank Sinatra was making concept albums back when John and Paul were still knocking around in knee socks, and compared with Sinatra’s LPs such as In the Wee Small Hours, the Sgt. The album’s 40 th anniversary has been greeted by scores of articles touting its historical significance, debates about whether it is “the greatest album of all time” (as if such a thing exists), and the usual talk about its status as pop music’s first concept album. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is so familiar, so encrusted with myth, that we can barely hear it. It’s a delightful image, a metaphor for the flood of joy and wonderment that the four Liverpudlians loosed on the world, and on England in particular-the windows, the minds, that were nudged open by the Beatles’ sonically questing, love-affirming, sad, funny, irrepressibly tuneful music.

#Song sergeant windows windows

In the surrounding buildings, windows slowly rose in reply, and neighbors leaned out to listen to the Beatles’ newest songs. Pepper’s in the wee hours of April 21, 1967, the Beatles decamped from Abbey Road Studios to Mama Cass’ apartment in Chelsea, where they flung open the windows and blasted an acetate of the album into the London morning at top volume. Immediately following the completion of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band have been told and retold in the 40 years since the record’s release, but the loveliest is a true one. This piece was originally published on its 40 th anniversary. This week marks the 50 th anniversary of the Beatles’ Sgt.