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Sgt Pepper Exposed
The Making of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band- As Sgt. Pepper is my all-time favorite album and the most influential album ever, this section will be based on the creation of the album. I’ve pulled interviews with Paul, John, George, George Martin and Geoff Emerick to start with and I’ll see where it takes me from there. Could be why I named this page Sgt Pepper Exposed!
Let’s start with the driving force behind the album Paul:
Paul: We were fed up with being the Beatles. We really hated that fucking little mop-tops approach. We were not boys. We were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn't want it any more, plus, we'd now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers. There was now more to it; not only had John and I been writing, George had been writing, we'd been in films, John had written books, so it was natural that we should become artists.
Then suddenly on the plane I got this idea. I thought, Let's not be ourselves. Let's develop alter egos so we're not having to project an image which we know. It would be much freer. What would be really interesting would be to actually take on the personas of this different band. We could say, 'How would somebody else sing this? He might approach it a bit more sarcastically, perhaps.' I thought we could run this philosophy through the whole album: with the alter-ego band, it won't be us making all that sound, it won't be the Beatles, it'll be this other band, so we'll be able to lose our identities in this.
Interviewer: How did you come up with that name?
Paul: Me and Mal Evans bantered words about which led to the rumor that he thought of the name Sergeant Pepper, but I think it would be much more likely that it was me saying "Think of names" We were having our meal and they had those little packets marked "S" & "P". Mal said, 'what's that mean? Oh, salt and pepper'. We had a joke about that. So I said 'Sergeant Pepper, ' just to vary it, 'Sergeant Pepper, salt and pepper,' an aural pun not mishearing him but just playing with the words.
Then, 'Lonely Hearts Club', that's a good one. There are a lot of those about, the equivalent of a dating agency now. I just strung those together rather in the way you might Dr. Hook and his Medicine Show. All that culture of the sixties going back to those traveling medicine men, Gypsies, it echoed back to the previous century. I just fantasized well, 'Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band'. That would be crazy enough why would a lonely hearts club have a band? If it had been Sergeant Pepper's British Legion Band, that's more understandable. The idea was to be a little funkier, that's what everybody was doing. That was the fashion. The idea was just take any words that would flow. I wanted a string of those things because I thought that would be a natty idea instead of a catchy title. People would have to say, 'What?' We'd had quite a few pun titles- Rubber Soul, Revolver- so this was to get away from that.
The recording sessions for Sgt Pepper began on 11/24/66. “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” were the 1st and 3rd songs recorded. At that time Brian Epstein decided that the boys needed a great new single so both songs were pulled and released in February of 1967. Both 45s reached number ONE in the UK and the USA.
Paul: I've seen Strawberry Fields described as a dull, grimy place next door to him that John imagined to be a beautiful place, but in the summer it wasn't dull and grimy at all: it was a secret garden. John's memory of it wasn't to do with the fact that it was a Salvation Army home; that was up at the house. There was a wall you could bunk over and it was a rather wild garden, it wasn't manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in. The bit he went into was a secret garden like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and he thought of it like that, it was a little hide-away for him where he could maybe have a smoke, live in his dreams a little, so it was a get-away. It was an escape for John.
Paul wrote a song that brought back his childhood memories of Liverpool as well, and I bet you can figure out that it’s “Penny Lane.”
Paul: I think we wrote them around the same time, we were often answering each other's songs so it might well have been my version of a memory song but I don't recall. It was childhood reminiscences: there is a bus stop called Penny Lane. There was a barber shop called Bioletti's with head shots of the haircuts you can have in the window and I just took it all and arted it up a little bit to make it sound like he was having a picture exhibit in his window. It was all based on real things; there was a bank on the corner so I imagined the banker, it was not a real person and his slightly dubious habits and the little children laughing at him, and the pouring rain. The fire station was a bit of poetic license; there's a fire station about half a mile down the road, not actually in Penny Lane, but we needed a 3rd verse so we took that and I was very pleased with the line 'It's a clean machine'. I still like that as a phrase, you occasionally hit a lucky little phrase and it becomes more than a phrase. So the banker and the barber shop and the fire station were all real locations.
There is a 'shelter in the middle of the roundabout' at Smithtown Place, known to the locals and the Penny Lane Roundabout, where Church Rd. meets Smithtown Rd. It was used as a place to meet people or shelter while waiting for a bus.
Paul: John and I would often meet at Penny Lane. That was where someone would stand and sell you poppies each year on British Legion poppy day; where John and I would put a shilling in the can and get ourselves a poppy. That was a memory. We fantasized the nurse selling poppies from a tray, which Americans used to think was puppies! Which again, is an interesting image. I was a choirboy at a Church opposite called St. Barnabas so it had a lot of associations for me. When I came to write it, John came over and helped me with the 3rd verse, as often was the case. We were writing childhood memories: recently faded memories from 8 or 10 years before, so it was recent nostalgia, pleasant memories for both of us. All the places were still there, and because we remembered it so clearly we could have gone on.
George Martin on why those songs were not part of the album: EMI and Brian Epstein told me they needed another single since they hadn’t had one for a while. I said “Ok, we’ll put out the “Strawberry Fields Forever” & “Penny Lane” as a double A-sided single, but it means we’ll have to find extra material for the album. In those days we didn’t put the single on the album. The boys thought it was conning the public into buying the same song twice, the biggest mistake I ever made. For my money that was the best single we ever released”
Paul on a 'Little Help From My Friends':
It was written out at John's house in Weybridge for Ringo; we always like to do one for him and it had to be not too much like our style. I think that was probably the best of the songs we wrote for Ringo. He was to be a character in this operetta, this whole thing that we were doing, so this gave him a good intro, wherever he came in the album; in fact it was the 2nd track. It was a nice place for him, but wherever it came, it gave us an intro. Again, because it was the pot era, we had to slip in a little reference: 'I Get High!' It was pretty much co-written, John and I doing a work song for Ringo, a little craft job. I always saw those as the equivalent of writing a James Bond film theme. It was a challenge, it was something out of the ordinary for us because we actually had to write in a key for Ringo and you had to be a little tongue in cheek. Ringo liked kids a lot, he was very good with kids so we knew "Yellow Submarine" would be a good thing for Ringo to sing. In this case it was a slightly more mature song, which I always liked very much. I remember giggling with John as wrote the lines 'What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.' It could have been him playing with his willie under the covers, or it could have been taken on a deeper level; this was what it meant but it was a nice way to say it. I always liked that.
Paul talking about Joe Cocker's cover of the song:
Denny Cordell (Joe's music man) gave me a ring and said, 'We love that song that Ringo sings but we've got this treatment of it that we really think would be great, singing it very bluesy, very crazy, slow it right down.' I said 'Well, great, try it, and let me hear what you do with it.' He came over to see us at Apple Studios at Saville Row and played it and I said, 'Wow, fantastic!' They'd done a really radical treatment of it and it's been Joe's staple diet for many years. Then it was taken on by John Belushi, who used to do a Cocker impression, and so taken even further by Belushi, so it has good memories, that song. It became the theme tune to the very good American series about growing up in the sixties called The Wonder Years, so it's been picked up and used a lot, but it really started just as a co-written song crafted for Ringo
Here is Paul on “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” but 1st a little background.
Lucy was one of the fastest songs on the album to record: one day to record the backing track, one to overdub the instrumentals and vocals, and a final day to mix. It was also one of the Beatles most controversial songs as it was taken to be a reference to an "LSD' trip.
Paul: I went up to John's house in Weybridge. When I arrived we were having a cup of tea and he said 'Look at this great painting Julian's done. Look at the title!'
Paul: John showed me a drawing on school paper, a 5 x 7 piece of paper, of a little girl with lots of stars, and right across the top there was, in very neat child handwriting, I think in pencil, 'Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds'. So I said 'What's That Mean?', thinking Wow, fantastic title! John said, 'It's Lucy, a friend of his from school. And she's in the sky.' Julian had drawn stars, and then he thought they were diamonds. They were child's stars, there's a way to draw them with 2 triangles, but he said diamonds because they can be interpreted as diamonds or stars. And we loved it and she was in the sky and it was very trippy to us. So we went upstairs and started writing it. People later thought 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds' was LSD. I swear we didn't notice that when it came out, in actual fact, if you want to be pedantic you'd have to say LITSWD, but of course LSD is a better story.
John said that the psychedelic imagery was inspired by the 'Woody & Water' chapter of Lewis Carroll's 'Through the Looking Glass'...she found there was in a little boat, gliding along the banks: so there was nothing for it but to do her best'
Paul: John had the title and he had the 1st verse. It started off very Alice In Wonderland: Picture yourself in a boat on a river…' It's very Alice. Both of us had read the Alice books and always referred to them, we were always talking about Jabberwocky and we knew those books more than any others. And when the psychedelics came in, the heady quality of them was perfect. So we just went along with it. I sat there and wrote it with him: I offered cellophane flowers and newspaper taxis and John replied with kaleidoscope eyes. I remember which was which because we traded words off each other, as we always did...And in our mind it was an Alice thing, which both of us loved.
Geoff Emerick on the making of Lucy in the Sky: John’s “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (which also ended up being banned by the BBC because the title words spelled “LSD”) was up next, and it soon became one of my favorite tracks on the album. It was actually done very quickly- including rehearsal, it took only three nights to complete. By this point the four Beatles were starting to get a little fed up with being stuck in the studio. After all, they’d been there for nearly five months and it wasn’t the dead of winter, the weather was starting to brighten, so they were probably starting to get itchy. I know I was
By now it was evident that John’s personality was changing. Instead of being opinionated about everything, he was becoming complacent; in fact, he seemed quite content to have someone else do his thinking for him, even when he was working on one of his own songs. By the spring of 1967, he was becoming increasingly disengaged, and that would more or less continue until the end of the Beatles career. No doubt Paul was aware of the situation, and he was seizing the opportunity to step in and expand his role within the band.
That manifested itself down in the studio as they worked on this song, with John’s lead vocal getting less aggressive and more dreamy with each successive take. That might have been a reflection of what he was smoking behind the screens, but Paul was clearly steering him in that direction, too. We had decided to route George Harrison’s guitar through the Leslie speaker during the choruses, and because that reminded John of the Dalia Lennon vocal effect from “Tomorrow Never Knows”, Mal was duly dispatched to see if he could find a rope so John could try out his theory, that you could get the same effect by swinging around a microphone suspended by a rope. From the wink that Mal gave me when he returned some hours later, empty handed, I suspect that he had spent the evening in the pub instead. He knew how absurd, and potentially dangerous, the request was, and he probably guessed that John would have forgotten all about it by the time he got back, which, of course, is exactly what happened.”
John on Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds: My son Julian came in one day with a picture he painted about a school friend of his named Lucy. He had sketched in some stars in the sky and called it Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. Simple.
The images were Alice in Wonderland. It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualizing that. There was also an image of the female who would someday come save me- a “girl with kaleidoscope eyes” who would come out of the sky. It turned out to be Yoko, though I hadn’t met Yoko yet. So maybe it should Yoko in the Sky With Diamonds.
“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”
 Paul: “Mr. Kite was a poster that John had in his house in Weybridge. I arrived there for a session one day and he had it up on the wall in the living room. It was all there, the trampoline, the hoops, the garters, the horse. It was Pablo Fanques Fair, and it said ‘being for the benefit of Mr. Kite’; almost the whole song was written off that poster. We just sat down and wrote it. We pretty much took it down word for word and then just made up some little bits and pieces to glue it together.”
Geoff Emerick: “The backing track to “Mr. Kite” was quite simple: Paul on Bass, Ringo on drums, and John doing a guide vocal, with George Martin enlisted to play the harmonium. It did take quite a few takes to nail it down, which caused problems for George Martin, because the Harmonium required pedaling to get the air through the bellows, kind of like riding a bicycle. After playing it non-stop for hours on end, he finally collapsed in exhaustion, sprawling out on the floor like a snow angel, a sight that gave us all great amusement. “
John, as usual, was full of creative ideas but was having trouble expressing them in practical terms. “What I want is some kind of swirly music, you know?” George Martin did NOT know. John continued “I want the sound of a fairground around my voice; I want to be able to smell the sawdust and the animals. I want to feel like I’m at the circus with Mr. Kite, the Hendersons and all that”
George Martin: I knew we needed a backwash, a general mush of sound, like if you go to a fairground, shut your eyes and listen: rifle-shots, hurdy gurdy noises, people shouting and way in the distance, just a tremendous chaotic sound. In order to create the swirly background sounds we got together a lot of old recordings of Victorian steam organs, the type you hear on Carousels at county fairs, playing all traditional tunes, Sousa Marches and so on. I dubbed a few moments of them on to tape and gave it to Geoff Emerick, our engineer, and told him “take a half a minute of that one, a minute and a half of that one and another half from that and so on. Cut them up into little pieces about one foot long and then fling them up in the air. Then, pick them up in whatever order they come and stick them all back together again.” When I listened to them, they formed a chaotic mass of sound…it was unmistakably a steam organ. Perfect! There was the fairground atmosphere we had been looking for. John was thrilled to bits with it.
Geoff Emerick: “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” was embellished with all manner of overdubs: chromatic organ runs and glockenspiel (both recorded at half speed), normal speed oom-pah style organ (played by John), and a chorus of bass harmonicas (played by John, George Harrison, Mal Evens and Neil Aspinall). It turned into quite a production that stretched over many weeks.”
The Making of “Good Morning Good Morning”
The Beatles began work on John’s “Good Morning Good Morning” on February 8th 1967, but continued to fiddle with it until the very end. The animal effects were not added until March 28th and the final mixing did not take place until mid-April. The title itself is taken from a Kelloggs Cornflakes TV commercial. The sound effects added to the song were taken from EMI sound-effects tapes Volume 35: Animals and Bees and Volume 57: Fox Hunt, each placed, at John’s insistence, in order of ability to eat, or at least frighten, its predecessor.
Paul: This is largely John’s song. John was feeling trapped in suburbia and was going through some problems with Cynthia. It was about his boring life at that time, there’s a reference in the lyric to “nothing to do” and “meet the wife”: there was an afternoon TV soap opera called “Meet the Wife’ that John watched, he was that bored, but I think he was also starting to get alarm bells and so “Good Morning Good Morning”. When we came to record it we used Sounds Incorporated to do a big sax thing: they were friends of ours who had been on tour with us. But we still felt it needed something more manic so we decided to use a lot of sound effects on the fade. The great thing about working at EMI Abbey Road was that anything you needed was reasonable within reach. EMI was so multi-dimensional they had everything covered and we took advantage of all this. We used Daniel Barenboim’s piano that he’d just recorded on: they would sometimes lock it but we would just ask, “Can you unlock it?” and they’d say “sure.” That was used on the big chord at the end of “A Day In the Life”. There were so many organs, there were harmoniums, and there was a sound-effects cupboard which they used for doing plays and spoken-word albums. George Martin said “There is a library, what do you want?” and we said “What have you got?” So we got the catalogue. “Right, elephants, cock-crowing, the hunt going tally-ho, we’ll have that.”
Geoff Emerick: For nearly a month, John had been ruminating about what kind of instrumentation he wanted on “Good Morning, Good Morning”. He finally decided to add brass, but he was adamant that it mustn’t sound ordinary, and he insisted that George Martin hire a horn section comprised of old Liverpool mated instead of the top-flight session musicians we had been using. The group who called themselves Sounds Incorporated, were nice enough blokes- actually, they were a lot of fun, which explained why John liked them so much. But it took a long time to get a good take out of them because, through-out the session, John kept complaining that they were playing too ‘straight’- he had a real bee in his bonnet about that. In the end, to satisfy John’s demand that I take a different sonic approach, I shoved the microphones right down the bells of the saxes and screwed the sound up with limiters and a healthy dose of effects like flanging and ADT: we pretty much used every piece of equipment at hand.
Later that same evening Paul overdubbed a lead guitar part on the song, which didn’t do anything to improve George Harrison’s mood. It seemed to me as if George was aggrieved a lot of the time…with good reason: Paul was playing a lot of his leads and he had precious little to do. In addition, the one song he’d brought to the album had been rejected (Only a Northern Song). As we got into out 4th and 5th month of recording, the preparatory meetings at Paul’s house started to tail off, so the four Beatles began arriving separately. Paul was almost always the first to come in, since he lived nearby, and George was often the last, so if Paul got an idea for a guitar part and George wasn’t around, he’s sometimes say, “Well, let’s get on with it- I’ll just play the part myself.”
As George Harrison himself later said, his heart was in India the whole time the Beatles were recording of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. AS a result, he was a detached participant: the only thing that brought him around again was when we worked on “Within You Without You”
George Martin: The way in which the record seemed to generate its own togetherness became particularly apparent during the editing. A perfect example of that was the song “Good Morning”, an up-tempo, fairly raucous song with a curious, irregular meter to it. We normally faded out with music at the end of a song, bit this time we decided to cover the fade with a host of sound-effects, particularly animals. We shoved everything in, from a pack of hounds in full cry to more basic farm yard noises. The order we had worked out for the album meant that that track was to be followed by the reprise of the “Sgt. Pepper” song, and of course I was trying to make the whole thing flow. So imagine my delight when I discovered that the sound of a chicken clucking at the end of “Good Morning” was remarkably like the guitar sound at the beginning of “Sgt Pepper”. I was able to cut and mix the two tracks in such a way that the one actually turned into the other. That was one of the luckiest edits one could ever get.”
Beatles In The Studio:
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