It's an analog heirloom that's still resisting oblivion － perhaps because, even in its moment, it was already contemplating a broader sweep of time. The music on “Sgt. Pepper” reached back far before rock as well as out into an unmapped cosmos, while its words － seesawing between Paul McCartney’s affability and John Lennon’s tartness － offered compassion for multiple generations.
We simply can't hear “Sgt. Pepper” now the way it affected listeners on arrival in 1967. Its innovations and quirks have been too widely emulated, its oddities long since absorbed. Sounds that were initially startling － the Indian instruments and phrasing of George Harrison's“WithinYou Without you,” the tape-spliced stream-organ collage of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” the orchestral vastnesses of “A Day in the Life” － have taken on a patina of nostalgia. “Sgt. Pepper” and its many musical progeny have blurred into a broader memory of “psychedelia,” a sonic vocabulary (available to current music-makers via sampling) that provides instant, predigested allusions to the 1960s. Meanwhile, the grand lesson of “Sgt. Pepper” － that anything goes in studio － has long since been taken for granted.
“Sgt. Pepper” has been analyzed, researched, oral-historied and dissected down to the minute differences between pressings, and because the Beatles industry never misses an anniversary, it has been repeatedly reissued.The 50th-anniversary deluxe version is exhaustive. It has been remastered once again to give the album a broader soundstage and crisper detail, giving more separation to individual voices and instruments. (For the older blend, it also includes the mono mix from 1967.) The new box rightfully incorporates “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane,” the masterpieces recorded alongside “Sgt. Pepper” but released before the album. It also has outtakes , comprehensive reading material, video clips from 1967 and a documentary about making the album. (The anecdotes are now familiar because the film was done for the album's25th anniversary.)
“Sgt. Pepper” was not universally adored when it appeared．The New York Times penned it, not entirely incorrectly, as “busy, hip and cluttered.” As pop tastes have swung between elaborate musical edifices and back-basics reactions, “Sgt. Pepper” has been by turns embraced, reviled and simply ignored.
But now that rock itself is being shunted toward the fringes of pop, it's a good time to free “Sgt. Pepper” from the burden of either forecasting rock's eclectic future or pointing toward a fussy dead end. It doesn't have to be “the most important rock & roll album ever made,” as Rolling Stone declared in 2012, or some wrongheaded counter-revolutionary coup against “real” rock’n’ roll. It's somewhere in between, juxtaposing the profound and the merely clever.
Although the album as a whole is synergistic, song by song it's a mix of milestones, like “A Day in the Life” and “Within You Without You,” with meticulously wrought baubles like “Lovely Rita” and “Good Morning Good Morning.” Two of its most remarkable songs, “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane,” aren't even on the album. But with 50 years of hindsight, “Sgt. Pepper” remains a joyful, whimsical and revelatory experiment. Even the album's slightest songs are full of musical and verbal twists.
For people who, like me, heard the album brand-new in 1967, “Sgt. Pepper” remains inseparable from its era. It was released on June 1, the beginning of the Summer of Love. It was a time of prosperity, naive optimism and giddy discovery, when the first baby boomers were just reaching their 20s and mind-expanding drugs had their most benign reputation.
