Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the biggest game changer in rock history.
a sprawling masterpiece that combines familiarity with surprise, innovation with technique, and imagination with technology
alongside its prefatory single ("Penny Lane" / "Strawberry Fields Forever"), it signifies an artistic and commercial high point in their already-exemplary career, a ringing fulfillment of their promise ... and of pop style's staying power
LP: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (rel. June 1)
Side 1: "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" / "With a Little Help From My Friends" / "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" / "Getting Better" / "Fixing a Hole" / "She's Leaving Home" / "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite"
Side 2: "Within You Without You" / "When I'm Sixty-Four" / "Lovely Rita" / "Good Morning Good Morning" / "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)" / "A Day in the Life"
Single: "All You Need is Love" / "Baby You're a Rich Man" (rel. July 7)
Single: "Hello Goodbye" / "I Am the Walrus" (rel. Nov. 24)
EP: Magical Mystery Tour (rel. Dec. 8)
Side 1: "Magical Mystery Tour" / "Your Mother Should Know"
Side 2: "I Am the Walrus"
Side 3: "The Fool on the Hill" / "Flying"
Side 4: "Blue Jay Way"
The Summer of Love
to rock artists & their audiences, the Utopian impulses to transform the world through sound, color, and protest had an urgent sincerity during the era, even as innocence began to fade
to many in the older generation, it seemed as if young people hoped to construct a delirious bubble in which they might escape the world's troubles
during 1967, the June release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band kicked off "the Summer of Love" (Summer 1967), even though day-to-day life on the streets was far from tranquil
at the time in America, ...
President Johnson's mandatory draft (i.e., conscription) began siphoning young men for combat service in Vietnam, building troop levels up to 475,000 ... 1967 would be the war's bloodiest chapter yet, with over 16,000 American casualties!
as if admitting failure, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara resigned that fall
Senator Eugene McCarthy (Democrat of Wisconsin) announced his presidential candidacy on a peace platform, challenging his own party's president and further exacerbating the arguments between younger and older generations
leftist groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Stokely Carmichael's Black Power movement began to form to counter the "hippies," a more naive side of the counterculture
the SDS had grown from regional chapters at the Universities of Michigan, Columbia, and Yale to a booming national movement of over half a million students
as the Vietnam War heated up, SDS protests led to sit-ins, teach-ins, and peaceful marches involving tens of thousands by 1967
tactical conflicts within SDS led to the founding of the Weather Underground, a group that practiced "controlled" bombings of government property
this radical splinter sect named itself after Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues": "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"
as a conscious objector, heavyweight prize fighter Muhammad Ali (formerly, Cassius Clay) refused to be drafted when his number came up in April 1967, which resulted in the New York State Athletic Commission stripping him of the championship title he had seized in 1964
The gap between young and old took on charged symbolic status as men grew their hair to their shoulders. Shouts of "Get a job!" and "Cut your hair!" from hardhat construction workers met with "Make love not war!" and "Let your freak flag fly!" from longhairs.
Paul McCartney's "She's Leaving Home" (from Sgt. Pepper's) conveys an elegant and largely sympathetic portrayal of the difficulty of one generation failing to communicate with the other: "What did we do that was wrong?"
The Beatles continue to evolve in 1967 ...
took Harrison's Eastern mysticism seriously began to investigate Transcendental Meditation, following the lead of Pattie Boyd Harrison (George's wife)
in August 1967, while attending a weekend workshop in Wales led by their future guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles learned of the death of manager Brian Epstein from a barbiturate overdose
the Beatles' business anchor fell away, forcing them to reconceive their empire
the Maharishi became a father figure to the group, and an Indian meditation retreat was planned for the fall
the Beatles formed a new company (Apple) as a tax strategy and opened a clothing boutique in London that lost money hand-over-fist due to criminally negligent mismanagement
the Beatles took a serious stand on world peace even though Britain never sent troops to Vietnam
When asked to represent the United Kingdom as one of 19 countries participating in the first-ever global satellite television broadcast, Our World (June 25, 1967), they performed their new anthem, "All You Need is Love," which opened to mocking strains of France's "La Marseillaise" ... in the classic film Casablanca, this is the national anthem the Allies sang to drown out the Nazi's "Die acht am Rhein"!!
Hippies & flower children comprised the tender side of the countercultures, which was centered in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco ... home to the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, the Steve Miller Band, and other purveyors of "acid rock," a musical style that played out in Britain with Cream (one of Eric Clapton's early groups). Frank Zappa's arch social critique made fun of the hippies as well as the establishment they countered. For example, listen to the opening track of his 1968 release We're Only In It for the Money (with an inverted parody of the Sgt. Pepper's album cover) skewered the runaways who dropped out of society to take drugs in San Francisco.
George Harrison famously visited the Haight in August 1967 but became so turned off by flower-power naifs that he renounced hallucinogens and recalibrated his spiritual search.
The Monterey Pop Festival (June 1967); to see and hear some of these performances, point your browser to the "Monterey Pop Festival" page of my rock history website for Music 151: Rock History to 1980
a small-scale precursor of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair of 1969, featuring a number of the bands mentioned above as well as Janis Joplin, the Who, and the American "debut" of Jimi Hendrix
McCartney had personally recommended the Jimi Hendrix Experience to the organizers
LSD and recreational drugs
many rock stars glorified the use of drugs, leading to law-enforcement crackdowns; Sgt. Pilcher busted ...
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones in February & May 1967
during Spring 1967, as Sgt. Pepper's sessions progressed, the Rolling Stones served time in jail for drugs Pilcher had planted on them and became early icons for the decriminalization of marijuana
Pilcher ultimately saw prison himself for four years on a perjury charge
John Lennon in November 1968
Lennon's arrest became particularly troublesome as a pretext for deportation attempts made while he was living in the U.S. in the early 1970s, subject to abuses of power in the Nixon White House, which feared that John would be formidable in galvanizing the youth vote against Nixon in his 1972 bid for re-election.
George Harrison in March 1969
busting rock stars became a key propaganda tactic in the early culture wars
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
During the unprecedented 10-month gap between Revolver (August 1966) and Sgt. Pepper's (June 1967), rumors swirled ... the Beatles had run out of steam, they were working on a "turkey," or they were finished! The abstract promotional TV films for "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" fed such talk, since most fans found these videos incomprehensible. Both of these promotional videos are linked below from The Paul McCartney Project.
"Strawberry Fields Forever": Promotional Video
"Penny Lane": Promotional Video
Both of these singles were highly expressive artworks ...
even if "Penny Lane" displayed a fanciful common touch, its layered meanings revealed only through repeated listenings
poetry and musical craft reached an all-time peak, capping and expanding on a sequence of 1966 rock masterpieces: Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, the Rolling Stones' Between the Buttons, and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.
The moment Sgt. Pepper's appeared (June 1, 1967), all negativity vanished
the music lit up the airwaves in a starburst of melody
radio stations competed with one another to see who could broadcast the album in its entirety the most times in a row
the overwhelming audience response made the Beatles' entire early career seem like a mere overture to this moment
After the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on June 1st, Jimi Hendrix opened his June 4th show at Brian Epstein's Seville Theatre with the album's theme song ... his audience knew every word!!
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band altered the pop world dramatically:
the album's highly imaginative explorations of altered states, with Day-Glo colors in shifting forms, earned the term "psychedelic," reminiscent of the light shows at Ken Kesey's "acid tests," cosmic dance parties held with the Grateful Dead in San Francisco in the last months of 1965, while LSD was still legal
the Beatles even recorded an unpublished but legendary 14-minute tape piece, "Carnival of Light," for "The Million-Volt Light and Sound Rave" hosted by a London theater in late January 1967; despite frequent "teases" from McCartney, "Carnival" remains "the holy grail" of unreleased Beatles tracks
Sgt. Pepper's as a concept album
in McCartney's mind, it was a way of refurbishing the image of the Beatles from teenybopper heartthrobs into a socially conscious young adult act ... he pitched it to the band members as changing from entertainers to artists
quoting Paul: "Let's not be ourselves. Let's develop alter-egos so we're not having to project an image which we know.... What would really be interesting would be to actually take on the personas of this different band .... Then when John came up to the microphone or I did it, it wouldn't be John or Paul singing it, it would be the members of this band. It would be a freeing element.... It won't be the Beatles, it'll be this other band, so we'll be able to lose our identities in this."
More than any singular visual, poetic, or aural feature, this reborn group identity maps the lasting impact of LSD on the Beatles' art ... the album's concept took shape as an illusory performance by an unreal band, pictured on the cover, showing band members holding orchestral instruments they didn't really play.
the tracks follow one another as as a seamless parade of situations held together less by a common theme than by the colorful arrangements and harmonies ... with little or no silence between songs
The album cover (sketched out by McCartney and developed by a team of artists/designers) included photographs of a collection of life-size photographs, props, and wax figures (including the Beatles' own mop-top likenesses from Madame Tussauds wax museum), entering pop history as an example of Peter Blake's postmodern "pop art."
the celebrity montage on the front of the album cover (the image above) outlines a major Sgt. Pepper's theme: the triumph of 20th-century pop culture, a postmodern lust for notoriety, and the new claims for pop art's legitimacy
Blake long expressed bitterness about having been paid a flat fee (£200) for the album cover!
Because they had given up two of the three songs they had already produced toward their next album (recall that "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" with both released as singles) the Beatles built then new album around Paul's remaining number ("When I'm Sixty-Four") and the next track they produced, which was "A Day in the Life." To be more precise, the Beatles conceived a frame that included "When I'm Sixty-Four," positioning "A Day in the Life" as outside the album proper, delivered by a deflated narrator who presented Sgt. Pepper's fictions with a final sense of resignation.
though recorded early in the Sgt. Pepper's sessions, "A Day in the Life" was the Beatles' most ambitious songwriting collaboration and orchestral production, appearing as the album's coda, a morning-after hangover from the revelry of the night before
if Sgt. Pepper's fantasies and Technicolor costumes create a Utopian hope, "A Day in the Life" finishes the record off with a cold splash of dismal reality
Experiencing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Side 1:
the opening sound of the album (an orchestra warming up and a crowd murmuring excitedly before a performance) hints at the conundrums most contemporaneous listeners appreciated: for their first all-studio effort, the Beatles pretended to be a Victorian brass band, "guaranteed to raise a smile"
the LP opened and closed with a theme song, marked by an anticipation-filled and appreciative audience
the Pepper "show" begins with entertaining sing-alongs: "With a Little Help From My Friends" then moves to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and moves through innocence and fun ("Getting Better" and "Lovely Rita") to greater and greater complexity (the major-minor instabilities of "Fixing a Hole" and the elaborate tape manipulations for the whirligig effects in "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite"). "She's Leaving Home describes the unsatisfying home life of a runaway from her parents' point of view"
listeners quickly pointed to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" as an acronym for LSD, although Lennon denied this, maintaining that he was simply attaching childlike, Lewis Carroll-style imagery to the name of a painting by his 3-year-old son, Julian
"Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" details an 1840 handbill from a traveling circus that Lennon analogizes with rock 'n' roll (taking many lyrical phrases directly from the vintage poster), with shifting tonal centers (C minor, D minor,and E minor) for a three-ring circus
Side 2:
opening side 2 of the LP with an Indian interlude is "Within You Without You, including unique instrumental sounds: sitar, tabla, svaramandal, dilruba, and tamboura
"When I'm Sixty-Four"and "Good Morning Good Morning" provide a bit of corny nostalgia
as the final track, "A Day in the Life" rises from the experience more like an after-concert apparition than an encore
the Beatles knew they had crafted a series of songs they never intended to perform live
Sgt. Pepper's colorful veneer masks a painstaking technical project that required 324 hours of studio time for arranging, recording, mixing, and preparing masters
recall that the 14 songs of Please Please Me were fully done, edited, and mixed four years earlier in a total of 28 hours!
Engineer Geoff Emerick won a Grammy Award in the non-classical category for his work on this production, the first such technical recognition for a rock album
the Beatles devoted far more time to figuring out how to commit ideas to tape, often by inventing new gadgets (such as the use of a control voltage to gang together multiple tape machines for the orchestra in "A Day in the Life") and multiple generations of four-track tape
these results sound delightfully artificial with heavy reverb applied to some parts and not to others or expressive panning (movement appearing to be from one side of the stereo field to the other), effects that would never occur in a real performance space
add to the talent of the Beatles the abilities of conceptual artist Yoko Ono, who had worked with musical pioneer John Cage and performance-artist collective Fluxus before intensifying a relationship with John Lennon in late 1967 and you have the pinnacle of experimental pop (note, for example, the inclusion of a recording of a section of Shakespeare's King Lear inserted into "I Am the Walrus")
the entire set of lyrics for all Sgt. Pepper's tracks are included on the back of the album cover (previously unprecedented)
”Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
A song for which the title was the product of the imagination of 3-year-old Julian Lennon (who used the phrase to describe a picture he had drawn; undoubtedly, Julian's fantastic imagery was influenced by his father who also had fond memories of Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Lennon claimed that the fact that the acronym for the song title is "LSD" (John's favorite hallucinogen) was simply a happily cosmic coincidence. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is a wonder-filled impressionistic journey from one unreal place to another, its unusual contrasting timbres coalescing around unexpected tonal twists in a labyrinthine formal structure.
changing meter & tempo in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"
the transition from each verse into the chorus involves a dramatic change in both tempo and meter!
listen to the four strong hits (one hit per beat) that Ringo uses to signal transitioning from the triple meter verse to the duple meter chorus
pre-choruses are slightly faster than the verses
choruses have a slower pulse (than verses), but their beat divisions and subdivisions are faster than previous sections
During the same year when Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton demonstrated that rock music had room for instrumental virtuosity, the Beatles showed no interest in flashy displays of dexterity.
To learn more about this track, I strongly recommend reading carefully through the "sidebar" section of the Everette & Riley (2019) textbook
devoted to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," especially the description of each band member's roles in recording this track!
Paul considered the Pre-chorus to be a "middle 8" (8 bars inserted into the track)
repeat as coda
”A Day in the Life”
As the closing track on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, after waving goodbye to the fictional audience -- "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)" -- the curtain descends on the album's illusory world, and a new narrator greets us from a private, hyper-realistic realm: alone with ominous piano, bass, and despondent maracas, Lennon recounts his daily ritual of reading the newspaper, whose stories provoke anguished, existential sighs (like "oh boy)."
in the third verse, Lennon reads about a movie he's seen (it's actually How I Won the War, a film Lennon starred in), in which the in which the English army had just one the war, and the violence makes a crowd of people turn their heads away
at the conclusion of the third verse, Lennon ascends into falsetto with this phrase: "I'd love to turn you on"
at the time, this was an explicit drug reference
in the context of the song, the line works poetically on different levels ... it's the narrator wishing for a more enlightened world, one where violence and carnage doesn't intrude, where the poetry of everyday life can elevate monotonous routine and innocence answers evil
the second time Lennon sings "I'd love to turn you on" at the conclusion of the third verse, a huge orchestra swoops into the mix for a musical transition that mixes escalating fear with a fearsome resolve
in an avant-garde move, the orchestral musicians were told to play whatever notes they wished in a generally rising motion and land together on a target
once they hit their peak, the noise suddenly drops away and an alarm clock goes off (around 2:18 in the track)
after the alarm clock sounds, a new character enters (Paul McCartney's voice) with a completely different outlook on life (Paul's busybody replaces John's oversensitive narrator)
the listener may wonder whether the preceding section has been a dream or a nightmare from which the singer awakens
Paul's character remains sublimely checked out of reality, until a drag on his smoke sends him off into a dream
the orchestra reenters with Lennon singing "Aaaaaaah"
after a flourish of brass instruments, we land back in John's world for the final verse
at around 4:20,after a moment's suspenseful pause, a gigantic E-major chord is played on multiple keyboard instruments, bringing the track to a crushing close, like a huge, heavy door slamming shut on some cultural dystopia
Engineer Geoff Emerick artificially extended the piano's decay across 40 seconds of unbearable tension (that a LONG time to hold a chord ... and listeners' attention!), even more unsettling than either the orchestral climax in that it nullifies all possibility of resolution or escape.
This song-within-a-song structure (inserting Paul's character into the narration being provided by John) remains striking for how elegantly it suits the large idea: that simple engagement with the contemporary world involves suffering, and staying "sane" relies on tuning everything out.
Does McCartney parachute down into Lennon's song?
Does Lennon's narrative simply let McCartney's sideshow in from some trap door?
full orchestra
Can you hear the aa' form of this verse?
As a finale, "A Day in the Life" casts a gigantic shadow over the album it closes
this single track lifts Sgt. Pepper's out of the pop context and gives it a weight and self-consciousness it wouldn't otherwise have
when Bob Dylan eulogizes Lennon in "Roll on John" (the final track on Dylan's Tempest, 2012), it's "A Day in the Life" that provides the first quoted Beatle lines
when Sgt. Pepper's gets referred to as a masterpiece, "A Day in the Life" is the main reason why: it elevates everything it follows, working as a diagram of Lennon's and McCartney's opposing concerns (like a negative image of "We Can Work It Out."
the Beatles seem to be saying that fame, fortune, and pop fantasy all have their pleasures, but after the show's over, we all return to modern life, which is brutal, full of random savagery, answered by neglect and worse: mundane tasks (like the counting of potholes!)
an interesting point: folded into the structure of this dual narrative lies the suggestion that Lennon dreams McCartney and McCartney dreams Lennon, ans astral metaphor for the songwriting partnership just as it begins to crack open
Lennon & McCartney use their own sparring partnership to stitch a masterpiece about the limits of entertainment
from this point on, their Utopian promise for a world rejuvenated by music becomes inexorably shaded by a dark undertow
Magical Mystery Tour
After Brian Epstein's death, the group delayed a fall trip to India and decided instead to keep working, stay busy, and deal with the grief by concentrating on music ... including a contract to complete a one-hour TV film.
in the spirit of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, who had sojourned across America in a psychedelic bus named Further in 1964, the Beatles followed McCartney's concept: hire a bunch of eccentric actors and extras, climb on board a tour bus with no fixed destination, and improvise dialogue.
having repeatedly charmed the world's press, they reasoned they were good enough at extemporizing to carry the patter between musical numbers and had earned the self-governing status to create and produce their own film instead of relying on established hands for a prefabricated rerun of Help!
this plan did not work
even when laced with Beatles tracks, a mass-movie audience expects characters, plot, and conflict
Magical Mystery Tour suffered by comparison to the "masterpiece" Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which had been released earlier the same year.
most of us consider the second half of 1967 as the only "dip" in the otherwise brilliantly consistent aesthetic drive of the Beatles, forgiving Magical Mystery Tour's indulgences in light of Sgt. Pepper's brilliance
Magical Mystery Tour debuted on BBC-TV on Boxing Day (December 26th)
unbelievably, the movie was debuted in black-and-white, draining the project of its mind-altering color and heightening the contrast between its flowery goals and their amateurish realization
it's impossible to imagine their first self-directed color film airing in black-and-white on Epstein's watch!!
After Sgt. Pepper's had restored the Beatles' credibility following the backlash they experienced in 1966, by the end of 1967, Magical Mystery Tour had collected new negative reviews for the Beatles, ending the year with a level of discomfort not felt since they had quit performing live.
the musical soundtrack appeared in Britain in a uniquely bizarre format: across to 45 rpm EPs in a colorful package with booklet
in America, Capitol Records combined the movie material on side 1 of an LP with the year's A- and B-sides (including "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever") on side 2.
At the beginning of 1968, the Beatles strongly felt they deserved a break from fame and recording, so they finally headed off to India.
”The Fool on the Hill”
"The Fool on the Hill" is one of McCartney's minor character portraits; other examples include "Eleanor Rigby," "Penny Lane," "Lady Madonna," "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," and "Rocky Raccoon."
Everette & Riley (2019) consider "The Fool on the Hill" among the least of these songs for the following reasons:
the lyric goes unfinished
the major-minor design of verses against their refrains
the instrumentation and production reveal a weakness (unusual for the Beatles) sounding more like a tired cliché
Everette & Riley go on to suggest that the character itself was tired before McCartney even wrote the song, citing ...
Nat "King" Cole's "Nature Boy" (1948)
the film Forrest Gump (1994)
Can you hear the "ab" form of this verse?
Paul McCartney playing recorder, harmonicas, & flute over the "a" section of the verse. This verse consists ONLY of the "b" section, completing the verse begun by the instrumental break.
Paul McCartney on wind instruments again ("a" section only) including vocal improvisations throughout. Like Verse 3, only the "b" section of the verse is performed here.
bird-like sound effects This section repeats the "a" section of the verse, fading out; very similar to the music in the "instrumental break."
”I Am the Walrus”
"I Am the Walrus" is John Lennon's most irregular Beatle song in every manner possible.
hearing that his lyrics were under study at Quarry Bank High School, led by the literature "masters" who had once branded him as "bound to fail" ...
Lennon resolved to weld poetic and musical nonsense into a form so inscrutable only a fool could pretend understanding
his lyrics were peopled by characters such as "Semolina Pilchard" and "Edgar Allen Poe," the song's dark tales move between the cockeyed utterances of Stanley Unwin and Bob Dylan invoking Lewis Carroll's Walrus and Humpty Dumpty ("the Eggman")
the form of "I Am the Walrus" may be the most complex construction ever to shape a pop song under five minutes
phrase lengths and patterns seem almost arbitrary
the verses are in bar form (a-a'-b) but each phrase expresses a different harmonic progression and the last, a refrain, is half of the expected length
at around 2:00 into the track, the "Eggman" refrain takes an extra bar of V (the Dominant chord) embellishment with a rude, foul mix of a disjointed operatic yodel, a radio's harsh frequency modulation, and group glissandi from a dissonant interval in cellos
listen to the
after a solo piano introduction, "I Am the Walrus" quickly involves a wild use of strings, horns, bass clarinet, and chorus for which the brilliant George Martin must be given credit
the choir was actually the Mike Sammes Singers, an expert jazzy a capella-style group, often hired as backing vocalists for pop-hit arrangements recorded in London
listen to the by the choir after John sings "I am the Eggman"
harmonically, "I Am the Walrus" is comprised of all-major triads built on every white key of Lennon's electric piano, confounding the home scale with mode mixture from realms outside of functional tonality
George Martin's description of "I Am the Walrus" is probably the most accurate: "organized chaos."
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the biggest game changer in rock history.
to rock artists & their audiences, the Utopian impulses to transform the world through sound, color, and protest had an urgent sincerity during the era, even as innocence began to fade
took Harrison's Eastern mysticism seriously began to investigate Transcendental Meditation, following the lead of Pattie Boyd Harrison (George's wife)
The moment Sgt. Pepper's appeared (June 1, 1967), all negativity vanished
Side 1:
A song for which the title was the product of the imagination of 3-year-old Julian Lennon (who used the phrase to describe a picture he had drawn; undoubtedly, Julian's fantastic imagery was influenced by his father who also had fond memories of Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Lennon claimed that the fact that the acronym for the song title is "LSD" (John's favorite hallucinogen) was simply a happily cosmic coincidence. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is a wonder-filled impressionistic journey from one unreal place to another, its unusual contrasting timbres coalescing around unexpected tonal twists in a labyrinthine formal structure.
As the closing track on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, after waving goodbye to the fictional audience -- "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)" -- the curtain descends on the album's illusory world, and a new narrator greets us from a private, hyper-realistic realm: alone with ominous piano, bass, and despondent maracas, Lennon recounts his daily ritual of reading the newspaper, whose stories provoke anguished, existential sighs (like "oh boy)."
After Brian Epstein's death, the group delayed a fall trip to India and decided instead to keep working, stay busy, and deal with the grief by concentrating on music ... including a contract to complete a one-hour TV film.
"The Fool on the Hill" is one of McCartney's minor character portraits; other examples include "Eleanor Rigby," "Penny Lane," "Lady Madonna," "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," and "Rocky Raccoon."
"I Am the Walrus" is John Lennon's most irregular Beatle song in every manner possible.