I can't even swear I heard the record at the time. Too young. My memory of this as a new release is a family memory, not a personal one: my Aunt Sandy returned from a year of nursing in the U.K. and presented my eldest brother with a copy of the record. Laminated, glossy cardboard sleeve and lots of colour and big bold sound. But that's almost hearsay. I remember seeing my sister lower her head in a kind of prayer at some news on the radio around the same time. Same thing. That was when Prime Minister Harold Holt went missing forever off Cheviot Beach in 1967. Sgt Pepper and I don't go back that far as friends. That happened later.
When my brother Michael descended upon the house for his uni holidays he brought his entourage and a few crates of LPs. One afternoon when I was drawing in the rumpus room he came in and put Sgt Pepper on to test the stereo system Dad had finished making that year. Dad had had made to enormous cabinets for the front speaker but also had another two speakers mounted on the rear wall just under the ceiling. Michael had the notion that this made it quadraphonic. When the first lead guitar lashes out in the opening song he grinned and pointed to the rear. That was all the proof I needed: Sgt Pepper was great because the Beatles had invented quadraphonic sound and made an album of great songs to prove it. I listened to all those aural textures and the strong central voices and harmonies, the great range of styles, and knew that all of modern rock music had started there the way that modern history starts with the French Revolution.
You see what I mean? I knew nothing about the band or their history and already I was making things up about them. This is what a dangerous little learning does; you like something so you make mythology for it. Michael also had Magical Mystery Tour with him and the White Album. The latter scared me a little with its horror soundscapes and songs about cannibalistic pigs but Magical Mystery Tour plugged straight into the nervous system of a kid whose only musical love was classical but needed prodding if he was to survive the impending rack of high school. The Beatles to me were from the get go as sophisticated as they were in 1967 and, for all I knew, always had been (I heard the earlier stuff a lot later). I got through the door of rock music with an instant credentials.
That wasn't the door to any kind of credibility with the natives of my age, though. Countdown and a lot of pretending saw to that until I realised that it didn't really matter what I liked as long as it wasn't classical (which I never gave up). This made me tolerate the adolescent mainstream rather than gleefully involve myself in it but that meant that liking The Beatles put me both outside (which I was used to and still happy about) and deep inside. What all that meant was that I was in touch with a classic, something from a former generation but also outside of time. Its reputation by the mid seventies put it at the apex of all rock albums. I just so happened to like it.
So, to me any nostalgia from hearing the album had no flowers in its hair, it wore a blue and grey school uniform, drew music fuelled dreamscapes in pencil and marvelled at his sisters singing along to A Day in the Life and getting the perfectly pitched note at the end of the line "nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Loooooooooooords." So it was never the big groundbreaking edifice of music for me but a record I loved and judged others by. I heard it in Queen's A Night at the Opera (well, any Queen album from the seventies) and disappointed that there wasn't more of it in Skyhooks' Living in the 70s.
I've had a few copies. I bought it as a U.S. pressing on Apple from Ken Hurford's import records around the corner. It didn't have the weird loop at the end and it was on the wrong label but it did have the gatefold and the cutout sheet (the local edition was a single sleeve). Until the following year's Never Mind The Bollocks finally got released it was my most played album. Then I bought an original mono edition for 99 cents at the Record Market in Brisbane (the guy checked the price ticket a few times but had to sell it to me for that. I didn't quite appreciate mono at the time so I gave it to a friend for helping me with some recordings in the eighties just before I left Brisbane. I bought the CD which was the only Beatles reissue to have a slip cover and booklet. Of the remasters in 2009 I bought both the stereo albums as hi-res flacs on the usb stick lodged inside the little aluminium apple and the mono box set. And this year I also bought the super deluxe box set with Giles Martin's more contemporary mix with centred bass, drums, and lead vocals, discs of sessions and outtakes, the mono mix and surround mixes on dvd and blu-ray. At some point in the future when we add to our music collections by tapping our temples and ramming our heads into media walls so that the downloads of our choice transfer to the microchip in our cerebral cortices I'll probably get a version of Pepper in that format, as well.
But Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is an album, a record by a pop group. When you remove the hype you have thirteen songs that delight or not. They delight me, still, as a whole sequence and as individual songs. The effect of the whole album is exhilarating with its great range of textures and colours, from the chorus of Lucy in the Sky through the eerie drones of Within You Without You to the delicate vocals and cataclysm of A Day in the Life.
Because I heard it closely for the first time in the seventies the sound of the tampuras buzzing through so many of the tracks I assumed was a synthesiser. Same went for the big flitty chaos at the end of Mr Kite. It didn't sound like a normal rock band but so much of it sound like records from the time of my discovery of it rather than its own. It didn't occur to me until I found out much more about the time of its creation that it was a groundbreaking album (and a very good one).
But hype and a tireless promotional machine have ways of rendering criticism meaningless and celebratory accounts into formless gushes. So, I won't be talking track by track or going into any detail for this one. If a new edition is released there will be millions of words prepared in advance to once again describe the sounds and songs. It's one of the easiest albums to get to hear and is best heard for oneself.
I will say that Giles Martin's contemporary stereo mix is impressive and respectful, if it does approach loudness war excess in the mastered image. The original mono is still the strongest indicator of what the first listeners heard and remains the closest to the band's intention. The surround mixes are also impressive by restraint. My copy of the boxed super deluxe set of the 50th Anniversary version arrived in time for an anniversary play but the week was busy and exhausting. At the end of it, tired unto collapse I had no wish to go out and remembered the blu-ray with the hi-res 5.1 mixes. I put the disc in, staggered to the couch, buried my body under the doona and lowered into a dozing haze as the orchestra tuned up and the restless audience shuffled. The first big electric chords clanged out and the stinging lead licks followed and MacCartney's excited scream welcomed me to the show. And I joined in falling beneath or surfacing into its warm colourful flow. Yep, don't care at all for the nay sayers neighing: this is a great record.
