The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967): One of the best and most influential rock albums of all time, period. Paul McCartney conceived of the Beatles’ reimagining themselves as a military band from the Edwardian period (early 20th Century). The cover shows the Beatles in their new garb and also the original Beatles to one side (the wax statues borrowed from Madame Tussauds as I recall), and there are several rows of life-sized cardboard cutouts to the rear that are always fun to look through – that’s Bob Dylan in the upper right corner, W. C. Fields and Edgar Allan Poe are in the center of the top row near Marilyn Monroe, and I think that’s Marlon Brando behind the wax Beatles. Not all of the figures are well known; several are important yogi masters from India that George Harrison selected for the collage. In the title song of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album opens with a framing device that, despite being “the band you’ve known for all these years”, serves to introduce the Beatles as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, along with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)” near the end of the album. George Harrison’s contribution to the album, “Within You Without You” opens Side 2 and is drenched in Indian influences, with several Indian musicians playing on the track. That song and the closing number “A Day in the Life” are my favorites on the album, but every song is a classic. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is a psychedelic masterpiece, while “A Little Help from My Friends” is sung by Ringo Starr (he typically has one lead vocal per album) and was later masterfully covered by Joe Cocker. This particular disc is taken from a 1982 limited-edition box set of all 14 of the British albums by the Beatles that were half-speed remastered by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab. These were the last albums that I found after Katrina blew through; they had rested in the bayou for months, still in their metal rack. One album was missing, and the two outer albums had marine life on them including barnacles (!), but the other 11 albums cleaned up perfectly and play just fine.
