About Me
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was recorded as Beatlemania was waning. The Beatles had grown tired of touring and had quit the road in late 1966, burned out after the drama of the "bigger than Jesus" controversy and a tumultuous tour of the Philippines, which saw the band expelled from the country more or less at gunpoint. After one particular concert, the four men were driven away in the back of a small van, and they decided, even Paul McCartney, who was perhaps the most in favour of continuing to tour, that enough was enough, and from then on the Beatles became an entirely studio-based band (excepting the 1969 rooftop performance during the Get Back sessions).Retirement from touring gave them, for the first time in their careers, more than ample time in which to prepare their next record. As EMI's premier act and Britain's most successful pop group, they had almost unlimited access to the state-of-the-art technology of Abbey Road Studios. All four band members had already developed a preference for long, late-night sessions although they were still extremely efficient and highly disciplined in their studio habits.By the time the Beatles recorded the album, their musical interests had grown from their simple R&B, pop and rock and roll beginnings to incorporate a variety of new influences. They had become familiar with a wide range of instruments, such as the Hammond organ and the electric piano; their instrumentation now covered the entire range, including strings, brass, woodwind, percussion and a wide range of exotic instruments, such as the sitar. McCartney, although unable to read music, had scored a recent British film The Family Way (see The Family Way soundtrack) with the assistance of producer-arranger George Martin, which earned him a prestigious Ivor Novello award. McCartney came to be greatly influenced by the avant garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom he wanted to include on the cover.The Beatles also used new modular effects units like the wah-wah pedal and the fuzzbox, which they augmented with their own experimental ideas, such as running voices and instruments through a Leslie speaker. Another important sonic innovation was McCartney's discovery of the direct injection (DI) technique, in which he could record his bass by plugging it directly into an amplifying circuit in the recording console. While the still often-used technique of recording through an amplifier with a microphone sounds more natural, this setup provided a radically different presence in bass guitar sound versus the old method. But the most frequently used method was to record the bass last, after all the other recording was done, by placing the amplifier in the centre of the studio and placing the microphone several inches from the source.The Sgt. Pepper period also coincided with the introduction of some important musical innovations, both from within the band and the rest of the musical industry. The work of Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, Phil Spector, and Brian Wilson was radically redefining what was possible for pop musicians in terms of both songwriting and recording. Studio and recording technology had already reached a high degree of development and was poised for even greater innovation. The old rules of pop songwriting were being abandoned, as complex lyrical themes were explored for the first time in popular music, and songs were growing longer (such as Dylan's "Desolation Row," "Like a Rolling Stone," and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands").
