Skip to main content

View Post [edit]

Poster: BryanE Date: Jun 1, 2007 8:06am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: It Was 40 Years Ago Today . . .

Far be it from me to miss an opportunity to post one of these commemorations of the day's highlights in history, and today's is significant with the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on June 1st, 1967, which signalled the beginning of the fabled Summer of Love. By that time, the musical and cultural scene in London had already developed into a contemporary flashpoint of international influence. And on this side of the globe, the city of San Francisco was a crucible of societal change, and The Grateful Dead and their peers had already been at the forefront of the revolution for a couple of years and then some. But Sgt. Pepper's and the wave that followed it bumped everything up to a whole new level (and not necessarily a good level at that). The generation born at or near the end of World War II that had been weaned with Howdy Doody playing in glorious black and white on the family Philco migrated to the bay by the thousands in search of something much more colorful, most specifically, to the section of town at and around the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets that the Dead called home. By the end of the summer, which even included a visit to the Haight from a guy named George (whose requisite single composition per album on Sgt. Pepper's was called Within You, Without You), the influx was overwhelming, and there goes the neighborhood. Locals who were none too keen on their town becoming overrun by the hopeful and the hapless dirtying its sidewalks quickly became weary of the population explosion. Among those that got fed up were the Dead themselves, and within a year they had all moved to the hinterlands. Eventually, even the city's tour buses were steered back to their traditional routes as residents thankfully returned to a more tranquil life, but the mark left by Sgt. Pepper's and The Grateful Dead's community that existed before the deluge cannot be overstated. Although I can't speak for the quality of the recording because this computer at work is devoid of audio, it sounded pretty good to my ears that night at Soldier Field, so maybe give a listen to this version of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds just for good measure: http://www.archive.org/details/gd94-07-23.sbd.fishman.14839.sbeok.shnf
This post was modified by BryanE on 2007-06-01 15:06:08

Reply [edit]

Poster: ghostofpig Date: Jun 1, 2007 11:00am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Paul is deaed, miss him, miss him, miss him .

Actually isn't Paul 64?

I remember when Sgt. P came out--followed a few months later by Zappa's We're Only in it for the Money. The "cool" folks on MacDougal Street swore by the latter. By June of 1967, I was into mystical herbs and seeing the Dead for the first time. Pepper--on headphones--was a dope smoker's delight with all its tricks and bells and whistles. Geroge's tune has always stood out as the best to me--and it doesn't feature any of the other three.

I agree that Revolver is still their finest moment, followed by Abby Road, but Pepper--well, it will always be Pepper.

Reply [edit]

Poster: ganges Date: Jun 1, 2007 12:09pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Paul is deaed, miss him, miss him, miss him .

Nice post, thanks Bryan, so many memories, is it really 40 years ago???, when I walked down Carnaby ST. in London that summer..., buying a shirt with the design of all those psychedelic images! It seems it was a special time, musical ideas exploded on both sides of the pond.

Always loved George's tune, too, he was a great person for me.

Reply [edit]

Poster: cush212 Date: Jun 1, 2007 12:10pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Paul is deaed, miss him, miss him, miss him .

Not to knock Sgt Peppers... But even back when they were both new, I always was much more into "We're Only In It For The Money"... Still am!

:)

Reply [edit]

Poster: bluedevil Date: Jun 1, 2007 12:15pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Paul is deaed, miss him, miss him, miss him .

what's the ugliest part of your body?

Reply [edit]

Poster: cush212 Date: Jun 1, 2007 12:16pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Paul is deaed, miss him, miss him, miss him .

Some say it's your nose... Some say it's your toes... But I think it's your......

:)

Reply [edit]

Poster: ghostofpig Date: Jun 1, 2007 12:29pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Paul is dead, miss him, miss him, miss him .

I remember being alerted to playing the end of side one of "Money" backwards--before all the Paul is dead stuff.

You heard a censored verse from one of the tunes;

"Take a look around before you say you don't care.
Shut your fucking mouth about the length of my hair.
How would you survive, if you were alive, shitty little person?"

The end of side 1 of Pepper also had a little backwards blip as the groove hit the label:"Fuck you like a superman."

Frank's was again better!

Reply [edit]

Poster: cush212 Date: Jun 1, 2007 12:34pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Paul is dead, miss him, miss him, miss him .


;)

Gotta go to work... see you all tonight.

Reply [edit]

Poster: ghostofpig Date: Jun 1, 2007 12:36pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: Paul is dead, miss him, miss him, miss him .

Shitty little person. :)

Reply [edit]

Poster: Uncle Hulka Date: Jul 28, 2007 7:15am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: It Was 40 Years Ago Today . . .

perk it's ears up
This post was modified by Uncle Hulka on 2007-07-28 14:15:22

Reply [edit]

Poster: SomeDarkHollow Date: Jun 1, 2007 8:20am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: It Was 40 Years Ago Today . . .

From an article in Rolling Stone (August 1987):
Take, for example, the dog whistle - which humans can't hear - buried on the album's second side. "We're sitting around the studio, and one of the engineers starts talking about wavelengths, wave forms and stuff, kilohertz," McCartney recalls. "I still don't understand these things - I'm completely nontechnical. And as for John, he couldn't even change a plug - he really couldn't, you know. The engineers would be explaining to us what all this stuff was. An ultrasonic sound wave - 'a low one, you can kill people with the low ones.' We were all saying, 'Wow, man. Hey, wow.' 'And the high ones,' he said, 'only dogs can hear it.' We said, 'We gotta have it on! There's going to be one dog and his owner, and I'd just love to be there when his ears prick up.'"

Reply [edit]

Poster: bluedevil Date: Jun 1, 2007 9:03am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: It Was 40 Years Ago Today . . .

One guy's take [http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070618/wiener] This album does feel like the most dated of the Beatles' efforts, while Rubber Soul and Revolver still seem ahead of their time (at least to me).

posted May 31, 2007 (web only)
A Day in the Life: Sgt. Pepper Turns 40
Jon Wiener
It was forty years ago today: the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "It's certainly a thrill," the Beatles sang; but listening today, much of the thrill is gone--except for one song. Still, it's easy to remember that day--June 1, 1967--when the first thing we saw was the cover: a collage featuring the Beatles surrounded by cut-out figures of their heroes and other celebrities, including wax figures of themselves two years earlier, when they were the lovable moptops. Rock had never been so smart.
As for the music, rock had never been so big, so free, with so many ideas and feelings and so many different sounds. The lads from Liverpool wanted to "raise a smile" with the irresistible whimsy of Paul McCartney's "When I'm Sixty-Four" and "Lovely Rita, Meter Maid." But they also told vivid and true stories like "She's Leaving Home," a song about the parents of a runaway girl.
Critics quickly ran out of superlatives: Geoffrey Stokes wrote in the Village Voice that "listening to the Sgt. Pepper album one thinks not simply of the history of popular music but the history of this century." In the Times of London, no less than Kenneth Tynan described Sgt. Pepper as "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization." He didn't seem to be kidding.
Listening to the CD forty years later, the concept behind this concept album now seems a bit lame: The lads take on the identity of old-time music hall entertainers for a kaleidoscopic tour of popular styles of the century--marching bands, circus music, folk songs, jazz hits. Some of the cuts are pretty bad, particularly John Lennon's "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," with elaborate circus sound effects and not much else. Lennon's song about the world of LSD, "where rockinghorse people eat marshmallow pies," is cloying.
But one song today seems stronger than ever: Lennon's "A Day in the Life." As the cut begins, "the curtain falls on Pepperland," Tim Riley wrote, "just as another is raised on the sobering stage of the real world." The opening line, "I read the news today, oh boy," is dense with meaning now, especially the way Lennon sings "oh boy," which sounds sad, vulnerable and puzzled. It makes me remember hearing the news of his murder on December 8, 1980, and also reading the news from Saigon the summer the album came out, and seeing the news from Baghdad today.
The singer is reading the newspaper, about a man killed in a car accident, while "a crowd of people stood and stared." One death, in a summer when thousands were dying in Vietnam. In place of the big rich sound of the rest of the album, the instrumentation here is stark and simple: guitar, bass, piano and percussion.
Then we hear a dissonant orchestral cacaphony, and then an alarm clock goes off, and the bewildered and subdued John is replaced by the perky Paul, waking up and heading out, blissfully ignorant of the world's terrors.
Then we're back with Lennon--is this just a nightmare? The next news story is about the puzzle of "four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire." Lennon tosses in a joke--"now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall"--but it's hard to laugh after the news about the man who was killed.
Lennon's last line is "I'd love to turn you on. " But this isn't the happy turn-on of Ringo's "I get high with a little help from my friends"--it's more like turning on to escape a hopeless world, to get away from the nightmare of "a day in the life."
Then comes that concluding orchestral crescendo, one of the most dissonant and most famous in popular music, followed by a crashing fortissimo piano chord in E major, followed by a long, slow fade--forty-three seconds of utter finality.
"A Day in the Life," with its confusion and quiet horror, follows the youthful fun of the rest of Sgt. Pepper. Together they express so much of what we call the '60s: As one speaker in the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties put it, "so much life, so much death; so much possibility, so much impossibility."

Reply [edit]

Poster: sydthecat2 Date: Jun 1, 2007 9:30am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: It Was 40 Years Ago Today . . .

Despite criticism regarding the album's sound and realization we are still hearing the influence from this lp in today's crowded pop field. I hear Pepper in almost everything in the Canadian scene (apart from the roots/country artists) from Feist, (which might shock her) to her mates, Broken Social Scene,to Arcade Fire to Stars. It hasn't hit my turntable or CD player much in the last twenty years compared to other Beatle albums but to hear a few of the the songs re-contextualized on the LOVE release is to re-hear the album. The sound is state of the art. They have been remixed for our 2007 ears (necessitated by the music being used in the Cirque de Soleil show of the same name). Lucy in the Sky seems to come out of the clouds in the wake and wash of the brilliant mash of Tomorrow Never Knows and Within You Without You. The Sgt. Pepper Reprise and Day in the Life cleft here by Hey Jude have an almost live feel, as if you're in the studio watching the boys rock or sitting beside John at his piano. In fact the whole record feels like it was recorded yesterday. (The mix of Come Together will blow you away in its clarity and the band performance is stunning.) Not for purists then but definitely a route to re-discover the freshness of ideas and sound that made you a fan in the first place. Inevitably today it leads me back to the original four track masterpiece of ambition. Even Lennon said in the angry 1970 Rolling Stone interview "Pepper was the one, you know". I still prefer the the directness of Revolver, the live off the floor sound of much of the Let It Be sessions, and the cornucopia that is the White Album but I reserve a special place in my heart for this record and how it knocked my socks off forty years ago today, when my ears were young and my dreams were fueled by brilliant art.
This post was modified by sydthecat2 on 2007-06-01 16:29:59
This post was modified by sydthecat2 on 2007-06-01 16:30:32

Reply [edit]

Poster: bluedevil Date: Jun 1, 2007 9:40am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: It Was 40 Years Ago Today . . .

Have you seen LOVE? A buddy of mine saw it recently in Vegas and said it was incredible and that it was like hearing things for the first time. I'm skeptical, but your take makes me think he was onto something.

Reply [edit]

Poster: BryanE Date: Jun 1, 2007 9:45am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: It Was 40 Years Ago Today . . .

Just to jump back in for a couple more cents worth, I haven't seen it, but across the board, reviews and reaction have been nothing short of glowing. Paul and Ringo have both spoken highly of it, and Olivia Harrison has said George would have felt the same. Even Yoko responded positively, so there ya' go.

Reply [edit]

Poster: bluedevil Date: Jun 1, 2007 10:03am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: It Was 40 Years Ago Today . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1u489DqbMQ

Reply [edit]

Poster: BryanE Date: Jun 1, 2007 10:58am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: It Was 40 Years Ago Today . . .

I'd seen that one, but thanks-plenty of stuff to watch on that page. Hey Bulldog is one of my favorites by the Fabs/the video is pretty straightforward, but the song still kicks ass.

This is immeasurably far off the subject, but speaking of something that kicks ass:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=AAC07QWXTps

Reply [edit]

Poster: AshesRising Date: Jun 1, 2007 6:58pm
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: It Was 40 Years Ago Today . . .

BryanE:
..man, you always come through with some great historical references and insight. Thanks a lot. == Was it the following year, 1968, that there was a "funeral" for the "death of the hippies" (or whatever it was called) == do you know anything about the origin of that event and how little or how much the band was involved it?

Thanks again, -- AshesRising

Reply [edit]

Poster: ghostofpig Date: Jun 2, 2007 5:32am
Forum: GratefulDead Subject: Re: It Was 40 Years Ago Today . . .

The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), and Jefferson Airplane continued to live in the Haight, but by the end of the summer, the incessant media coverage led the Diggers to declare the "death" of the hippie with a parade. According to the late poet Stormi Chambless, the hippies buried an effigy of a hippie in the Panhandle to demonstrate the end of his/her reign.


It was one of those fine moments when the originators of the scene declared said scene to be done--having been overrun by media, runaways, speed, violence, and bullshit. They actually carried a coffin down to the panhandle. I would imagine that some of the dead were there--not as musicians, but as spectators. I think Phil mentions it is his book.