Pilot's Log

Because of the various discussions and whatnot about the 50th Anniversary of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, I think I'll start off with what I said about my view of the Beatles in general about eight years earlier:

I suppose I have a rather skewed view of the band compared to most people. You see, I was a baby in their heyday (I was born around the time Revolver came out) but they had already broken up by the time I was allowed to listen to the radio in the early Seventies. So I knew all four of them as solo artists FIRST. It wasn't till much later in life that I got the message that these guys were THESE GUYS and so on.

The media establishment was so quick to move on that their songs as a group were largely out of circulation for some years. Besides, Paul kept on making hit records with Wings. There was no point to look back at that time...unless you were looking back to the Fifties in the wake of American Grafitti and Happy Days. It took the Disco backlash, Elvis' death, the Beatlemania Broadway show (anybody remember that?) and the Sgt. Pepper's movie/soundtrack to start a Beatles nostalgia trend in earnest.

Anyway, I come from a time warp with regards to that realm of pop culture. I'm like a baseball fan who has to remember that the Dodgers once played in Brooklyn, or a car nut who must be prompted that GM used to have a brand of cars called LaSalle. Well, I'm not THAT bad. After all, I can ask my brother (who played a role in his High School's Beatles-based revue).

--So, what about the album itself?  Really I took my own sweet time getting to it.  You see, my sister had the vinyl of the movie soundtrack, which of course threw the original narrative of the album out in favor of a contrivance of both it AND Abbey Road.  So my own views of what the songs were and what they meant were very very wrong, on many levels.

I only got to hear the songs that were on the album that were not remade for the movie in the early Eighties when a family friend let me borrow her vinyl of the Beatles LP--and I never heard the Beatles LP all the way through till just after the start of this Millennium when on a road trip with my brother.  The new PBS special about the album's making swung my compass on it completely around.

The new remaster is going on my Xmas Wishlist.

FP