From One Anniversary . . .

It was sixty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play - if you believe such things, but at any rate, this week mark's the fortieth anniversary of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, widely thought to be the greatest, most important, and/or influential album of all time. While many articles and tributes will be written to attest to how great the songs were, how iconic the album was (true, true), we'd like to focus on something that we here at The Daily Wenzel feel is the album's true accomplishment.

We forget sometimes that rock and roll was barely ten years ago when Sgt. Pepper was released. Furthermore, the concept of an album as a single piece of vinyl was less than twenty. Throughout much of the 1940s, an album was a collection of 78s or 45s packaged together. The notion that you could listen to four or five songs continuously was still new. The crowning achievement of Sgt. Pepper was that it was the first concept album, where a theme linked every song together (even if the link was pretty tenuous in some cases). The rise of the concept album became a potent weapon in the rock arsenal during the psychedelic era. It also led many artists to move away from the creation of a radio-friendly single because the Beatles had demonstrated that rock and roll could be a piece of art. These albums quickly found a happy home own the emerging FM band which was licensed by the FCC to be album-oriented so as not to compete with the highly commercialized AM band.

Second influential aspect of Sgt. Pepper was that it was also the first album in which the artists adopted a persona, the Lonely Hearts Club Band, performed not as themselves, but as their alter egos. Without Sgt. Pepper, where would David Bowie and his legion of followers be? Similarly, hip hop is also indebted to the Beatles for the freedom to experiment that they initiated.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band stands out as one of the great rock albums of all time for a lot of reasons. These are just two that we like.