“As close as we would ever get”: the 2001 album Billy Bob Thornton wanted to be his ‘Sgt Pepper’
Every musician, or at least the ones obsessed with The Beatles, has dreamed of making something that comes close to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but few of them would say it out loud.
Billy Bob Thornton would, though, but he was also self-aware enough to realise two things: one, that it would be impossible to emulate or replicate the lightning in a bottle that defined one of the most iconic albums ever recorded, and two, people would think he was a dick for even suggesting it.
Despite that, the Academy Award winner, who happens to be a lifelong Fab Four devotee, said it out loud anyway. Fortunately, he did make a point of explaining that he wasn’t heading into the booth with dreams of coming out on the other side with Sgt Pepper V2.0, but he didn’t sound against the idea, either.
When he’s not in front of the cameras, you can barely keep Thornton out of the studio. Since the release of his debut solo album, Private Radio, in 2001, he’s dropped another three solo LPs, and a dozen with the Boxmasters, so he’s no slouch as a musician. However, for the group’s ninth record, Speck, he set his sights about as high as they could go.
“We wanted to make as close as we would ever get to a Sgt Pepper record,” he explained. “Kind of like songs that had some different approaches, but that all sonically met each other and contained a message.” Ambitious, sure, but to further those ambitions, he had a secret weapon: Geoff Emerick.
The legendary sound engineer, who worked with The Beatles on Sgt Pepper, lent a helping hand to the Boxmasters on Speck, not that he was recruited with that specific goal in mind, as Thornton clarified: “The idea of trying to do this concept album or thematic album, and having Geoff produce it, was two different things.”
“In other words, we didn’t go into it, ‘Let’s produce this record with Geoff Emerick and make it like Sgt Pepper,'” the actor and filmmaker continued. “And the thing is, there’s going to be a whole bunch of asshole who are going to say, ‘Oh yeah, like these pricks are going to make Sgt Pepper.'”
In effect, Thornton didn’t say that he was preparing to unleash the second coming of Sgt Pepper upon an unsuspecting world, despite Emerick’s presence behind the scenes. Instead, he wanted to evoke the same kind of spirit and concept, but without sacrificing the Boxmasters’ sound to turn them into a Beatles tribute act trying desperately to achieve something they never could.
Did people think, “Oh yeah, like these pricks are going to make Sgt Pepper?” Probably, because that’s how these things tend to work. Did they make Sgt Pepper, or even try to? They did not, but Speck was nonetheless cut from a similar cloth, albeit one as tangential as it was spiritual.
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