Beatles fan finds the original images from the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ cover
As the Summer of Love was getting underway, The Beatles were on a creative resurgence of their own. After playing the role of moptops for nearly half a decade, the band’s departure from the road meant something new and extravagant when they did return to make another record. Though Sgt. Pepper stands as one of the most adventurous albums of the 1960s, there’s even more attention being paid to the album cover.
Looking to make music that would be judged on the same lines as high art, the album cover went all out, with each of the Fab Four donning military outfits as a group of people stood facing behind them. Although this might not have taken long to create with the technological advancements available today, the entire project was rigorous from the jump, including securing authentication of using every famous person in the photo.
While the original idea to use polarising figures like Hitler were nixed immediately, the band still shoehorned different key faces from history in the shot, from fellow rockers like Bob Dylan to Edgar Allen Poe in the middle of the frame. The cover also contained tributes to some of their friends, from featuring a picture of their late bandmate Stu Sutcliffe to wax figures of the band in their early years, almost serving as a sendoff to their moptop era and an entryway into the world of psychedelia.
In the past few months, one particular Beatles fan has set out to find all of the original photos from the album cover. Beatles historian Chris Shaw has been working to discover where the original images came from, saying on social media: “Being a bit of a Beatles obsessive, I’m excited about the 50th anniversary rerelease of Sgt Pepper. The legendary album cover is regularly popping up on my news feeds and I became curious as to the origins of the photos Peter Blake used to create the iconic sleeve”.
The first piece of the puzzle came when tracking down the image of original Tarzan actor Johnny Weismueller, who is pictured just behind Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in the final product. After gaining some help from other Beatles luminaries, the hunt was on for every other celebrity that graced the iconic cover.
While Dylan’s likeness was taken from an enlarged photo of him from the album Highway 61 Revisited, there were a few Easter eggs from other parts of pop culture, including standup comedian Max Miller and boxer Sonny Liston. The deep dive even unearthed a few images that were in the original version of the album, like Gandhi being tucked to the right side before being removed at the last minute.
The cover even featured an in joke amongst the two biggest bands in England, with the doll on the front cover saying ‘Welcome the Rolling Stones’ as a nod to the bad boys of the British Invasion. Despite having a who’s who of talent from each generation, Sgt. Pepper was about more than just putting a lot of famous people on the cover.
When you listened to the music inside, you were treated to some of the most adventurous rock and roll ever made, going into the world of classical, jazz, and psychedelia with every single song. In that respect, the cover says a lot more about the album inside than any text ever could. Just like the vast array of celebrities on the cover, The Fab Four were looking to give their audience a little taste of everything they could do as entertainers.
View some examples of Shaw’s findings, below.
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