The “mind-blowing” album Kevin Bacon called the greatest of all time: “This was different”
Some people have grown pretty tired of actors deciding they want to release an album, but since he’s cut from the same cloth as Billy Bob Thornton and not Terrence Howard, Kevin Bacon can be forgiven.
While acting will always be his first love, as you’d expect from someone who’s amassed well over 100 film and television credits covering almost every genre under the sun in a career that dates back almost 50 years, he isn’t anyone’s idea of a part-timer when it comes to indulging his musical side.
For the last three decades, he’s been writing original songs and touring with his older sibling, Michael, as the imaginatively titled Bacon Brothers. They’ve released a dozen albums, played across the United States, and as much as it probably physically pains him to do so, they’ve been known to add a cover version of Kenny Loggins’ ‘Footloose’ to their setlist.
As mentioned, that puts him more in line with Thornton’s Boxmasters than the raft of vanity projects pumped out by thespians who think they’ve got what it takes to succeed in the recording booth, but it’s still a side gig. The Bacon Brothers are more country and folky than anything else, with their sound a million miles removed from the first album that changed a young Kevin’s life.
A devoted radio listener as a kid, the star revealed that as a nine-year-old, he repeatedly went into his parents’ bedroom to steal any loose change that was lying around, specifically so that he could save up enough money to purchase his very own copy of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which, thanks to his surreptitious thievery, became the first album he ever bought.
“To come home, and hold it, and look at it,” he marvelled. “There was the music, which was mind-blowing, of course, but it was also this thing. It had stuff that you’d cut out, and there was the cover. You could stare at it for hours. There were records before, but this was a ‘record’. This was different.”
“It was crazy, it was fresh, sonically, it was so advanced,” he continued. “But it was also very accessible, even for a kid. It was just wonderful.”
While it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Bacon was enamoured by The Beatles since he was born in the late 1950s and was at the perfect age to become consumed by Beatlemania when it first exploded into being, he isn’t describing Sgt Pepper as a mere album.
As the first record he owned for himself, it was a milestone moment in his burgeoning life as a music aficionado, and clearly, it became a core memory. Then there’s the obvious fact that it’s one of the most important, influential, and seminal albums that any band has ever recorded, and that band also happened to be one of the most important, influential, and seminal groups in history.
The release of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a milestone moment for the entire music industry in more ways than one, and almost 60 years after he robbed his folks to get it, Bacon still vividly remembers the first time he took it all in.
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