The 1967 Beatles album John Lennon fell out of love with: “One of the most important steps”
By the time the mid-1960s rolled around, The Beatles were on a path that no one was able to stop.
Every single one of their records was a new creative endeavour and approached rock and roll with a completely different lens when they started bringing in new instruments and making the odd tune that didn’t seem to have anything to do with rock altogether, such as on tracks like ‘Eleanor Rigby’. But even though John Lennon was the one writing all of those tunes with Paul McCartney, he felt that some of their albums looked a lot different from what he had envisioned them.
Because as much as Lennon loved the idea of making the best songs that he could, his solo career was the moment he began looking at his songs differently. He felt that some of the greatest tunes of his career were when he was being honest, and when the band added a bunch of unnecessary production elements to them, he wasn’t exactly happy about trying to water down what he was saying.
He wasn’t afraid to experiment when he wanted to, but ‘Revolution 9’ was a lot different to what Macca would have been doing when writing granny tunes like ‘When I’m 64’. That kind of whimsy was well outside his wheelhouse, but he was at least willing to go along with what the rest of the band was doing when they were headed towards Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The group seemed to be drying up, but Lennon felt that it was more important for them to hunker down and make the kind of album that they knew no one was ready for.
‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was already turning some heads even back in the day, so an entire album of them going off the rails should have been a slam dunk. And while the rest of the Summer of Love seemed to finally catch up to them at that exact moment, Lennon did think that their being remembered for that record was going to be an extremely mixed blessing in the long run.
On one hand, he seemed to be absolutely thrilled with the fact that they had made something groundbreaking, saying at the time, “Sgt Pepper is one of the most important steps in our career. It had to be just right. We tried and, I think, succeeded in achieving what we set out to do. If we hadn’t, then it wouldn’t be out now.” They had certainly hit a peak, but the thought of him making one of the greatest albums ever made wasn’t what he was planning to do, either.
Sure, it was novel for the time, but Lennon remembered resenting Pepper only a few years after it had come out. He had already been having trouble coming up with songs after McCartney came in with a bunch of whimsical tunes, and even though he could respond in kind with tracks like ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’, he felt that the lion’s share of the record was a bunch of nonsense, with the only exception being a song like ‘A Day in the Life’.
That was the high point in his mind, but when you break it down, the conceptual side of the record was always going to be McCartney’s vision. He was the one who had the idea of making an imaginary band, and while it took Lennon a little while longer to jump on the bandwagon when making the Plastic Ono Band, George Harrison wasn’t exactly in love with the idea, either, to the point where, to a degree, ‘Within You Without You’ sticks out like a sore thumb in the track listing.
Each member of the band was still at the peak of their powers, but even if Lennon had a few issues with it, it didn’t seem to matter. This was the album that only came once every generation, and even if he had his own fair share of problems with it, all of them are almost irrelevant at this point. Because Pepper is more of a statement these days than a proper album, and when people want to know why the Fab Four were so popular, this is the record that should prove their genius to the world.
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