The albums Pete Townshend called “seminal changes” for music
When artists step into the studio, their primary focus isn’t typically on sales but on crafting something that expresses their emotions and connects with listeners. However, when the creative process aligns perfectly, the result can unexpectedly resonate with millions. Pete Townshend, despite his monumental achievements in shifting rock and roll with records like Tommy, recognised that something was changing when he first heard Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles and Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys. These albums marked a seismic shift in the musical landscape, influencing not only fans but even fellow innovators like Townshend himself.
Looking at the charts from around that time, though, you would swear that another life-changing album would have been released almost every other week. The British invasion had already produced records well above what anyone expected out of the general rock scene, and even Townshend himself had started chomping at the bit for what constituted aggression in ‘My Generation’.
But The Beatles always seemed to be in their own league during the making of Sgt Pepper. They had already vacated the road, but for anyone claiming that they were on the verge of drying up, hearing them put together a record all about using the studio as an instrument through the lens of an imaginary band became the perfect backdrop to psychedelia once the ‘Summer of Love’ kicked in a few months later.
Then again, if the Fab Four received the glory for kickstarting everything, Brian Wilson was the one who was ahead of the curve almost a year before. After taking time off the road, Pet Sounds became his purest sonic statement to the world, complete with chord progressions that no one had ever conceived of before in rock like ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’.
That’s not even counting some of the other classics happening around the same time. In that short timeframe of two years, fans would see the release of The Doors’ first album with its twisted take on psychedelia, and Bob Dylan would be pouring out every piece of himself on the tracks on his double album Blonde on Blonde.
For Townshend, though, both Sgt Peppers and Pet Sounds were the standards that marked a seismic shift in rock and roll, telling Rolling Stone, “Sgt. Pepper, there isn’t much of a concept to that record. But to this day, whenever I sit down and get the vinyl out, stick it on, something always leaps out that I’ve never noticed before. I think the same is true with Pet Sounds. Those two albums are seminal changes in what we all believed was going to be possible if you were in a band making records, just extraordinary leaps of faith that the audience would accept it.”
When you listen to what Townshend would be making just a few years later, it’s not like he wasn’t thinking in terms of making his scope broader as well. Tommy was the sound of his conceptual albums like The Who Sell Out taken to its most logical conclusion, but when listening to Quadrophenia, it’s hard not to hear the influence of The Beatles’ more ambitious projects like ‘A Day in the Life’ or the way that Wilson utilised The Wrecking Crew in the same way that Townshend used string lines.
But regardless of whether or not they sold millions of copies, Sgt Pepper and Pet Sounds didn’t intend to set the world on fire. It was just about delivering the best album that they could, and by getting it so right on both sides of the Atlantic, The Beatles and The Beach Boys helped rock audiences dream a lot bigger than the party songs they had grown accustomed to.
