Tomorrow will be the 40th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I plan to listen to it as much as humanly possible. This album was probably one of the first I ever owned. I still have my first copy. It's completely unplayable and covered in crayon writing. The cover is long gone. I remember when I lived in Denver, someone telling me I have to hear it in mono because the mix is different and i'll hear it in a totally new way. I searched high and low for a mono copy of the LP and it couldn't be found. The first day I arrived in my new home, San Francisco, I headed down to the Haight and found a copy for 100 bucks. I had to have it so I went home and got the money and bought it. It was well worth it. The mix is really different and I listened to it about 5 times in a row which drove my roommates crazy. I've since found and bought 5 mono copies in various states of wear. It's weird to think they intended the mono version to be the definitive one and you can't get it legally outside of the LP issue. I bought a bootleg cd on ebay and it sounds great! I remember when it came out on cd and I bought it without even owning a cd player. I used to listen to it on headphones over a friend's house.
I'm not convinced it's their best album but it is a great one. As usual, Capitol/EMI has not done anything to commemorate the occasion. It would have been nice if they would have remastered it in mono/stereo with bonus tracks like "Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane" and "It's Only A Northern Song" which was recorded at those sessions. Bastards. Tomorrow, i'm off to Marathon to play Friday and Saturday at a place called The Hurricane. We stay in a really gross band house behind the club. The beds are broken and stained but at least the TV and air conditioning work. I'll be taking a camera so i'll have some pix to post. I'll miss you, family!
4 comments:
Thanks for reminding me of this. It's not my favorite Fabs album either, that would be either Revolver or White, or for an early album, Hard Day's Night (13 songs all by Len/Mac at the height of the Mania, you can't beat that). But there are some great songs on Pepper, if also some fluff, and the overall mood of the album is special and magical in a very 1967 kind of way, so the date is significant because this album definitely caught the spirit of the moment and was a milestone in modern music, yadda yadda.
You're actually the one who first really hipped me to the mono mixes of all the Beatle stuff. I had read it in the Lewisohn books where it says how the band did all this mono mixing, but I guess it never really registered to me the importance of that until you started making a big deal out of it, which was definitely a post-Denver thing because I never recalled hearing you get into it in the earlier years. But now I hardly ever listen to the stereo versions anymore, it's all about the mono, baby. It's your fault, and I thank you for that. Now I can hear the Beatles the way they wanted me to hear them. For Fab Geeks Only.
I thought having mono was a bad thing...?
I hope this weekend is better for ya than last weekend. Gimme a shout when the eagle lands.
the beatles website is previewing the album... in MONO !!! its only a preview but shows they care, no ?
thought you would want to know :P
Hey, how do you know it's in mono? I didn't see where it said so.
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