Trilogy One: The end of The Beatles.

“…and the jukebox kept on playing Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” All Summer Long, Johnny Rivers

Do I even need the pictures? Fair Use*

There were jukeboxes that played albums? Perhaps for Johnny, this was a metaphysical assertion that “…we heard Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band everywhere we went” which, of course, doesn’t rhyme.

After Revolver, the Beatles stopped touring. For the world of rock music, this was the dawning of studio rock. For the Beatles, it was the beginning of the end.

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Precursor: The beginning of the end.

On paper, SPLHCB achieves a cultural significance matched by few other albums and the ones that do are mostly by the Beatles themselves. An iconic album cover by a genuine fine artist, a “concept”, lyrics printed on the back, a programmed suite of music flowing seamlessly from one track to the next, psychedelic costumes, an aural landscape evoking the breadth of English culture from the circus to the daily papers, the retirement home to the marital home, replete with tricksters, runaways, wife beaters, heavenly beings, parking meter attendants and humdrum entertainers. The Beatles didn’t necessarily invent these things, they just put them together in a radical new. That they managed to cram so much in is an achievement in itself, yet what was…