Sgt. Pepper's Notorious Byrd Brothers
On two albums that measure the highs and lows of 1967
The below essay came out of a note I shared on Substack a few weeks ago.
I was intrigued by the idea that the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers reflect 1967 in very different ways. Sgt. Pepper’s is the touchstone musical moment of the year while The Notorious Byrd Brothers wrestles with the fact that a new age would not be dawning. Both are among the finest recordings from the amazing deluge of creativity in pop and rock music in the late sixties. I hope you enjoy what I have put together. Please share your thoughts as well!
Until next time, may good listening be with you all!
Sgt. Pepper’s Notorious Byrd Brothers
By: Robert C. Gilbert
“All summer long, we were grooving in the sand,
and the jukebox kept on playing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
- from ‘Summer Rain,’ written by James Hendricks
In the United States, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the number-one album for all but 10 days during the summer of 1967. In the United Kingdom, it has been at the top of the charts for 17 days before summer began and would remain there for 49 days after summer ended (it would return to the number one spot three more times by February 1968). In Canada, it would take almost a month after the summer solstice for it to reach the top, but on June 1, widely seen as the album’s release date in the UK although it likely came out six days earlier, visitors to the Youth Pavilion at Expo ’67—the event that best marked the country’s centennial—in Montreal got to hear Sgt. Pepper’s before just about anyone else in North America.
Roger La Roche, then of the Sinners who played at the Pavilion during Expo ’67, recounted the occasion 50 years later for Le Journal de Montréal. “At the Youth Pavilion, there was one of the producers who knew a flight attendant who flew from Montreal to London,” said La Roche. In London on June 1, she bought several copies and then flew to Montreal with them in tow, where it would only be released in stores the following week. “Upon arriving [in Montreal], she put everything in a taxi that took them to the Youth Pavilion. People knew about it, since it had been announced the day before. Around 2 p.m. [on June 1], they started playing Sgt. Pepper’s on repeat, and they kept doing it until 2 a.m.”
Just two-and-a-half-days after the thundering final chord of ‘A Day in the Life’ decayed and a snippet of gibberish repeated over and over again for the last time in Montreal, the Jimi Hendrix Experience appeared on a bill with Procol Harum, the Chiffons, the Stormsville Shakers and Denny Laine & the Electric String Band at London’s Saville Theatre. The Experience’s set started with Mitch Mitchell playing a complex rhythm heavy on the bass drum. Hendrix pointed to his ears and warned everyone, “your ears, watch out for your ears, watch out for your ears, okay.” He then put a cigarette in his mouth and slid into a rolling, funky chord progression. With Noel Redding, he began to sing, “It was twenty years ago today…”
In the audience were Paul McCartney and girlfriend Jane Asher as well as George and Patti Harrison. Peter Asher was there too. “Jimi had just gotten the Beatles’ new album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which had come out only three days earlier, and apparently he had learned the title song just by listening to it on the radio; he taught it that afternoon [June 4] to the other members of the band and they played it onstage that night,” said Asher. Of the moment, McCartney once remarked: “I put that down as one of the great honours of my career.”
No surprise or shock that the Experience’s homage is ragged but the message it imparted was sharp: Sgt. Pepper’s would take on an importance that no other album released during the rapid maturation of rock and pop music in the mid sixties had or would assume. The Beatles were the ultimate exemplars of what by June 1967 had become a significant movement within the decade’s counterculture.
Please join me in spreading the joy of listening to music. A monthly subscription is $6/month and an annual subscription is $50/year.
Two Sundays after Hendrix blew McCartney’s mind, Hendrix and the Experience held an audience of thousands in a similar state of awe at the Monterey International Pop Festival. They closed with the Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing.’ Hendrix set his guitar on fire and destroyed it in a sonic cloud of feedback and Mitchell’s polyrhythmic fills. While the Beatles did not appear at the Festival, having hung up their touring shoes for good at the end of August 1966, they were on the mind of several who did.
Mike Bloomfield, then of the Electric Flag, offered this observation in an outtake from the footage D.A. Pennebaker and his team shot at Monterey. “In little towns in Iowa, man, growing up now, are kids who are being freaked out of their minds by the Beatles man, freaked out, they’re raised on Beatles man, raised on genius music,” he said.
During the second evening at the Festival, there was a far more prominent pronouncement on the Fab Four: “if we gave LSD to all the statemen and politicians in the world, we might have a chance at stopping war.” It was a paraphrase of a quote from the then-current issue of Life magazine: “if the politicians would take LSD, there wouldn’t be any more war or poverty or famine.” It was said by McCartney in an interview in which he admitted to dropping acid. From the Festival stage, David Crosby triumphantly shared that it was McCartney whom he was loosely quoting and then, with a giggle added, “I concur … heartily!”
It was one of several moments during the Byrds’ set at Monterey when Crosby pushed the envelope as well as the tolerance level of his bandmates, especially Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman. The Byrds weren’t the first American group to gain notice that took overt inspiration from the Beatles—that would be the Beau Brummels—but they were the most lasting. Twelve-string jangle, mop tops and the Merseybeat gave way to songs with a profound jazz influence with McGuinn and Crosby both inspired by John Coltrane, and explorations about extraterrestrial life care of McGuinn and of consciousness expansion care of Crosby.
Looking from the vantage point of 60 years later, popular music seemed to be changing almost daily back then. Nowadays, change in contemporary popular music seems glacial with the only evolution being the infiltration of AI slop as it is infiltrating every other aspect of cultural life. That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of good new music being made today. Those who read my ongoing series of new-and-upcoming music round-ups know how entranced by I am by today’s legion of music-makers. It’s just that the vitality of a lot of what was recorded from, let’s say, 1965 to 1967 abides.
Sgt. Pepper’s continues as a substantive statement of the drive to go further, reach deeper and create works just as important and just as weighty as, for one example, Leonard Bernstein’s recordings of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler (Bernstein quickly caught on to the importance of what the Beatles and their peers were doing). Its’ whole-hearted embrace of being anointed as a significant album went from its cover like no other, from cut-outs of Sri Paramahansa Yogananda to Dion, situated behind the Beatles in regimental floral glory to the insert cutouts of the group and the supposed Sgt. Pepper to the lyrics printed out on the back cover.
It also extended to the music. Only the reprise of the title track harkened back to the stripped-down energy of the glory of Beatlemania and even then, there was supposed crowd noises and applause laced throughout.
The textures of the album: orchestral, classical—Western, Indian and avant-garde, echoes of music halls and circuses not to mention barnyards and concert arenas, are the sonic equivalent of the explosion of colours that the phrases “flower power” and “Summer of Love” can still evoke. Whereas Monterey Pop, Pennebaker’s documentary of the Festival, still rivets attention with its vérité presentation of part of the cross-section of music that was always in the air, that so many heeded the call to go to San Francisco, often running away from home or arriving solely to sample a buffet of sex and drugs, made the summer of 1967 grimmer than the Beatles’ portrait of the times.
Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem,’ first published in the September 23, 1967 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, famously held the legend at bay for the facts as she experienced them, including the piece’s most indelible scene in which a young child, Susan, trips on the LSD given to her by her parents.
The Diggers, a group formed in 1966 which operated in the epicentre of the San Francisco counter-culture: the Haight-Ashbury district, was dedicated to freedom from the societal grind. Among other things, they operated free stores and in Golden Gate Park each day, gave out free food, including soup made of whatever the group’s members could get their hands on.
Writer Joel Selvin, 17 in 1967, once recalled the shift from the tentative first steps to creating a new world to a struggle for survival in the city. “I had Diggers’ soup. It was fun. It was neat. You go out and get a bowl of soup, you know, eat with some people you don’t know and be amongst all this new community,” he said in 2007 for PBS. “The next time I went back, man, those people waiting in line needed it. I didn’t stay ’cause now it was squalid.”
Harrison was similarly disillusioned when he visited the Haight in August 1967. “We walked down the street and I was being treated like the Messiah or something,” he remembered for the Beatles’ Anthology. “I was really afraid because I could see all these spotty youths as they were still in the undercurrent of Beatlemania but from a kind of a twisted angle.” Harrison, who was with his then-wife Patti as well as frequent Beatles and Byrds associate Derek Taylor and the soon-to-be-infamous “Magic Alex” Mardas, was offered drugs, gifts of all kinds and a guitar to play. As he continually refused to play the role that was expected of him, the crowd, which was not what Harrison expected, turned angry.
I suppose these recollections offer a reason why Sgt. Pepper’s has slipped in esteem, no longer universally crowned the greatest album ever made. The album is rooted in a place and a time that if it existed at all, only did so for a sliver of a moment.
That, of course, neglects that there are genuine moments of darkness that lurk just beyond the album’s kaleidoscopic visions. The pain of the parents who wake up one morning to discover their daughter has left home. The upbeat protagonist of ‘Getting Better’ who admits, against the smear of a tamboura, “I used to be cruel to my woman / I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved.” The apocalyptic ratcheting up of the orchestra from the lowest note of each instrument’s register to the highest that occurs twice in ‘A Day in the Life’—an effect that Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead once compared to the eruption of American folk songs that are blasted in all directions during the Allegretto movement of Charles Ives’ Fourth Symphony, referring to Leopold Stokowski’s premiere recording of the work in the mid sixties for Columbia Masterworks.
As dark as Sgt. Pepper’s may occasionally be, the moments that are luminous—too many to mention but the shuffles of ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ and ‘Getting Better’ first come to mind—have that feeling of complete correctness that to me is the single most compelling reason to explain why the Beatles became as big as they did. These snippet of sounds serve as a kind of vaporizer against those who try to argue that the Beatles just weren’t as great as so many continue to believe. Nowhere are they as persuasive as they are on Sgt. Pepper’s, those both planned (Ringo Starr’s tumbling tom fills on ‘A Day in the Life,’ for just one example) and serendipitous (the deeply psychedelic interlude in John Lennon's ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’ created by engineer Geoff Emerick splicing together snippets of circus music at random after tossing them in the air).
The result is anything but antiseptic, but its precision is deep and I suspect that’s why some argue that the album is not as good as its acolytes say it is—a fashionable statement of the crowd who wishes to be provocatively contrarian. Such a pose has its uses; today more than ever; but it is a wasted one when applied to Sgt. Pepper’s. It is the big-bang album, one which others tried to emulate and got there (Love’s Forever Changes), took a swing at and missed (the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request) or hoisted a middle finger to it all (the Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only In It for the Money).
There is still something about hearing Sgt. Pepper’s for the first time. I was probably all of nine when I pressed play on a cassette copy, feeling deeply terrified at the clamour of ‘A Day in the Day’ but also enthralled that music could be this engrossing.
David Crosby visited Abbey Road Studios during the album sessions. On hearing the just-finished ‘A Day in the Life’—two days prior, the final piano chord had been recorded—he remembered, “at the end of the last chord, my brain just ran out my nose onto the floor in a puddle. I didn’t know what to do, I was just stupefied.”
By then, February 24, 1967, Crosby had begun growing the mustache that became his signature look and settling into the role as the enfant terrible of the Byrds. Earlier that month, the group’s fourth album, Younger Than Yesterday, was released in the States (it was to come out in the UK two months later) and was a big leap forward from their previous release, Fifth Dimension, about three-fourths a great LP. Crosby insisted on including the stream-of-consciousness ‘Mind Gardens,’ full of backwards effects and no discernable harmony or melody, and lacked enthusiasm for covering Bob Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages’ (Younger Than Yesterday’s most well-known selection).
Crosby’s introductions and interruptions during the group’s turn at Monterey—an edgy, rushed and precarious performance—as well as appearing with Buffalo Springfield during their set didn’t help as well as his taking the reins for the sublime ‘Lady Friend’ and it barely making a dent on the charts.
The next time the Byrds were in the studio, the group as it had been known for the past three years didn’t make it out intact. The album that resulted, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, is as close to equaling Sgt. Pepper’s as an experience as any other album of the time but with little of its feeling that a new world was about to be born.
On the late nineties CD reissue of the album, there is an extraordinary sequence included as a hidden track. The Byrds are trying to record Crosby’s jazzy and trippy ‘Dolphin’s Smile.’ After a swirling introduction by McGuinn on the twelve string and Crosby on a six string, Michael Clarke begins to play a heavy-handed rhythm on the drums. Crosby calls off the take and tries to encourage Clarke. “Instead of that fast, choppy stuff—see, it’s supposed to be a long, smooth kind of slow, floating thing, feel like a boat, not feel like horses clopping or something,” he explains to Clarke. Producer Gary Usher interjects to clarify that Clarke should be playing a jazzy shuffle.
Crosby and Clarke begin to argue with each other. F bombs begin to fly. Each time McGuinn counts off for another take, Clarke plays a pattern that feels off. He wasn’t a drummer when he joined the Byrds but was a quick learner, playing complex rhythms on recordings like ‘Eight Miles High,’ ‘Everybody’s Been Burned’ and ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’
For whatever reason, Clarke never delivered what Crosby was looking for on ‘Dolphin’s Smile.’ He soon quit and then McGuinn and Hillman gave Crosby the heave-ho. Clarke returned for the end of the album sessions and then got the heave-ho too. In total, the drummer is on five of the 11 cuts on The Notorious Byrd Brothers with Crosby on four. In their places were a roster of session musicians. It was Jim Gordon would nailed the “long, smooth kind of slow, floating thing” Crosby was looking for on ‘Dolphin’s Smile.’
Gordon was among the more than 20 musicians employed by McGuinn, Hillman and Usher to build The Notorious Byrd Brothers out of the wreckage. There are strings, horns, a pedal-steel guitar, the Moog synthesizer and a sound collage. Phasing effects were liberally applied. Moments of tranquility were shattered by explosive explosions of electric guitar. The album is a strange, wondrous listen.
The wistful ‘Goin’ Back,’ written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, in which “now there are no games / to only pass the time / no more electric trains / no more trees to climb” is all the more poignant by being preceded by the anti-drug ‘Artificial Energy.’ Similarly, Hillman’s ‘Natural Harmony,’ so trippy it could be mistaken for a Crosby song, merges directly into the cold reality of Crosby’s ‘Draft Morning.’
Ideas about peace, love and understanding are constantly challenged. ‘Change Is Now,’ another song that dares to speak of the dawning of a new age that switches to a country two-step on the chorus, seems to question its message during an extended interlude powered by Hillman’s throbbing bass and McGuinn’s stinging solo lines. ‘Get to You’ talks of a traveler trying to return to London and seems fueled by dream logic, especially when considering “it’s a bright sunny day when I see you come my way / but it look me twenty years to get to you.”
The Notorious Byrd Brothers ends with a voyage to the Moon on ‘Space Odyssey,’ inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and drenched in the sound of the Moog and a metallic McGuinn vocal. It ends, unlike Sgt. Pepper’s, with a whimper, not a bang. A synthesizer chord rings out of silence. A transmission from a faraway place. Of a summer where a Beatles’ album set the scene.
I haven't listed to Sargent Pepper's for many years, I still have the album and will have to get it out soon. This was such an inspired concept album with amazing orchestration and stories. I miss concept albums. There's one that doesn't seem to be mentioned these days and that's Thick as a Brick, but that's a different story. I can't upload a pic here, but I came across a red Sargent Pepper's outfit once, and often wore it while out riding on my Triumph. It's hard to conceive why I did that. Maybe it was my homage :)
Awesome read, Robert! 1967 was such a massive year. These two albums make a good microcosm of many of the themes of that time, including the UK/US cross-talk between rock bands.