Sgt Pepper's @ 40.

"It was forty years ago today, etc," writes John Coulthart, marking the UK release of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on June 1, 1967, and pointing to a few fun items from his blog, feuilleton. "Love it or hate it (I love it, of course), popular music has to be divided into 'before and after Sgt Pepper such is the scope of the album's impact."

For Jon Wiener, blogging for the Nation, "much of the thrill is gone - except for one song."

Updated through 6/3.

"It was called 'a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization,' one of its tunes ('She's Leaving Home') was credited with being one of the three great songs of the 20th century, and in the week after the album came out, 'the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young,'" notes Bruce Dancis at PopMatters. "Because those comments were made by, respectively, the Times of London's noted critic Kenneth Tynan, New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein and New Yorker writer Langdon Winner, they signified the acceptance and triumph of Sgt Pepper and the Beatles in the arts - and adult - community."

Wiener, too, recalls that "Geoffrey Stokes wrote in the Village Voice that 'listening to the Sgt Pepper album one thinks not simply of the history of popular music but the history of this century.'"

The London Times "asked famous fans for their memories and who they would put on the iconic cover today."

"Like no other record, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ushered in a new age - one with long hair, dope and time for a number of things that weren't important yesterday." The Guardian opens a discussion.

"Taking into account the disastrous film version of Sergeant Pepper - Frankie Howerd doing 'When I'm 64,' George Burns doing 'Fixing A Hole' - and George Martin's woeful In My Life (featuring - oh Christ - Billy Connolly's 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite'), are there any good covers of tracks off Sgt Pepper?" wonders Alexis Petridis. "Or is there something about that album, as opposed to the rest of the Beatles' back catalogue, which mitigates against decent covers, and leaves us only with William Shatner sounding genuinely mentally disturbed on his version of 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds'?"

Another song-for-song remake is in the works, "another of Bob Geldof's media-friendly, madly time-pressured initiatives," as Robert Sandall reports in the Telegraph. But first, a recollection from Geoff Emerick, a sound engineer who worked on Sgt Pepper's (he was 19 at the time): "The first thing John [Lennon] said was that he was sick of making soft music for soft people, and that this time he wanted to make sounds that nobody had ever heard before. And everybody looked at me."

Update: Online listening tip. For NPR, David Bianculli samples some of the best covers. And yes, there's a cut here from Sgt Pepper Knew My Father. A fun 10½ minutes, though I could've done without the barkers.

Updates, 6/2: "Paul McCartney may be the closest thing our generation has produced to Schubert - a master of melody, writing songs that seem to have been there all along," writes Daniel Levitin in the Guardian. "To a neuroscientist, the Beatles' longevity can be explained by the fact that their music creates subtle and rewarding schematic violations of popular musical forms, causing a symphony of neural firings from the cerebellum to the prefrontal cortex. To a musician, each listening showcases subtle nuances not heard before, details of arrangement and intricacy that slowly reveal themselves across hundreds or thousands of listenings. I have to admit, they're getting better all the time."

Kim Murphy talks with McCartney for the Los Angeles Times.

And it's only an excerpt, but it's a good one: "Beatles, or Stones?" in the new issue of the Believer. John McMillian: "With their matching suits, mop-tops, and cheeky humor, the Beatles largely obscured their origins as working-class Liverpudlians; by contrast, under the influence of their wily manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones cultivated a decadent, outlaw image, even though they mostly hailed from the London suburbs. 'The Beatles were thugs who were put across as nice blokes,' someone remarked, 'and the Rolling Stones were gentlemen who were made into thugs by Andrew.'"

Update, 6/3: "Is it a testament to the quality, or purity, or beauty, or timelessness of that record... that it appealed so thoroughly to an 8-year-old, one who had virtually no contact with pop culture?" asks Aimee Mann. "I can't listen to Sgt Pepper's anymore. As a musician, I'm burnt out on it - its influence has been so vast and profound." Also in the New York Times, Chris Conway rounds up a few critical assessments and Allan Kozinn talks with McCartney, who tells him, "The major record labels are having major problems. They're a little puzzled as to what's happening. And I sympathize with them. But as David Kahne said to me about a year ago, the major labels these days are like the dinosaurs sitting around discussing the asteroid."

More McCartney: "You can't replace someone like John, and I don't think he could have replaced someone like me." Andrew Romano and Daniel Klaidman talk with him for Newsweek.

Posted by dwhudson at June 1, 2007 8:49 AM