the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was like nothing heard before and, by that point, the most important, influential album they’d released.
I can remember going to Lorne’s, my gr. 12 friend’s house (his family had a big console stereo), to hear the album for the first time. It so knocked us out, we had to keep replaying it and this continued right into our final exam week.
After that, I can remember the long hot Winnipeg summer. I would hear songs from the album all July and August on people’s radios everywhere in the hospital which I worked in. Now it was “With a Little Help from My Friends”, then it was “Within You, Without You”–strange raga and string sounds infiltrating the workplace. in the daytime.
On those steamy summer evenings, I would sometimes walk down the back alleys north of Portage Avenue from my apartment block (Billingsley Manor) to Conway Street, and from the various suites–as evening fell–I would hear “I read the news today, oh boy” from “A Day in the Life” or other album songs. There was definitely a sense that The Beatles were changing the world, topped by the 45 rpm release of “All You Need Is Love” in that unforgettable Summer of Love.
I can still remember going to my friend Wayne’s house on a Sunday morning and there, he and another musical friend Bill were with a 12-string acoustic guitar belting out “With a Little Help from My Friends”–a song I impromptu-ly played on my acoustic 6-string, with my friend Chris singing harmony, in June in an alley behind a neighboring shopping centre.
And the music from that album kept going all that fall, like concentric circles rippling, spreading out, only to die down after catch-up Xmas presents that year, though after November 27, the next album–The Magical Mystery Tour–was being added to those Christmas lists.