The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love
Contributions by Kenneth L. Campbell, Jacqueline Edmondson, Michael Frontani, Katie Kapurch, Mark Osteen, Kit OToole, Joe Rapolla, Robert Rodriguez, Bruce Spizer, Jerry Zolten Edited by Kenneth Womack, Kathryn B. Cox
Not available to order
Publication date:
03 July 2017Length of book:
254 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498534758
For the Beatles, 1967 marks a signal crossroads that would both transform the group’s career and place them on a trajectory towards their eventual disbandment. It was a year in which they exploded prevailing rock music demographics through the global onslaught and international success of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band beginning in June 1967. Yet it was also a period that saw them in a precarious state of flux throughout the summer and fall months, as the band attempted to recapture their artistic direction in the wake of Sgt. Pepper and the untimely death of manager Brian Epstein.
The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love draws readers into that pivotal year in the life of the band. For the Fab Four, 1967 would see the band members part ways with psychedelia and the avant-garde through the trials and tribulations of the Magical Mystery Tour, a project that resulted in a series of classic recordings, while at the same time revealing the bandmates’ aesthetic vulnerabilities and failings as would-be filmmakers and auteurs.
The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love draws readers into that pivotal year in the life of the band. For the Fab Four, 1967 would see the band members part ways with psychedelia and the avant-garde through the trials and tribulations of the Magical Mystery Tour, a project that resulted in a series of classic recordings, while at the same time revealing the bandmates’ aesthetic vulnerabilities and failings as would-be filmmakers and auteurs.
In this fifty-year retrospective on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Magical Mystery Tour film/EP/LP, Womack, Cox, and their writers have done what a good recap of these pop artifacts should do: not merely to 'celebrate' them for having aged so well, but to wrench readers out of their by now routine responses to the Beatles so as to have them experience, as if for the first time, the group's supreme masterpiece, their subsequent misadventures in film-making, and all of the lasting music they created in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love.