Sgt. Peppers is the best beatles record for the reasons described in this article - it captured the most beatlesque moment in history, brought to you by none other than The Beatles. Yet its a sharp observation that in music polls, as well as in many conversations that I have been privy to, Revolver tends to get more credit. I think this has much to do with the musical tastes of a Post-punk generation of listeners as well as a cynical generation of rock critics who focus almost exclusively on more lo-fi, underground sounds. Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE Revolver. But it is slightly more insular and biting in its sonic approach. Moreover, due to the technical limitations of the day, it was recorded with less instruments and at lower fidelity. Today, this type of album wins automatic points among hipster rock fans and critics. Pavement, Elliot Smith, Wolf Parade, The White Stripes and The Strokes come to mind. They may not get on the front page of rolling stone, but Indie rock bloggers and South-by-Southwest attendees drool at the sound of unpolished guitars and slightly-out-of-key harmonies. Virtuosity and perfectionism are not great values among these underground tastemakers. But whatever. Silly people run around, they worry me and never ask me why they don't get past my door.

i disagree about your characterization of the current state of indie/alternative music. it would appear that with the critical and commercial success of bands like the arcade fire, sufjan stevens, and, on a more mainstream level, the flaming lips, that bacharach-style orchestration is the trend, a repudiation of the slacker rock of the early 90s. but of course, all sorts of influences are absorbed. (the arcade fire probably bridges the two competing histories of popular music, in so far as they actually compete.)

it would be interesting to see if the same people--like me--who prefer "revolver" to "sgt peppers", prefer "pet sounds" to "sgt peppers"--like me. i think "pet sounds" is more sincere, and therefore more emotionally resonant, than "sgt peppers."

Hard to say - I do like Revolver a bit more than Peppers. Pet Sounds is a sonic trip, but I didn't realize that until I got a bit older. It wasn't hip enough for me when I was younger and the system I had at the time wasn't up to the more delicate nuances of the recording.

I think Pet Sounds requires a more critical ear than Sgt. Peppers. Sgt Peppers is more immidiately accessible, it sounded good at a beach party, through 8-inch speakers connected to my 1963 Rambler station wagon's 8-track. WIth a whopping 10 watt booster amp, lol. How times have changed. Pet Sounds, OTOH, is best appreciated on a good home system, on a comfortable couch with a glass of wime and a doobie. The vocal harmonies are stunning, but then again when weren't the Beach Boys vocally stunning?

The legacy of both recordings is impressive. The fact they were done on 4-track recorders is amazing. I think they mark a high point in late 60's music, along with Electric Ladyland (now there's a sonic trip) and a host of other LPs.

I'd be interested to know what you think of Smile.

Excellent analysis of why the hipsters prefer Revolver. We lo-fi fans of GBV, Sebadoh, Pavement, etc., prefer it. But those of us who truly love the pop music can never deny the power of the songs in Sgt. Peppers, and what the album came to mean for years to come.

I find it really interesting that you make a point of lumping Elliott Smith in with "harder edged, lo-fi indie," given what his later work - the work he did when he actually had the resources to make his music sound just as he wanted - was indelibly Beatlesque in the poppiest of ways (even if the lyrics didn't always reflect the sentiment).

XO, the album many would consider his masterpiece, has lush instrumentation and an incredible pop sensibility - the same sensibility that carried his earlier work through even its bleakest points. In fact, if anything he was picked on later on in his career for borrowing too much from the Beatles' pop side. I don't see how anyone can listen to some of the tracks on his first post-humous album (Memory Lane, Little One and A Distorted Reality, especially, come to mind) and NOT immediately hear the connection.

Sorry to babble on (yes, I am a rabid fan of Elliott's, I'll admit), but it seemed kind of ironic that anyone would use his music as some kind of foil for SPLHCB love, when in reality at his best he aspired (and some might say managed) to be a one man Beatles, perfect pop hooks and all.

Another reason hipsters might like "Revolver" more than "Sgt. Pepper:" The songs on "Revolver" are better. "Pepper" works as album - once a side is playing, it's hard to get up and stop part way through. But as individual songs rather than part of a suite, "Pepper" contains the Beatles B-list material ("A Day In The Life" notwithstanding). Does anyone here ever just listen to one or two songs off of "Pepper?" Particularly, Lennon's songs on "Revolver" are much stronger. They're fully realized songs, as opposed to sketches or ideas for songs propped up by Martin's inventive production.

I think you're over-analyzing this. "Pepper" is certainly the most famous Beatles album. I suspect that a lot of "hipsters" are naturally inclined to conclude that the most famous can't also be the best. It is much hipper to say "everybody thinks 'Pepper' is the ultimate, but those of us in the know realize that 'Revolver' is the true work of genius." As for me, they both continue to be highly enjoyable and I see no need to compare them.

The reasons Beatle fans in general (rather than only) "hipsters" prefer Revolver to Sgt.Pepper is for the only reason that really matters when one is alone with their CD player or iPOD; the songwriter is consistenly better, the production crisper, the lyrics succeed in being intriguingly poetic without the florid excess that capsized about half of Sgt.Pepper's songs, and one still percieved the Beatles as a band, guitar bass and drums, performing tunes with a signature sound that comes only after of years of the same musicians performing together.

It might be compared to Miles Davis when he was performing with his classic bands--John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock,Tony Williams, Ron Carter, et al-- with a long string of releases like Birth of the Cool and Kind of Blue (name your favorite here)and when he turned to the jazz rock fusion of Bitches Brew and On the Corner, which featured the endeavors of Chick Corea, and John McLaughlin . The first mentioned releases are conspicuous examples of bands sensitive to each members nuances, strengths and weaknesses, quirks and signatures, combing with the material to offer adventurous improvisations as part of an ensemble effort, while with Bitches Brew Davis and his producers culled performances from hours of taped jam sessions where ideas and motifs were explored to produce albums that are, in effect, mosaics. The general tone of the later releases was less the sparks that occur between musicians confronting each other in performance but rather something more theatrical; thought the musicianship is rather magnificent and often times bracing on the later electric releases,they seem more in service to Davis' cantankerous muse , performing as directed. As much as I admire and respect the accomplishment of both the Beatles and Davis in their late work, studio craft and all, a larger part of me would have prefered if the musicians had found a way to expand their horizons without abandoning their identities as bands. The Rolling Stones sought to produce their own version of Sgt.Pepper with the releases of the bloated and wasted Satanic Requests, and it's a fine thing to appreciate the Stones self critical response to bad notices (and perhaps some sober listening to the record, after the fact); they abandoned their attempts to compete with the Beatles on their new turf and returned , brilliantly, to riffy, rhythm and blues tinged rock and roll.

What hasn't been mentioned here is that Frank Zappa released his first Mothers of Invention album Freak Out on June 27, 1966, a full month before the Beatles released Revolver in August of that year. Zappa was an erratic, quizzical, quarrelsome presence, but he achieved things with that album that neither the Beatles nor the Stones came close to; both those bands were more influential in the pop music sphere, where their separate approaches to including cross genre and avant gard gestures made for pleasant and easily apprecitated (and imitated)music for a large record buying public. Zappa, though, with his solid chops as composer, producer, guitarist, satirist and multi media mavin, was miles further up the road and around the bend with respect to advancing the primitive ways of rock and roll into an art form. A good amount of Zappa's early music remains challenging to this day, which is another way of saying that it's hard to sit through and that it's downright ugly. The ugliness, though, wasn't merely my limited aesthetic; Zappa cultivated it, advanced it, gloried in it. Now that's integrety.

that too.

Agreed - Pepper has a wider palate of orchestral detail (and not just "orchestra" in the sense of violins and oboes).

This spring, I decided to throw Sgt. Pepper on my MP3 player because I hadn't listened to it in years. I don't think I'd ever listened to it through headphones as an adult.

All kinds of sonic details popped out at me that I'd never noticed before.

For instance, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" always sounded simply "psychedelic" to me, but I'd never thought about what instrumentation made it sound that way.

Before, when I thought of Indian stringed instruments & Sgt. Pepper, I only thought of the George Harrison tune "Within You Without You" and the sitar.

Listening recently through headphones, I noticed the touches of tanpura (buzzy-sounding Indian drone instrument) in "Lucy" and how the instrument, used sparingly, was much more effective than on the faux-raga Harrison piece (which kind of breaks the flow of the album with it's earnestness--sorry George, mate).

I had probably 10 other such epiphanies--'Hey! there's the tanpura again in "Getting Better"'...'Gee, the vamp at the end of "Love Rita" is sure a good audio facsimile of drug-induced disorientation--never really thought of that song as psychedelic'....

Paul of course is widely quoted as saying that Pet Sounds had a huge impact on his musical thinking, and Pet Sounds is full of crazy orchestral touches like bass harmonicas, tack piano, bells, french horn melodies, etc.

I think listeners all know that Pepper is an elaborate production, but many of us don't give this album we've been hearing since grade school a close listen to find out how it's all woven together into a psychedelic whole.

It's much more subtly orchestrated than the bits on Revolver like Eleanor Rigby and Got to Get You Into My Life.

Re: Revolver and it's influence on indie rock, funny how many later musical developments the Beatles anticipate on their records. Revolver's harder moments (John's stuff) do foreshadow/influence a lot of music, from the Jam in the 1970s to the Pixies and beyond, that two generations of hipsters love.

And the Beatles go all 1970s-singer-songwriter on a good bit of the White Album. Except for on Helter Skelter, where they are kind of proto-metal! (Listen to Paul's bass there and imagine it played twice as fast--he's pass the audition for Metallica's bass chair :) )

Peppers + "Strawberry Fields/Penny Land" does live up to the hype, if you can hear it with fresh ears again.

Though I'm a pretty solid Brian Wilson fan, I think with Smile, he was overwhelmed with the idea of making a concept album. He was distracted from his knitting, which was songcraft and the brilliant vocal/instrumental orchestration of his tunes.

And he was overwhelmed by drugs, of course.

With Smile, he spent most of his time futzing with the icing and never really got around to baking the cake.

Ted

Excellent observation, to draw the parallels to Miles Davis' Bitches Brew etc.

In each case, both approaches have their moments of brilliance, but for me, it is the less contrived work that I keep coming back to, this many years later. But it is nice to occassionally revisit Pepper or Bitches Brew after not having listened to them for some time.

I like the Miles Davis analogy too, but I'd compare In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew to the White Album -- chaotic, exploratory, and daring to the point of willingness to fail, but always genuinely going for something new.

If Revolver is The Beatles' Kind of Blue, for me Sgt. Pepper is their Sketches of Spain.

Both pairs of successive albums are avowed masterpieces. In each pair, a relatively simple album with no overt theme was followed by a more complex "concept album." The later albums in each pair were aided and abetted extensively by an orchestrator/arranger (Gil Evans, George Martin) arguably as responsible for the sound and "feel" of the records as the artists who made them. Each of the earlier albums even contains a track that serves as blueprint for the disc that follows: Kind of Blue's "Flamenco Sketches" prefigures Sketches of Spain, and Revolver's "Tomorrow Never Knows" foreshadows Sgt. Pepper.

To me, each of those blueprint tunes, and the albums upon which they appear, are more satisfying and genuine than the follow-up albums they spawned. Sketches of Spain and Sgt. Pepper are both lush and elegant, but for all their sophistication, they've always left me a little cold. They just seem to lack the intimacy of their predecessors.

Virtuosity and perfectionism are not great values among these underground tastemakers.

Well, there goes Dylan and the Velvets, too, I suppose.

Clearly, I don't see any evidence that "virtuosity and perfectionism" were expectations of rock 'n' roll (at least not until the soporific, sucking 70s), so I don't see how that factors in one way or the other.

One Down, Six to Go (the "Pepper" project's working title) was a chance for the Band You've Known For All These Years to put on a special performance in hippie drag, for the heck of it, and even then they kinda gave up on the concept along the way. In situ Hipsterism was anathema to The Beatles. Screwing with people's expectations (and heads) was what they loved.

In fact, looking back, the ultimate "hipster/slacker" release has to be The Beatles, with its hippie-repulsed attitude so palpable in its anarchic, purging, George-Martin-mortifying all-inclusiveness, I'm actually surprised that they didn't include the full scope of the "Revolution" recordings as one huge, side-filling track, just to ensure a complete and total harshing of everyone's post-Pepper mellow.

It wouldn't be until the deliberately slick Abbey Road that the Beatles acknowledged the death of good ol' fun time rock 'n' roll and the emergence of the Rock Music As Product and built their second musical Stonehenge out of "tasty licks" and "hi-fi coolness" rather than of "far-out sounds" and "electronic whatchamacallit" like they did with Pepper. At least during Pepper they were clearly role-playing. By the time Abbey Road hit the charts, the show was over, the well was dry, and the Rock Music Machine was enjoying maximized sales from such dreck as Emerson, Lake & Palmer (who I still listen to occasionally for laughs) and CSNY (who I cannot stand to listen to, unless I'm also as... uh... impaired as the "artists" themselves clearly are...)

Back at Music Scool, I was told by a professor that "taste is most irrelevant" and "history knows no taste AND she never ever sleeps" No whippersnapper today shall ever know the meaning of those opening moments of the Sgt. Pepper Era. Maybe Paul and John actually DID hear those pre release tracks from Brian Wilson's " SMILEY SMILE" or "PET SOUNDS". I remeber the comment in a British Teen Music Tab at the time "Bully Choir boys, those..." John said, that autumn before they gathered for their followup to "REVOLVER", after having heard the Beach Boy's latest via True Genius, George Martin.

Now, about the Cover Art (MC Productions-Peter Blake and Jann Haworth) for a dish of the universal part of the Billy Shears and Co.Band from Pepperland Gazebo:

That cover has SIMON RODIA on it! it has Yukeschwar and Yogananda and Dogson and John's favorite footballer. T.E.Lawrence and Jung and Crowley, Stu Sutcliff, Terry Southern, The Babaji, Keats, Beardsley,Poe,Marx, 2 Shirley's and about 40 more-mostly NON Brits- Sonny (freaking) Liston along with Huxley and Wilde and Shaw and Dylan Thomas, Gladstone and that punctuation of Frank Petty's Girls.

It is the fact that it contains only one up-tempo piece (title track) that keeps the thing out of reach from the new alt, subpop,postpunk esteem. I think the 3 album set (Revolver, Sgt.P. AND The famous Christmas gift to the U.K., Magical Mystery Tour as one trilogical opus with a few months intermission between acts- Wagnerian pacing.

No one, not having gone through the passage of that fateful year can really pass judgement or make comparison between those sounds and any thing since- lesser impersonations all of that image on the screen, Feb, 1964 from the (now) Ed Sullivan Theater. Taste has no relevance to this discussion. A splendid time was forever guaranteed for all. Do not try to spoil it. The band plays on forever, now.