24. The Beatles, "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band"

 

That's right.  This was the Big One, the Capo di Tutti Capi, the perennial number one Best Album of All Time until they let people other than old white guys vote.  Here we have Sgt. Pepper's, demoted to a (relatively) lowly 24.  Don't weep for what we've lost; celebrate what we had.

I mean, it's a pretty fucking good album!!  It kicks off, of course, with a performance of the titular faux band that Paul McCartney dreamed up on a flight to London, which then leads into an introduction of "the one and only Billy Shears," who turns out to be Ringo Starr, of all people, never a featured singer in the Beatles' lineup, gamely baritoning through "With a Little Help From My Friends," a cheerful pop ditty.  

The next song, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," really lifts the curtain on what the band is up to here and what they're up to is doing a lot of acid.  The widespread perception that the song is about the effects of LSD (based in part and not unreasonably on the acronym formed from the title words) was halfheartedly denied by the band; John Lennon said the song was inspired by a drawing that his son Julian made but COME ON MAN, it's obviously about doing acid.  That iconic riff at the beginning is played on a tambura, not a sitar as I had assumed, with a countermelody on a Lowrey organ.  "Lucy" is apparently Lucy O'Donnell, a classmate of Julian's, who died of lupus in 2009 and wouldn't it be wild to go through life knowing you were the Lucy in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

Lennon really gets to stretch out on this record.  "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" is a weird, wild, vaguely disturbing circus song with lyrics taken from an actual 1843 circus poster that Lennon bought at an antique shop.  It swoops and swirls and has calliope and Wurlitzer and glockenspiel and tape loops, really the pre-eminent psych-circus song of the era.  "Good Morning Good Morning" is one of those "contemporary life is bullshit" tracks that Lennon loved to turn out, even though he later disclaimed it, calling it "a piece of garbage."  It's definitely not the best song on the album.  

That's the Lennon and McCartney collaboration "A Day in the Life," one of the most important and finest songs in the history of rock, a masterful multi-part suite that really showed that the only limit to what you could do in the genre was your own imagination.  The first verse is about Guinness heir Tara Browne, a friend of Lennon and McCartney's who died in a fiery car crash in London in 1966:

I read the news today—oh, boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph
He blew his mind out in a car
He didn't notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They'd seen his face before
Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords

The song builds and builds and builds and then there's the famous orchestral breakdown and alarm clock and then Paul's section, the famous "Woke up, fell out of bed," yanking us from the dreamlike into the bustle of the real world.  Except, except!  Pretty soon we're back upstairs and having a smoke and falling into a dream.

Is it the Beatles' greatest song?  Some people think so.  (Some people think it's "Strawberry Fields Forever," but they're wrong.)  And it really does have it all!  The singalong verses, the different movements, the crescendo and release, the thunderous ending chord (that inspired the THX "Deep Note" you hear - or used to hear? I haven't been to a movie in a while - at the beginning of every movie that used THX sound, which was almost every movie).  And the little bits of lyric that will always be with us, "I read the news today, oh boy," and "Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire" and "I'd love to turn you on."

George Harrison gets his customary one to two songs, this time with "Within You Without You," which OF COURSE is deep psych, as is Harrison's want, based on Indian classical music, redolent with sitar and tabla and tambura, and lyrics clearly anticipating the Summer of Love that would soon follow ("When you've seen beyond yourself then you may find/Peace of mind is waiting there").  I don't love it tbh but it's probably great when you're stoned or SO I WOULD IMAGINE.

McCartney turns out some of his best pop gems.  "Fixing a Hole" alternates between minor verses and major choruses, making it sound slightly disjointed and jarring, but it's got such a great melody it's hard to dislike.  "She's Leaving Home," the next song, a sad tale of a girl running away from home, was inspired by a story McCartney read about a real girl, 17-year-old Melanie Coe, who ran away to be with an older boyfriend.  (In one of those twists that makes you think we really do live in a simulation, it turns out McCartney had actually met Coe years earlier when she appeared on a BBC show with the band.)

Obviously I could write a paragraph or a book about every song on this amazing album but I won't.  It's great, I love it, etc. etc.

Is this album in my personal Top 100? It would be kind of a letdown if I said no at this point, right?  Yes, of course it is.