Sgt. Pepper turns 40. And it’s Beatlemania once again.
It’s still debatable among “older” Beatles fans as to which is the most significant music event of the 1960s — The Beatles‘ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964, or the release of their majestic album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” that is 40 years old this month. My vote would be this: The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 is the most significant music event of the 1960s, while the most important event in the history of pop/rock music would be the release of the Beatles’ studio album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on June 01, 1967.
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The breathtaking Sgt. Pepper album cover is a puzzling and colorful collage by Peter Blake that showed the band, in gaudy mock-military costumes, presiding over the burial of the “old” Beatles, with scattered mug shots of high and low cultural icons hovering in the background. You’d go cross-eyed trying to figure out just how many notables were depicted — a mass of pop art that included Marilyn Monroe, Karl Marx, Aldous Huxley, Marlene Dietrich, Sonny Liston, Laurel and Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Marlon Brando, Leo Gorcey, Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce and Mae West.