The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love

Edited by Kenneth Womack and Kathryn B. Cox - Contributions by Kenneth L. Campbell; Jacqueline Edmondson PhD; Michael Frontani; Katie Kapurch; Mark Osteen; Kit O’Toole; Joe Rapolla; Robert Rodriguez; Bruce Spizer and Jerry Zolten

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.

Lexington Books

Pages: 254 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼

978-1-4985-3473-4 • Hardback • July 2017 • $123.00 • (£95.00)

978-1-4985-3474-1 • Paperback • May 2018 • $60.99 • (£47.00)

978-1-4985-3475-8 • eBook • July 2017 • $57.50 • (£44.00)

Series: For the Record: Lexington Studies in Rock and Popular Music

Subjects: Music / Individual Composer & Musician, Social Science / Popular Culture, Music / Genres & Styles / Rock

The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

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.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 254 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼

978-1-4985-3473-4 • Hardback • July 2017 • $123.00 • (£95.00)

978-1-4985-3474-1 • Paperback • May 2018 • $60.99 • (£47.00)

978-1-4985-3475-8 • eBook • July 2017 • $57.50 • (£44.00)

Series: For the Record: Lexington Studies in Rock and Popular Music

Subjects: Music / Individual Composer & Musician, Social Science / Popular Culture, Music / Genres & Styles / Rock

Author

Kenneth Womack is professor of English and dean of the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monmouth University.

Kathryn B. Cox isdoctoral candidate in historical musicology at the University of Michigan.

Table of Contents

Introduction: It Was 50 Years Ago Today! - Kenneth Womack

I. A Splendid Time Is Guaranteed for All
1. Sgt. Pepper—with a Little Outsider Help—Taught the Band to Play - Jerry Zolten
2. Turning Us On: Artifice as Authenticity in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - Mark Osteen
3. The Sitar, Eastern Music and Philosophy, and the Beatles’ Progress Towards Rishikesh - Kathryn B. Cox
4. The Act You’ve Known for All These Years: Discord and Harmony in the Third Space - Jacqueline Edmondson
II. The Summer of Love (and Commerce)
1. “All You Need Is Love”: The Beatles in the Global Village - Kit O’Toole
2. Golden Blunders: The Fall of the Beatles’ Apple and Its Unlikely Seed - Joe Rapolla
3. The Wretched Life of a Lonely Heart: Sgt. Pepper’s Girls, Fandom, the Wilson Sisters, and Chrissie Hynde - Katie Kapurch
4. “You Say You Want a Revolution”: The Beatles and the Political Culture of the 1960s - Kenneth L. Campbell
III. The Magical/Tragical History Tour
1. Dying To Take You Away: The Beatles as Cinematic Auteurs - Robert Rodriguez
2. The End of Fantasy: The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour, and the Counterculture - Michael Frontani
3. Magical Mystery Tour: From EP to LP to CD - Bruce Spizer

Reviews

Largely because of the Beatles, 1967 was the most important year for song since 1840. This study of the Beatles' work of 1967 offers deep and stimulating new research and speculation on the surrounding politics, communications media, commerce and the counterculture; inspiration ranging from non-western to avant garde musics; tension in the Beatles' masquerade; the role of gender in reception; and the album's influence on followers.
— Walter Everett, The University of Michigan

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.
— Steven Hamelman, Coastal Carolina University