Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1978)

What?

It was thirty-five years ago today that Sergeant Pepper taught Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees to play like the Beatles . . . and it didn't work out very well.  Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the movie, was a commercial and artistic disaster from the moment it came out on July 21, 1978.  Bee Gees manager and music mogul Robert Stigwood conceived the idea of creating a rock opera film after having bought the rights to use 28 Beatles songs on screen and stage and having employed some of them in a 1974 Broadway theatrical revue based on the group's landmark 1967 Sgt. Pepper album. The stage show had done modestly well, and Stigwood was determined to turn it into a spectacular cinematic extravaganza.  Instead, he created an extravagant cinematic spectacle.  The movie, which used all 28 songs Stigwood had rights to, starred Frampton and the three Gibb brothers, with a supporting "cast" of random pop singers and comedians.  It was a half-baked cross between Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine about a clean-cut rock band that becomes hugely successful.  They spend the movie trying to deal with the greedy record business while also trying to save their hometown of Heartland, U.S.A. (wait - weren't Frampton and the Bee Gees originally from England?) from an evil rock band (played by Aerosmith) hoping to take over the world, pollute young minds, and eliminate love and joy.

Again, what? 

The very first article I ever got published (in a Beatles fan magazine) was a disembowelment of the universally hated Sgt. Pepper movie and its double-album soundtrack, and although I now think it was as poorly written as the movie's treatment, I'm only here to revisit the latter product of this hideous escapade.  The Sgt. Pepper movie soundtrack album is easily the worst collection of Beatles covers ever made, attempting to contemporarize existing arrangements of the Beatles' work on the one hand and reworking other Beatles songs in unforgivable ways on the other. Examples of the latter case include a vaudevillian cover of "Fixing a Hole" by George Burns (who played Heartland's mayor, Mr. Kite), a goofy spoken-vocal performance of "Because" by Alice Cooper (who played a henchman hypnotist for the evil rock band) that sounds like Truman Capote on helium, and a slow disco cover of "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" by Dianne Steinberg (daughter of legendary Detroit soul-radio DJ Martha Jean the Queen) and the disco/R&B girl group Stargard, who collectively played a disco group named . . . Lucy and the Diamonds.  (Not to be confused with Derek and the Dominos.)  Frampton and the Bee Gees, meanwhile, tried to replicate the original Beatles records in various covers that only force comparisons to the originals.  (The Lord Mayor of Pepperland probably wouldn't think that they could pass for the originals.)  

Legendary Beatles producer George Martin actually produced this record, and he did so reluctantly. After all, he was and is the custodian of the Beatles' music.  Martin was not to blame for this record's horridness; indeed, there were flashes of brilliance in his production, and overall, he did the best he could.  But as he had members of Toto and smooth-jazz icon Larry Carlton, among others, playing the music, it simply wasn't enough. (I liked Martin's classy re-arrangement of "The Long and Winding Road" for Frampton, which outdid Phil Spector's strings on the original Beatles release, but Frampton's nasal, whining vocal ruined the effort.) 

On the other hand . . . could this be an album that has something for everyone to like? Because there are three outstanding covers here that must be noted - a wonderful version of "Come Together" by Aerosmith, a soulful update of "Got To Get You Into My Life" from Earth Wind & Fire (both of which were hit singles, though Earth, Wind & Fire leader Maurice White, not Martin, produced the latter), and a third cover that one person may like while hating the rest of the album.  People will point to a third track - say, the Bee Gees singing "Nowhere Man" or Billy Preston performing the Beatles song he'd done with the Beatles, "Get Back" - and say, "That's great stuff!"  (I'm one of those who would pick Preston's cover as the third good track.)   But the bitter truth is that this movie was doomed from the start, because the idea behind it was misguided.  Since the Beatles called it quits, cynical producers and impresarios have relentlessly staged simulated Beatles concerts and produced Beatles musicals in an attempt to re-create the magic of an era, magic that can never be re-created.  The Sgt. Pepper movie is the worst example of such cynicism by a wide margin. Two good things, apart from the few covers that worked, have come of out of  its soundtrack record.  First, it spurred a lot of posthumous interest in the Beatles than at almost any other time during the seventies.  Second, it demonstrated once and for all that the performance of a song is more important than how well it's written; people who insist otherwise always shut up after hearing it.