3. The BeatlesSgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
You don’t need no explanation for that! Shit! That record is why I was in the record shop in the first place! I was trying to find out what was happening. Psychedelic was just a concept back then – then they painted the picture of what psychedelic was going to be like, on a real, straight pop level. They didn’t even do the feedback and whatever, they just did straight writing and of course they had George Martin’s arrangements. They came up with something so brand new that it just blew my mind. ‘A Day In The Life’, ‘She’s Leaving Home’… that was like, damn! Talk about feeling like you never wrote shit! When you hear shit like that you know you gotta go back to school. That album was that for me. And it was that for everybody. Then that didn’t happen again until Abbey Road. I mean, they had songs and albums after that that I loved, but it was Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper’s… they were the moments. They really became who they were: The Beatles.
Right when they got started, Pete Best came to the States, and I was there in the studio before I even knew what a Beatle was. He was telling us about what they were doing over in Germany… "You’re gonna hear of these guys." But then, when they did come, little kids were trying to jump out of windows on Broadway. I hadn’t seen that since Elvis. You’d seen it with a few rock and rollers, but you hadn’t seen that kind of hysteria. They lived up to every bit of the hype.
But then they got to making Sgt. Pepper’s – there was nothing left for them to do. They couldn’t play nowhere because the people were louder than they were! They didn’t use Marshalls and if they’d been Hendrix or Cream they might have been able to drown out those people. But they had to make a change, and that was Sgt. Pepper’s.
