Worst Beatles song on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

shame on her!

i was going to say ivor cutler - were the beatles fans? i've always noticed the scots accent, but then my granny is from aberdeen/dundee/glasgow/ulster (moved around a bit in her life) so maybe that's why.

Yeah, Paul was, and he asked Ivor to be in the Magical Mystery Tour.

He was also on Parlophone, which helps.

were the beatles fans?

You've not seen "Magical Mystery Tour" then?

"Here, have you been impersonating me again, Mr. McCartney?"

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_24o5BqgMIK0/SNlrqGNIixI/AAAAAAAABUA/JjDMCEAk3EU/s400/MACCA.jpg

about the stereo/mono versions - can these be bought separately or do you have to get the box set?

Apparently they bonded over an unusual chord in Ivor's "I'm Going in a Field", which Macca was especially impressed with (xp)

i think you have to buy the mono as a box set, the stereo versions can be bought individually

Voted Within You, Without You because it is the only song that really doesn't fit in thematically or musically.

No, I don't think that Sgt. Pepper tells a story a la The Who's Tommy or something similar, but the songs definitely tie together in terms of theme and message.

I really don't get the comments about this album being a re-tread of Revolver, but then I buy all the hype...

xpost ah no, i need to see MMT. Love the album of course.

Also even though I can't blame the Beatles for it, "Mr. Kite" resulted in this awfulness:

It was the best part of Across the Universe, however:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59ahx9ckqIw

"I'm Going In A Field" - love that song - a good one to play the day poor mr cutler passed away.

voted "Good Morning"... so annoying. a song for alarm clocks doesn't belong in the middle of an album.

xxp: what the fuck is wrong with people?

i am very surprised that the title track didn't get a vote yet. it is one of the reasons why i never listen to this album. for me the dacapo really ruins the whole album. looking at the song list i just realised that the rest of it is quite good.

Hey! What am I, chopped liver?

sorry, i didn't read all your posts carefully. will you ever forgive me? that song is annoying as hell. in the beatles oeuvre it is only beaten by "the long and winding road", i think.

alex in manhattan's hit on something here - if anything the reason i don't get on so much with this album is its brashness - as someone mentioned upthread, the songs are good on their own, as a whole it's this loud brassy "GET OUT OF BED BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA LISTEN TO ME WAAAAAAAAA" affair, which I guess is what differentiates it from Revolver, which is much more mellow. It's the same reason I always skip the first track on Blur's "Great Escape", it's like this rude awakening I can do without, which I'm sure a lot of people enjoy.

It's the McCartney Smarm Offensive coupled with Lazy Lennon and Who Cares Harrison that bugs me

Revolver, which is much more mellow

Wait, what? Revolver was their most electric-guitary album up to that time, and in fact is MORE so than Pepper. In what way are Tomorrow Never Knows, She Said She Said, I Want To Tell You, And Your Bird Can Sing or Taxman "mellow"?

Yeah, how the hell is Revolver mellow? There is some serious noise on that thing.

I'd love to hear what your average Beatle teenybopper fan thought in 1966 when the needle finally got to Tomorrow Never Knows. I'm sure it was a priceless reaction. That song is mind-blowing.

i was thinking of things like i'm only sleeping, eleanor rigby etc. but you've got a point.

"Ooh, nice seagulls"

(xpost)

I'd love to hear what your average Beatle teenybopper fan thought in 1966 when the needle finally got to Tomorrow Never Knows. I'm sure it was a priceless reaction. That song is mind-blowing.

It came on when I was driving my mom somewhere a few years ago. She was an 18yr old suburban American girl in Catholic school in 1966. She was and still is very prudish. She kept saying how it was unlike anything she had ever heard or could have imagined. How it seemed like it came from a different planet. I should've asked her whether she liked it or not, but judging from the fact that she basically stopped following the Beatles after Revolver, I'm guessing it was just too weird and psychedlic for her and scared her off!

i basically love every song on this album and spent my teenage years being irritated by the challopsy types kate refers to. the late '90s was a bad time to say you preferred sgt pepper to pet sounds.

This was my first favorite album as a child and I will vote for the song that said the least to me then, though I did grow fond of it later: 'Within You Without You'.

the late '90s was a bad time to say you preferred sgt pepper to pet sounds.

i definitely prefer it to pet sounds, i'm just not supersold on either of them. (not least because i directly blame them for latter-day flaming lips and animal collective and all that twee sparkly indie-psyche stuff.)

I can't believe some people here are actually asshole enough to register a vote to have somebody banned from the site just for disagreeing about which song is least favorite on a record. But looking at recent Suggest Bans, it turns out yes, some people are actually asshole enough.

Name names!

No. I just wanted to register my disgust and hit the "Suggest This Is Maybe Why Mods Sometimes Don't Like To Deal With This Bullshit" button.

"I'd love to hear what your average Beatle teenybopper fan thought in 1966 when the needle finally got to Tomorrow Never Knows. I'm sure it was a priceless reaction. That song is mind-blowing."

"Oh dear, they've gone a bit weird! It must be drugs! I'll put Herman's Hermits on next."

Awww. People up thread said they were going to be sb'ing over this. High stakes!

Anyway, I'm voting "She's Leaving Home."

I can't believe some people here are actually asshole enough to register a vote to have somebody banned from the site just for disagreeing about which song is least favorite on a record. But looking at recent Suggest Bans, it turns out yes, some people are actually asshole enough.

Yes, this is ludicrous and a bit pathetic. It reminds me of that Peep Show episode where everyone keeps threatening to section everyone else.

Anyway, I voted for Sixy-Four. SB away if you like.

Oh, Dog Latin, didn't know that Easy Stars album existed! Thanks for the heads up, DLing it now.

Song for song, I do think Revolver is richer and punchier, but I do see why the comparison happens - if you strip away a few dozen overdubs and the cover art, there are a lot of sonic similarities - I mean let's say "Taxman" and "Good Morning Good Morning" changed places. "Taxman" would seem a little too worldly and pedestrian to be on Sgt. Pepper's but I don't think anyone would have noticed GMGM as out of place on Revolver - same charging guitar attack, same crisp sound. Or swap "Getting Better" for "Got To Get You Into My Life." Or "With A Little Help..." for "Yellow Submarine." If you really started juggling things around you could probably get "Rain" and "Strawberry Fields" together on this record and "Paperback Writer" with "Penny Lane" on Revolver

This was just a very, very fertile period for them and they didn't switch sounds as dramatically as the art, costumes, hair etc. would suggest. Paul in particular is the bridge, as certainly John was going a litle more wild with the possibilities available. The really massively "studio" tracks here (A Day In The Life, Mr. Kite) are mainly John's and I don't think they could slot onto Revolver whatsoever.

Oh! Right! Worst song. Um...I'll get back to you in the morning. I really like this record and have a lot of comfort food affection for it - if there's anything to the "concept album" hype it's that I don't relate to it as a "collection of songs" where cherry-picking feels natural, as I do most of the previous ones and the White Album..

Echoing what someone said above, Within You Without You is the track that separates the 8 year olds from the grown ups. I hated it *so* much as a child...its presence on the album offended me. These days, got no problem with it, especially in mono.

And now it seems like such a great way to start the "weirder" 2nd side. Along the lines of that, Benefit of Mr. Kite probably makes more sense when you think of it as a side-ender. It was always interesting as a child going from the circus music of Kite and then flipping the album over and hitting the brick wall of Harrison's sitars (which made a briefer and friendlier appearance in Getting Better, so we were warned). After all that Indian seriousness, When I'm 64 seems a little less fluffy. When I was a kid, it was a totally essential palate-cleanser.

Lovely Rita: the wierdo ending doesn't get enough love. Is there another Beatles song that combines a pop hook w/a noise breakdown in the same way? The opening of Lovely Rita gives me chills like no other Beatles track.

Anyway, I have to go with She's Leaving Home, though it is better (less draggy) on the mono album.

pop hook w/a noise breakdown

There's a great bootleg of "Paperback writer" that doesn't fade out and ends in a 'falling over' way, they really should have kept it.

Fixing a Hole. Apart from the title track and coda, McCartney's stuff on here really treads a thin line between charming and irritating.

I really like Fixing a Hole. It's Macca's equivalent to I'm Only Sleeping, similarly cocooned and narcotic.

I like Fixing A Hole too, and I'm sure that's largely due to reading somewhere that Lennon finally gave McCartney his due as a songwriter, describing it as "real head music" or something like that.

I think that "Within You Without You" is probably the song I'd be least likely to play apart from the rest of the album, but I agree that in the context of the record, it works really well. Compared with the colorful psychedelia of the first side, it sounds kind of harsh and challenging. And it's so long! It feels longer than it is ...

It feels longer than it is ...

You said it, brother

it's funny how, for the Beatles in 1967, a song that went past the 5 minute mark must've seemed sooooooo epic. Within You and Day in the Life are probably the first ones?

I really like how "Within You Without You" and "When I'm Sixty Four" fit with each other conceptually (the impermanence of existence "life flows on within you and without you", "losing my hair, many years from now"), but are worlds apart stylistically.

Cliche but voted reprise. I really like all the songs on this album, there is just something about it that stops me liking the album itself, like the pacing is all wrong or something.

The thing I never got about this album, or as much what people think and say about it- it's really quite conservative in subject matter and sound in places (or at least compared to MMT-EP) and not the '67 hippie free love technicolour thing it has always been discribed as.

Can't vote for reprise, the beat is too good.

the conservatism is an interesting point. certainly compared to what else came out in '67, sgt. pepper's is nowhere near as striking as, say, revolver is compared to the rest of what came out in '66. as i was saying on the revolver thread, it's really mindboggling what happened in the space of 12 months there. revolver really appeared at the crest of a wave, but by the time sgt. pepper's came out the wave was crashing everywhere.

I loooved Within You, Without You when I was 8.