Sir Paul McCartney celebrates his 77th birthday today (June 18th). The Beatles: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was designed to be some other band is playing this song. But really it would be them. The song wasn’t released as a single, but the album it kicked off and shared its name with topped the Billboard 200 for 15 weeks and was the best-selling album of the 1960s. Looking to do something as totally mind-blowing as The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Paul McCartney came up with a concept that would, as he put it, “lend distance to the album.” He tells how the title track of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band originated.
”Basically, from this idea I had about this band. It was going to be an album of another band that wasn’t us. And just imagine all the time that it wasn’t us playing this album. So I had this song written of Sergeant Pepper and it was twenty years ago and he taught us to play and we’re his proteges and here we are.”
Photo Credit: Landmark/PR Photos
