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

(Hardback)

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For the Beatles, 1967 marks a signal crossroads that would both transform the groups 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. Peppers 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.

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, University of Michigan
In this fifty-year retrospective on Sgt. Peppers 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

Author Bio

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 is doctoral candidate in historical musicology at the University of Michigan.