How the Hippies Hijacked Vinyl
This week brings another Beatles-related 50th anniversary, and arguably the grooviest of them all: The release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It landed, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, on June 1, 1967 in England, and June 3 in the United States. Maybe that’s just how trans-Atlantic shipping worked in those days, or maybe the lads wanted to give the mother country a wee head start. In any case, land it did, and, as the cliché goes, everything changed.
A hundred thousand paeans—and , by Richard Goldstein in , back before the paper of record was in the habit of regularly reviewing rock records—have been written about the album. The world doesn’t need another one. What I think the world may need, however, at this point in history, is a tribute to the form—to the physical thing itself. I was born in 1960, and as such I witnessed a lot as I sprouted toward puberty: the first war brought into American living rooms every night via television; those first post-Kennedy shared cultural moments, everyone watching Archie Bunker, Olga Korbut, and the moon landing in real time; and the primordial expansion of the commercial and cultural ganglia that bound Americans together as a nation of ravenous consumers, from cable television to the proliferation of the chain stores that seemed so novel
