Best Song on Sgt Pepper by The Beatles Poll

I READ THE NEWS TODAY OH BOY

how has this not been done?

i don't think "most people" would actually agree on this being a great album in 2013

most people would, i think. most ilxors maybe not.

i don't think it's nearly as good as abbey road or revolver, but it contains "a day in the life" which is my favorite beatles song.

The mono mix is mindblowing, and I say that as someone who thought it couldn't possibly be as mindblowing as it's made out to be. But it is.

why missing songs? from the poll?

how has this not been done?

― Treeship, Saturday, October 12, 2013 12:10 PM (4 minutes ago)

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Poll

good morning good morning wasn't going to win anyway xp

yah but getting better .

oh snap i didn't realize that was missing too. i never really decided how i felt about john lennon's (by all accounts genuine) admission of domestic violence on that song.

in any case, it's what makes the song memorable... saves it from being as trite as the sing-songy melody is. a punch in the gut, hauntingly tossed off and casual.

as you get older you realize that you don't really have to decide on or form a definitive opinion regarding everything (nor do you have time to)

aw i don't think it's trite at all

i like the threads (pretty sure there's more than one) where ppl are foaming at the mouth about how much they hate the beatles.

http://www.strong-island.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/conkers1.jpg

i don't hate the beatles but their appeal used to be that they were both very "universal" and also "ahead of their time" + i don't think their music represents either of those things now

maybe i do hate the beatles. i don't know.

i find them to be impossible to listen to lately. cloying + ancient

yeah. the level of vitriol just seemed really funny. I dunno, maybe that's just sort of a uk thing

i don't hate the beatles but their appeal used to be that they were both very "universal" and also "ahead of their time" + i don't think their music represents either of those things now

― sleepingbag, Saturday, October 12, 2013 7:40 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they arent ahead of their time now that it's fifty years after their time....... ?????????

No, and I was going to say that too.

I don't remember that being a meme about them, really.

Influential, but more that they exemplified their own time, I always thought.

i love getting better; the "holding me down (a-aah) turning me round (a-aah)" bit at the beginning nails hazy helpless alienation; "it can't get no worse" applied to john's personality is lol; plus it's part of the john-learns-happiness series that goes something like help! --> nowhere man --> getting better --> hey bulldog. (of those it's 3rd best at most but still.)

i was introduced to it by a phillips commercial tho :/

I was going to vote for "Good Morning, Good Morning". I like that song, but it's okay.

vg+

I can definitely see voting for "Good Morning, Good Morning." McCartney's solo is probably the best in the Beatles' oeuvre.

this is better than many of their other hilariously overpraised albums with all their retrospective perfect score reviews and w/e but idk if i would call it great. it's not something i ever wanted to listen to a lot.

There's something magical about the first ten seconds of "Lovely Rita." I'd probably vote for it just based on that.

^^^ Yeah, I love that opening too

this thread feels like a return to the early days of ILM

"Getting Better" and "Good Morning Good Morning" definitely my two favorites on here as a kid, not sure where to go here. Can imagine ceasing to care about this record but can't imagine disliking it.

kick into last chorus of lucy sways me

idg why people would even waste energy trying to understand why they hate this album. it's 2013 and this is a great album. i mean the beatles obviously did better albums than this, but that's like saying the monorail episode is better than 'lisa needs braces'.

idg why people would even waste energy trying to understand why they hate this album

bcos ilm fear of agreeing with the obv correct call

congratulations to whoever started this thread

darragh otm

4,000 holes

"with a little help from my friends" because I never thought I'd care about that tune again and then there it was in a songbook while I was picking out songs to play for aero jr. when he was very tiny and I thought, damn, someday you'll have friends, you don't know what they are yet but they're pretty great, and in the sappy way that obvious truths become unscalable heights of Truth for parents sometimes, the song became new to me. "how do I feel at the end of the day - are you sad because you're on your own?" suddenly a giant vortex of sadness, "yes, I'm certain that it happens all the time" a vast insight into how many people are falling in love all the time, etc etc

I don't kid myself this has more to do with me being in the right place to feel like that's what the song's about but at the same time it's been a year and I feel like I understand it in a way I hadn't before - that it's genuinely profound, where when I was a kid it seemed like it was really trying to be profound

have v. strong feelings about this album, although nowadays I'm not sure if it's because it's a genuinely great album or because of nostalgic recollections of playing it over and over on cassette as a teenager just beginning to get into music.

goddamn, the way the orchestra tuning noises resolve into rock music at the beginning of the title track just grabs me by the fucking gut, maybe nothing else I know compares to it except the beginning of pavement "silence kit"

voted for title track reprise for sentimental reasons but maybe should have given title track the nod

While this album must have seemed incredibly mindblowing and game-changing at the time due to its arsenal of production tricks, it's probably fair to say in hindsight from a songwriting perspective that this isn't the greatest collection of songs The Beatles put out. I would definitely have Revolver and Abbey Road down as being stronger collections of songs overall. 'A Day In The Life' is easily the best thing here by several thousand country miles, but I do find the odd time signature changes in 'Good Morning Good Morning' at the very least interesting. Joe Cocker's version of 'With A Little Help From My Friend' smokes the fuck out of The Beatles version here, much in the same way as the Stones' 'I Wanna Be Your Man' kicks several shades of shit out of the way The Beatles did it on With The Beatles.

The rest? A mixture of okay McCartney numbers which are hardly up there with the best of his work, George's incredibly dour 'Within You Without You' (which is just a duller version of 'Love You To' as far as I'm concerned), and Lennon at his least personal lyrically.

voting for Rita again.

...which, to me, is the weakest song on the entire album. Seriously. I'd hit the skip button on 'Lovely Rita' even if it were on Wings At The Speed Of Sound, that's how below-par I think it is as a McCartney composition.

goddamn, the way the orchestra tuning noises resolve into rock music at the beginning of the title track just grabs me by the fucking gut

otm. There's a reason Hendrix covered it.

question! slow stereo version of She's Leaving Home vs fast mono? i like the mono but can't 'get used' to it after 30 years hearing it the 'wrong' way.

It isn't sped up all that much. The wikipedia article says it raises the key a semi-tone, but I think it's less than that. I like both, but general fondness for mono.

"within you without you" is actually my favorite here, i voted for it

Mono is the only way to listen to this album. Or indeed any Beatles album issued up until The Beatles. The mono version of Rubber Soul on vinyl has a punch to it (especially in terms of the drum sound) which the stereo version on CD completely lacks.

Thinking about voting for Mr Kite just for general cragginess. I mostly love the big ones (Lucy, Pepper reprise into Day in the Life) (shd be just one option,imo; am sure others disagree) but Kite brings a certain creepy vaudevillain quality

Best song on Sgt Pepper by The Beatles except for a Day in Life might be an interesting poll...

I can definitely see voting for "Good Morning, Good Morning." McCartney's solo is probably the best in the Beatles' oeuvre.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Saturday, October 12, 2013 5:47 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Never knew that was Paul but that's a killer solo

Yeah, it's in the "Taxman" vein

ugh, the effing taxman. i still think revolver is better than sgt peppers but i hate that song.

Goddam, Taxman rules!

I'm Only Sleeping should start the album off and Taxman and Yellow Submarine should be on the white album or something.

http://i.imgur.com/lc5RxLr.png

Sgt. Pepper is a manufactured piece of music and I think the mono mix compliments that more than the stereo. Stereo separation by nature makes for something more like live sound.

The speeding up of "She's Leaving Home" doesn't bother me because it's just another manufactured element to the record. So is the sound of the old vinyl mastering.

every beatles album has been polled, just for everyone's info

Joe Cocker's version of 'With A Little Help From My Friend' smokes the fuck out of The Beatles version here

lol really? always hated that, it's like "what if I got REAL LOUD, AM I BLOWING YOUR MIND YET"

all great.

I'm thinking "Fixing a Hole" cuz they gave it to George Burns in that awful movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yXN1g3ED9w

"with a little help from my friends" is the only thing on this I'd listen to.

This was often considered the best pop album ever in the '70s, but today I doubt many even consider it the best Beatles album. Excellent, but hasn't worn as well as Rubber Soul, Revolver, or Abbey Road to pick three. Still one of the most influential albums ever, good or bad.

oh snap i didn't realize that was missing too. i never really decided how i felt about john lennon's (by all accounts genuine) admission of domestic violence on that song.

― Treeship, Saturday, October 12, 2013 3:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

At least he speaks of it as a distant episode from the past he's now ashamed of --- a big improvement over "Run For Your Life" from two years earlier which reflects his attitude in the present and future.

.. Which he was hugely ashamed of, and always slated it as being a lazy rewrite and so on.

Then again, as an acknowledgement of the 'nasty man' inside him, it's quite a shocking thing juxtaposed with a lot of the 'nice' songs they were mostly known for, up to that point.

Despite what ILXors likely believe, this is actually one of my favorite Beatles albums. Voted "She's Leaving Home"

Interesting, because I always believed your favorite was Revolver, Greg.

I go between Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, and Help! (UK)

"Good Morning Good Morning" and "Getting Better" would be my first 2 choices so i dunno. how the hell do you do a poll of all but 2 songs on an album anyway.

Apparently Conkers registered a couple of days ago just to start this incomplete poll of an album that's already been polled then disappear again. #modaccountabuse

Sometimes ILX is a total mystery to me.

what a bad fur day

conker wrote this on thread are you some kind of tweeist? on board I Love Everything on Nov 12, 2002
I met the famous girl with the "Fuck Me I'm Twee" T-shirt... and did.

Joe Cocker sucks, the male Janis, hernia blooze

As far as all the are they overrated? Were there really ahead of their time? Who cares? The reissues were a good opportunity for me to stop dealing with THE BEATLES THE IMPORTANT HISTORICAL ENTITY THAT EVERYTHING EVER MUST BE JUDGED AGAINST and engage with a really interesting inventive 60s rock band that could really play and write songs and made good sounding records

As far as whether they were ahead of their time... I don't get that at all. Like if they weren't who cares? It's hard enough to be a good band and write good songs how the fuck are you supposed to be responsible for being cutting edge decades after you break up?

otm, except for the part about Joe Cocker

yeah i don't remotely understand the gripe that they 'were' ahead of their time but aren't anymore. they created, reinvented and/or popularized so many sounds and tropes of popular music, even just from a production/engineering standpoint, that i feel like it's pretty hard to take anything away from them in that department.

i mean there are the people that will admit all that but say their influence was entirely a bad thing and they ruined music which, ok, whatever, but at least they're opinionated and not in denial of reality.

xp lol at the idea of a "Fuck Me I'm Twee" t-shirt.

anyway, the degree to which a band is "innovative" seems like an academic question that is different from the question of how good they are. i think it's fine to say that a lot of the studio wizardry on this album has lost its novelty, revealing the relatively thin songs underneath. i don't think this is their best collection of songs.

when i said that thing about them not feeling ahead of their time anymore -- obv which is only true to the extent that it is true -- i meant that a big part of my experience with the beatles was listening to them and at the time easily hearing directly how they must have influenced many of the bands that i was into at the time. i don't think i or anyone could replicate that experience today because of how music has changed. even in the 80's when music was first getting all techy and crazy i think their songwriting influence was still loudly felt, not so much now.

anyway, the degree to which a band is "innovative" seems like an academic question that is different from the question of how good they are

the degree to which a band is anything but "good" is an academic (but not properly like academic, probably more like i mean 'cuntish' really) question that is different from the question of how good they are, which is a personal opinion type of phenomenon in any case, and worthless except for the execution of that phenomenon as a diversion from the pain and alienation of modern existence where nobody understand you, mannnn.

It seems to me that studio wizardry is not as big a part of this album as is sometimes suggested. Apart from adding stock tape sounds in a few places (chopped up in the case of Mr. Kite), what else is there? I guess there's phasing on Lucy.

i.e., most of the color on this album comes from the instrumentation

The zombies, Os mutantes and the beach boys did this album better!

Objectively, a day in the life is the best one, but I'm voting Rita again because it's a personal favorite since I first heard it.

Didn't Lennon hit a waitress during the "lost weekend" or whatever his L.A. year is called? Hilarious back and forths between Lennon and Rundgren is all I remember?

The problem with this poll is that however much I might want to give a leg up to lovely songs like Fixing a Hole, Day in the Life just dominates. Firstly, its a beautiful acoustic song - that Amsus9 really cuts through, with perfect Ringo fills. Lyrically it's inspired; newspaper cuttings, incidents from Lennon's life that year, his sly black humour, the sadness. The McCartney interlude plays with a sense of narrative, but then there's a dreamy bridge back into the surreal news from Blackburn, Lancs, and a sound that could fill the Albert Hall.

White Album and Abbey Road probably contain more signature production flourishes than this album, it's true ("A Day In The Life" being the most obvious besides "Lucy"). but i think Sgt. Pepper's is still pretty justifiably the single LP that introduced the most things to their catalog that now encompass what we think of as Beatles music, even if a lot of those were just shades of retro/pastiche from non-rock styles.

If you compare it to other psychedelic music, I don't see any reason to slight it because there's more music hall in it. If anything, it just feels like deeper roots to me.

what a bad fur day

lol :)

can't believe i dropped that post, got in the car and drove 250km and a fight didnt break out in the meantime, i'm losing it

The zombies, Os mutantes and the beach boys did this album better!
Objectively, a day in the life is the best one, but I'm voting Rita again because it's a personal favorite since I first heard it.
― Moka, Sunday, October 13, 2013 11:29 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Eh...I don't feel any of these albums are really doing the same thing

Listening to the Rutles right now though... This album rules they wrote great Beatles songs

xp deems: i was going to respond to that post but didn't. i don't really understand why discussing how "innovative" a band is or whatever is "cuntish". it's just something to talk about. i do, however, feel that there is an annoying canon-making tick lots of people have wherein they feel the need to establish a band's "importance" to justify their appreciation for the band. so instead of "the dancehall elements of sgt. pepper's really work and were a surprising change from their earlier stuff" it's "before this, music was NEVER so eclectic, so daring". the latter type of statement is hardly ever true but it litters even reviews of non-canonical albums. ppl always trying to establish how something is new and different before they even get to the point of whether it is worth listening to or not.

i think you meant "music hall" elements Treesh unless i am gonna have to reappraise the fucking Beatles' contribution to Jamaican music

I'd give at least 1 listen to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Dub Band.

no, i was talking about the bass drop in "fixing a hole"

wait, now i confused dancehall and dubstep. i'm all messed up. sorry.

old british people, I'm really unfamiliar with music hall. Are there a music hall antecedents to Lovely Rita?

not really? but musically i can sort of imagine a George Formbified version of the song. lyrically there are probably antecedents - improbable romance with prosaic figure of authority. but as a whole it doesn't sound v. music hall-y to me.

the "music hall" in Pepper is more or less the same as vaudeville stateside, except with different accents

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eHpfWaSoxY

this is a 70s BBC pastiche/recreation of music hall, for reference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh_aG5MzPVM

gonna step in a defend treeship on the basis that the irish equivalent, no doubt carried over the atlantic genetically or w/e by his forebears, would have been dancehalls.

oh i wasn't having a pop, i was clarifying the usage in England cos i figured he'd mixed it up

i claim a prixe, first poster on ilm in years who's not having pop

what does "prixe" mean in ireland the uk, respecively

the same thing respecively does

so many words for dancehall

Wake the town and tell the people that she's leaving home.

Yeah, separating it from strict music hall classification might mean that it's actually more interesting - that there's a distinctly Old World feel to things but you don't always know how that's created.

I think Os Mutantes do have Sgt. Pepper-era Beatles elements at times. This track from Hungary is just incredible. Sitar, flute, glockenspiel, strings, harp, but calling it twee would just be an unnecessary insult. At its best, this music aspired to something pretty lofty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUB9EL209H4

I'd give at least 1 listen to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Dub Band.

http://www.amazon.com/Easy-Stars-Lonely-Hearts-Band/dp/B001SZ28VK

I'm thinking "Fixing a Hole" cuz they gave it to George Burns in that awful movie.

I love that version!

I'm "working my way" through that movie. I'm up to the bandstand scene where Frampton and the BGs are call/responsing with a little help from my friends.

So far? A bit saccharine...

The arrangements of the songs are too close to the originals... but that's George Martin for you. Racking my brains trying to think of the comedy show where there was a recurring sketch of George Martin where he began every sentence with, "Of course when I worked with the Beatles..." or something similar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIA_NVFnXZ8

Ah, nice one!

The arrangements of the songs are too close to the originals... but that's George Martin for you.

There was a piece about the soundtrack in Mojo a few years back. Martin and Emerick were generally nonplussed by the performances until Earth, Wind & Fire came in to do "Got To Get You Into My Life." All of a sudden, George and Geoff perked up, looked at each other and said, "This is what all of the artists should have been doing: putting their own spin on the Beatles' material!" I believe they've both gone on record saying that was by far their favorite track on the album.

I did watch "All this and World War II" last week, and I do have to say those 'versions' were pretty much fine. In context, anyway..

Getting Better would have been my choice, had it been available. I just listened on youtube to the stereo remaster vs the famous mono remaster. Can't say I can tell much difference except my for my usual complaint against mono - it sounds a little cramped and therefore flat compared to stereo where you have a sense of the sounds being spatially separated. why is the latter the format regarded as artificial? The bloody musicians and their instruments are spatially separated and arranged about a room, with the sounds coming from different directions forming a whole not because they're all compressed together but because the distinct and divided musicians create that 'whole' by playing in such a way as to perfectly mesh & meld their sounds - from their different spots - together into a 'whole' in the sense that everything fits together harmonically, melodically, vocally vs instrumentally, in other words, musically, and good stereo reflects that, and mono denies the reality of the initial separation that goes into the creation of a crafted whole.

Firsr 10 seconds of "Sgt. Pepper's..."

As stereo Beatles mixes go, "Getting Better" isn't bad. But it's distracting having Ringo's kit panned hard left with his overdubs center.

I don't think anyone has said the stereo mixes are "artificial" (or the mono "natural"), but the Beatles were actually present for (and have all gone on record as preferring) the mono mix. Beatles stereo mixes were a rushed afterthought; sometimes they were done well, sometimes not.

xp

Yeah, I was actually arguing that mono is, in a way, more artificial - basically for the same reasons you're talking about. It's an artificiality that I like, though. Sometimes I just listen to one channel of the stereo when I'm playing something that's in mono. Why listen to it coming out of two speakers spaced at some distance apart at the same?

Stereo artificiality I like less, I think, because you're tricking your brain. You hear something panned center coming out of the space between the two speakers, but that's not actually where it's coming from.

*at the same time*

this album is so sweet-spirited and generous and wonderful. love every song on it (except "lucy in the sky" which is kinda ruined for me by the lame chorus) and always will. but my favorite is probably "good morning good morning" just because it blew my mind when i was 17 and read revolution in the head and learned that "it's time for tea and meet the wife" meant that it was time to go home and drink tea and watch "a popular british middlebrow sitcom of the day."

even as a teenager i knew that ppl who dismissed the "wussy" side of the beatles (i.e., half of this album -- "when i'm sixty-four," "she's leaving home," "lovely rita," etc etc) were missing a HUGE part of what made them great. i love that they played songs your grandma would like and then played stuff like "strawberry fields forever" and "she said she said."

i mean the beatles obviously did better albums than this, but that's like saying the monorail episode is better than 'lisa needs braces'.

lol, a while back i defended revolver against someone who said it was inconsistent by saying it was "the last exit to springfield of beatles albums."

Didn't Lennon hit a waitress during the "lost weekend" or whatever his L.A. year is called? Hilarious back and forths between Lennon and Rundgren is all I remember?

IIRC the waitress actually hit him in this story, after he drunkenly insulted her or something. cynthia said that he hit her once when they were both teens, though never again after that. though lennon talked a lot in interviews about being abusive et al this is the only specific incident i've ever heard about.

i thought "plush" was on this one

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Wow! Wasn't expecting such a big margin for the winner!

well now 9 votes for When I'm Sixty Four is a surprise! macca's audible smile when Lennon does a wee vamp on the guitar is probs my fave bit on the whole damn album.

Big thrift-store jaunt today in and around my old hometown (pre-Toronto). Possibly the most pointless thing I bought was this on CD, an album I never needed to hear again by the time I left high school. But it was brand new, came with a booklet and supposedly a mini-documentary you can access on a desktop, and it was $2. Pointless plus cheap, I cannot resist.

Anyway, listened to it on the way home and took notice of the line "Fun is the one thing that money can't buy" in "She's Leaving Home." They'd already said that money can't buy them love, though, not five years earlier. They really need to get their story straight.

Barely 3 years!

They had obviously bought a lot of love, but no fun, during that period.

XP Just pointing it kut because it's so mind-blowing that there were only three full calendar years between the beginning of Beatlemania in America and the beginning of the Pepper sessions.

A lot of people--Warhol and Godard come to mind--were working at a frantic pace during that window.

if we posit that love is fun, then they're not being inconsistent.

Those 2009 remastered CDs (sounds like that's the one you got) sound nice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agPalf_-D0o

They had obviously bought a lot of love, but no fun, during that period.
― Halfway there but for you

if we posit that love is fun, then they're not being inconsistent.
― Thus Sang Freud

Further complicating the matter, this thing that can't buy fun and/or love--as two separate entitites or, if they're one and the same, simultaneously--they're also on record as wanting lots and lots and lots of it. And whatever it can't buy, you can keep those things for the birds and bees because they can't use them.