Back in the spring of 1975, I bought a certain iconic album. Boomers will have already ‘got’ what it is just by reading the title of this blog post. Those of younger generations, though not all, may need to be informed that it was The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, a game-changer of a record if ever there was one. Well, in my case, it was not as a vinyl record but another medium, the music cassette. In my parent’s house, there hadn’t been a record player for years since the old ‘gramophone set' - the kind that played 33, 45 and old 78 RPM 'Shellac' records - had failed either electrically or mechanically, I can’t remember which. My parents got rid of it in about 1970 when they bought a new three-piece suite and it had to go to make room for the furniture.
To cut a long story short, an aunt gave me a decent amount of money for Christmas 1974 and I manged to persuade my mother, who was dead against it originally, that I should buy a portable cassette recorder so that I could listen to music in my bedroom, like most fourteen-year olds would do. There were all kinds of conditions set down, particularly about the volume it could be played at and finally she relented. My first purchase was Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. Later, in the spring of 1975, there would be Sgt. Pepper's to add to a growing collection.
One day in the spring of '75 I was listening to this album for the first time and not knowing what to make of it. Although it had been recorded almost eight years previously to my having discovered it, it was to me a revelation of alternate sounds - a veritable reel-to-reel cacophony and the songs - wow! The writing was phenomenal and so was the production. the content wide and varied lyrics as much as the musical styles presented. There was so much detail in every bar of music. I listened night after night with a single earphone connected to the cassette recorder. We all know now about how the album was made as like you, I learned all about it years later. It still staggers me to this day that, particularly how Lennon, McCartney and Beatles producer George Martin could work out such arrangements, spinning crazy ideas off each other, completely original and quite different to what the Beatles had done before, although there was a hint if not a taste of what was to come on their previous Revolver album from 1966, IMHO the album with their best songs. Revolver paved the way for Sgt. Pepper’s which broke new ground and set The Beatles off in so many different directions, them having free reign to experiment as a, now, studio-only band and in some ways setting the scene for another different but what would become the highly successful, experimental studio band, Pink Floyd, to follow.
Although there was nothing like Sgt. Pepper's and never really has been, multiple listens may make you think that there is one song which doesn’t quite belong on the album, and for me that’s McCartney’s “When I’m Sixty-Four”. It's not my favourite from the album although it's probably the track with the most earworm potential. It's also possibly the most unpopular song on the album; when it first came out, it was the one all the old folks who didn't like the rest of the album liked. No surprise there with it’s 1930’s pastiche music hall songwriting influences and its masterfully melodic retro vocal presentation by McCartney himself. It was never a single but it is the one song from that album that casual listeners, not just fans, would know the words and tune to more than any of the others.
When I first heard that song, listening to the Sgt. Pepper's album on my cassette recorder back in the spring of 1975, I thought, I’ve heard this song before, but I didn’t know from where. I realise now that as it was so heavily covered by orchestras and TV studio bands on Saturday night shows in the early 1970’s, I’d probably heard it occasionally on TV never thinking it was a Beatles song. I remember thinking to my teenage self, sixty-four is really old. I wonder if I’ll still be listening to this album in fifty years time, when I’m sixty-four?
Well, I was to listen to that album literally hundreds of times over the next fifty years.
And indeed I still am. As I write these words just a day short of my 64th birthday, I’ve always known, since that spring of 1975, that if I was to survive another fifty years on this mortal coil, the first song I was going to hear on my birthday would be that song.
I still have the music cassette of Sgt. Pepper's I purchased in 1975 somewhere. I also have two vinyl copies complete with the cardboard cut outs and a CD of the same album. Long gone are the days of putting on a record and keeping the volume low so as not to disturb the other members of your household, especially your mother! These days, as like many people I’ve got the album on my iPhone (who could have imagined that back in 1975?) and I’ll select the song, put on my Bose wireless noise-cancelling cans and celebrate my 64th birthday with that song being the first music I hear on the day and that's going to be my priority. Then I'll listen to the rest of the album. Again.
Many of my musical friends and acquaintances of a similar vintage realise how fortunate we are to have been born in such strong musical, socially-changing and technologically-advancing times. Without The Beatles, and the Sgt. Pepper's album in particular, I may never have been a songwriter and a producer. And I’ll be thinking of McCartney, eighteen years my senior, now in his 83rd year and how he wrote that song as a teenager, years before The Beatles became famous never knowing what he’d do with it, never knowing at the time he was creating an anthem. Never knowing at the time that he would go on to create many more anthems. And I'm grateful that he did, now I'm sixty-four. You see, quality was built to last.
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