On March 30, 1967 before a late-night recording session
at Abbey Road, The Beatles visited Michael Cooper's London photographic studio
at Nos. 1-11 Flood Street in Chelsea where the cover photographs for Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band were taken. The Beatles arrived in the late
afternoon. The soon-to-be-famous collage, designed by Peter Blake and wife, Jann Haworth, had been assembled in the studio during the preceding eight days.
A contract dated April 1967 described the various fees for the session,
including an erroneous album title that omits "Club": "Hire and use of Michael
Cooper Studios for 8 days including personnel (3 fulltime assistants) plus
overtime and expenses to staff for additional work during Easter weekend:
£625.0.0 [at the time, about $1100]; 54 copy negatives @ 10/6 each: 28.7.0; 54
20"x16" prints @ 17/6 each: 47.5.0; Photography fee (SGT. PEPPER'S
LONELY HEARTS BAND set and centre spread, closeup): 250.0.0; Art direction fee
(Layout and co-ordination of sleeve and inserts, cutouts, song sheets,
production of mechanical rough and artwork by Al Vandenberg for Michael Cooper
Studios, including co-ordination and supervision of all aspects of design and
artwork from Peter Blake and Simon & Marekka; supervision and co-ordination
of printing, retouching and blockmaking): £350.0.0; Special fee to Peter Blake:
£200.0.0" (If you can imagine Peter Blake’s fee of less than $500!)
In addition to the front cover shot, The Beatles also
posed for the images used on the back cover and the gatefold sleeve. McCartney's initial idea was to stage a presentation
featuring a mayor and a corporation, with a floral clock and a selection of
photographs of famous faces on the wall behind The Beatles. Peter Blake asked
The Beatles to list their choices for the photographs. The original list,
complete with misspellings, was given to Fraser and Blake: Yoga's; Marquis de
Sade; Hitler; Neitch; Lenny Bruce; Lord Buckley; Alistair Crowley; Dylan
Thomas; James Joyce; Oscar Wilde; William Burroughs; Robert Peel; Stockhausen;
Auldus Huxley; H.G. Wells; Izis Bon; Einstein; Carl Jung; Beardsley; Alfred
Jarry; Tom Mix; Johnny Weissmuller; Magritte; Tyrone Power; Carl Marx; Richard
Crompton; Tommy Hanley; Albert Stubbins; Fred Astaire.
Jesus and Hitler were among John Lennon's choices, but
they were left off the final list. Gandhi, meanwhile, was disallowed by Sir
Joseph Lockwood, the head of EMI, after he told them they would have problems
having the sleeve printed in India.
By 7pm, The Beatles were at Abbey Road where they'd
record until 3am. On March 29, the recording sessions began for "With a Little
Help From My Friends." On April 1 (early in the morning March 31), the sessions
were devoted to the "Sgt. Pepper" reprise. It’s likely, therefore, that on the
night of the photo shoot, The Beatles were finishing up with "Friends," Ringo’s
vocal (as Billy Shears) already completed.
On Sgt. Pepper, as
on Revolver, Lennon and Harrison played their
Epiphone Casinos, Sonic Blue Fender Strats and Gibson J-160E acoustic guitars;
Harrison also played his Gibson SG. McCartney’s Rickenbacker 4001S was his main
bass, and he used his Casino and Fender Esquire for rhythm and lead work, and yet, despite the similarities in studio gear
and equipment, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper sound distinctly different. Whereas Revolver sounds like a rock 'n' roll album,
with its crunchy guitars and warm, fuzzy ambiance, Sgt.
Pepper is decidedly
refined, lacking the low-midrange tones that gave Revolver much of its propulsive power. Studio engineer Geoff Emerick puts the difference down to the choice of studio. "Revolver was done in Number Three studio, which
is a smaller room. It was a dirtier-sounding studio acoustically. Sgt.
Pepper’s was recorded
in Abbey Road’s fabled Studio Two, a large room well suited to handling the
volume and frequencies produced by pop and rock bands. Number Two is a
brighter studio, and you can get cleaner tones." And yet it wasn’t
really a "choice;" The Pink Floyd Sound was in Studio Three recording The Piper
at the Gates of Dawn.
The Byrd’s cover of "My Back Pages" peaked at No. 30 the week
The Beatles recorded "With a Little Help From My Friends," and for the past year
or so, David Crosby and the Byrds were running neck and neck with the Beatles
and the Rolling Stones commercially. Earlier that month, the Fab Four did
something that blew him away: "I was in London, at that time, when they were
making Sgt. Pepper. When I got
there, they didn’t really talk to me that much. They just dragged me out to the
middle of the studio and sat me down on a stool. In Abbey Road, they had these
speakers that looked like coffins. They were about eight feet tall, and they
were on rollers. They rolled two of these things up, one on either side of me,
and then they all left the room."
Crosby, had become one of the first outsiders to
experience the episodic wonder of "A Day in the Life." "They had just finished
it. By the time they got to that last piano chord, I was just a dish rag. I was
completely, absolutely stumped. I didn't know you could do that."
