By Melinda Newman

"It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.” With that simple opening declaration, The Beatles changed pop culture.

The Fab Four’s masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which ranks No. 1 on the top 500 albums of all time according to Rolling Stone, helped kick off the Summer of Love, a counterculture revolution that challenged the status quo in 1967 and has had a lasting impact over the ensuing four decades.

Released in June 1967, nothing could prepare listeners for the 13 tracks that make up the album. Simply put, says Beatles historian Bruce Spizer, Sgt. Pepper “sounds different from anything that had ever been recorded before by The Beatles or anyone else…After Sgt. Pepper, music would never be the same.”

The Beatles were at a crossroads when they stepped into London’s Abbey Road Studios in late 1966 with longtime producer George Martin to record Sgt. Pepper. After a few years of relentless Beatlemania, the quartet felt a need to retreat and declared they would never tour again.

The album was recorded over a 129-day period, an unheard-of length of time in those days. To keep fans sated during the long break between albums, two songs recorded for the album, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” were instead issued as a double-sided single in February 1967 and not included on Sgt. Pepper.

Those tunes, plus previous Beatles’ album Revolver, showed that the group had moved beyond the simplicity of “She Loves You;” Sgt. Pepper reflected the world’s influence on the group at that time. “The ideas were coming fast and thick,” McCartney told Rolling Stone. “All sorts of new ideas – artistic, political and musical…We had a lot of friends in the music world and in the art world, and there was a big cross-fertilization…It was a great time for experimentation, and it all found its way into our music and our lifestyle.”

Although not universally lauded – The New York Times gave the album a bad review – the general reception was positive. McCartney says such a reception was all the more gratifying given those who said The Beatles were over. “It was particularly nice because some people had thought that we’d dried up, and here we were at a peak…I feel very privileged to have lived through it, number one, and number two, to have been at the epicenter of it.”