By Scott Mervis, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It was 40 years ago today.

Ah, you knew the story would start like that. What other way to begin?

June 1, 1967. That's when "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" hit the streets in the United Kingdom, a day later in the United States, and hit the consciousness of the pop world like a dose of something strange in the Kool-Aid.

It was the eighth (British) Beatles album but also the beginning of a new chapter for the band and for a popular culture entering into the Summer of Love and a period of heightened experimentation with music, fashion, sex, drugs, politics and flowers.

	"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album cover, 1967 Click photo for larger image. Related coverage The greatest album of all time (says Rolling Stone magazine)
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Forty years later -- having survived a lot of rock history and that god-awful movie with the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton -- "Sgt. Pepper" still thrills and fascinates pop fans from the folks who bought it the day it came out to echo-boomers still discovering the Beatles.

Although a sacred cow in the pop canon, it's also a highly debated record, partly because of its lofty critical perch.

In 2003, it topped the Rolling Stone magazine list of the Greatest Albums of All Time. Next time you're in a room of Beatles fans, mention that and wait for the arguments to ensue, from people saying, "I'll take 'Revolver' " to "Gimme the 'White Album' " to, just heard in my office last week, "It might be their worst album, post-'Rubber Soul.' "

Whether or not it's the pinnacle of the Beatles career, there are a number of reasons for the "Sgt. Pepper" mystique beyond just the music.

It was a transitional album for the world's most popular band, which, in the aftermath of John Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" flap, was fed up with Beatlemania and finished with live performances.

It carried at least the illusion of it being a "concept album."

The stunning cover art of the Beatles in colorful military garb surrounded by their celebrity heroes was like the band bursting from Kansas into Oz. It was the most ambitious cover ever made and still might be. Even the gatefold sleeve and printed lyrics were new to pop fans.

The hype was unlike anything before it. You had the "Paul Is Dead" rumors and all the buzz that the Beatles had been holed up at Abbey Road for five months, a total of 700 studio hours, making nothing less than the greatest record of all time.

"I do remember it was a big event, and that's what everyone was talking about," says Jim Henke, chief curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, who was 13 at the time. "Very few other albums I can think of that had that kind of impact."

The 'Pepper' mill

Sean McDowell, the longtime disc jockey at WDVE, was a big Beatles fan at the tender age of 11. He had a morning paper route and recalls first hearing it at his friend's house one day before the crack of dawn. He was thrilled by the fact he could read along with the lyrics and, of course, blown away by the music.

"When this came out," he says, "you could tell that the Beatles, their minds were just so expanded by this time, from whatever they were into, probably a lot of LSD. That really translated into some brilliance."

"That fall it was impossible to walk down the hall of my dormitory and not hear 'Sgt. Pepper' playing in at least one room," says Grateful Dead historian Dennis McNally.

"Sgt. Pepper" was originally intended to be a memoir of their days in Liverpool, but the first two songs written for it, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane," were plucked away as singles by the label earlier that year and didn't appear on the record.

On a plane from Kenya to London in November of '66, Paul McCartney devised the concept of a fictional band -- originally he wanted to call it "Dr. Pepper," but that was taken -- playing a live concert. This was another way for the Beatles to break away from the past.

"'Pepper' was probably the one Beatle album I can say was my idea," McCartney told Rolling Stone. "It was my idea to say to the guys, 'Hey, how about disguising ourselves and getting an alter ego, because we're the Beatles and we're fed up. Every time you approach a song, John, you gotta sing it like John would. Every time I approach a ballad, it's gotta be like Paul would. Why don't we just make up some incredible alter egos and think, 'Now how would he sing it? How would he approach this track?' And it freed us. It was a very liberating thing to do."

The only songs that really followed the "Sgt. Pepper" theme were the title track, "With a Little Help From My Friends," and the reprise. Otherwise, they were Beatles songs not far removed from "Revolver" or "Rubber Soul," the inspiration for Brian Wilson's "Pet Sounds," which then inspired "Sgt. Pepper." But they were stitched together by instrumental segues that made it feel like one piece.

"There's a theatrical frame of 'this is the show' and 'here are the songs,' but it's not really a musical theater piece and it's not a collection of songs -- it's something in between that lets you free-associate," says Alan Bern, a member of the band Brave Old World who was drawn away from his classical training in part by the Beatles.

"For me it's a problem that pop music chops up musical experiences into three or four minutes. Great musical experiences require longer than that. There are no three-minute symphonies. 'Sgt. Pepper' presented an epic of music. It was pop music's answer to the symphony."

Much of the credit for that goes to the man behind the scenes, producer George Martin, who oversaw this fusion of psychedelic pop with strings, harpsichord and sitar, plus sound effects from applause to clucking hens to galloping horses. And he did it all on four tracks.

"A 4-track tape machine!" says McDowell. "All those orchestras and singers, all the instrumentation. That's just so stunning. I can't imagine being given that assignment."

Psychedelic explosion

"People would take it home and listen to it with the lights off and headphones on -- that's when you really discovered it," says Lee Abrams, senior vice president for XM Satellite Radio. "It ushered in the whole FM era, because while FM had been around since the '40s there was no real reason to listen to it. You had everything you wanted on AM. Now, you realized, 'Wow, records like this are unlistenable on AM.' "

McCartney, whose new album "Memory Almost Full" goes on sale Tuesday, had the original idea and contributed his typically wide-eyed pop songs like "With a Little Help From My Friends" (sung by Ringo Starr), "Lovely Rita" and "When I'm Sixty-Four." Harrison and Lennon made it trippy. George added the Eastern-inflected "Within You Without You," performed with no other Beatles on board. John brought the psychedelic gem "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," inspired by son Julian's drawing but mistaken for LSD code; "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" which he cribbed from an antique circus poster; and the mind-blowing suite "A Day in the Life."

Upon its release, the Times of London called it nothing less than "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization.''

But it's not as if "Sgt. Pepper" dropped from another planet. Dylan had expanded the boundaries, not to mention the length, of the pop song a few years earlier. In '66, Brian Wilson had broken sonic ground with "Pet Sounds" and Frank Zappa had released the orchestrated concept album "Freak Out." In England, the Stones were still exploring the blues, but Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd were sharing Abbey Road with the Beatles, recording their cosmic debut, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," which would land later in '67. Closer to home, in the psychedelic headquarters of Haight-Ashbury, the Jefferson Airplane had just dropped "Surrealistic Pillow."

What the Beatles managed to do was soak it all in and galvanize all these elements.

"It's absolutely psychedelic, but it's a different psychedelic than San Francisco," McNally says of "Sgt. Pepper." "There are no lead guitars, no misty jams. It's the Beatles. The best music hall music ever written.

"Where it meets is at Monterey Pop, the same month. The whole festival was about the confluence of San Francisco and London, and everybody was tripping and everybody was holding flowers in their hands. The zeitgeist was at Monterey and part of that zeitgeist was 'Sgt. Pepper.' It was almost like they anticipated what was going on at Monterey."

'A cosmic event'

Down in Los Angeles, The Doors released their startling debut album in January '67, and had a No. 1 hit that June with "Light My Fire."

Reached at home this week, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek was puzzled to be getting a call about "Sgt. Pepper." "Listen, you're asking the wrong guy," he said. "I listened to Thelonious Monk. Can you ask me about Thelonious Monk? 'Sgt. Pepper,' what the [hell]? 'Sgt. Pepper' didn't mean hardly anything to me.

"Look," he said, softening his tone, "it was very pleasant. I think 'Sgt. Pepper' was more in the vein of English music hall, as opposed to the Doors, which made jazz-rock, improvisatory rock 'n' roll. It had no effect on my life, other than it was a well-made record. People worshipped the Beatles. Anything the Beatles did was above and beyond any brilliance planet Earth could come up with. Virtually a cosmic event."

The success of "Sgt. Pepper" -- with no hit singles, but 15 weeks at No. 1 on the U.S. charts (27 in England) and a Grammy award -- contributed to the concept of the album as something other than a collection of singles.

"I think it ushered in a whole generation of experimentation," Abrams says. "A lot of bands from that era went back to the drawing board and said, 'Well, we have to rethink ourselves.' Sgt. Pepper set a new standard.' "

For better or worse, a flurry of concept albums followed, from the Stones' "Their Satanic Majesties Request" to the Who's "Tommy" to the Kinks' "Arthur" on up to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon."

Forty years later, in an age when the album is under siege from digital technology, the album and the concept album are very much alive, and a broad range of musicians -- from Belle and Sebastian to Fountains of Wayne to Sufjan Stevens to My Chemical Romance -- are still finding inspiration in the Beatles and "Sgt. Pepper."

"Most groups, whether or not they care to admit it, have been influenced by the Beatles or by someone who was influenced by the Beatles," says Jesse Ley, the 25-year-old keyboardist for local power-pop band Black Tie Revue.

As for "Sgt. Pepper," he says, "It's a timeless record. It's not my favorite Beatles record, but it altered the musical landscape in a way that no band has done since or probably ever will. The fact that we're talking about 'Wow, it's been 40 years' leads me to believe that we're going to be saying, 'Wow, I can't believe it's a hundred years,' when there's nothing but space robots and computers making songs."