I do not know how far into the future were the Beatles thinking when they put together the cover of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. But just as those four boys were able to create recordings that would change popular music forever, they were also able to give the LP packaging that would not only win the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover in 1968 but which would turn out to be an iconic symbol of an era just like the album.
Created by the British pop artist Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth, the cover featured the Beatles in their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band uniforms carrying a French horn, trumpet, cor anglais and a flute on the foreground of a collage made up of pictures of 58 people. It was an eclectic mix. Movie stars with real-life heroes. Artists and scientists. Writers and politicians. Dolls and statues. The only thing they had in common was that they were all personally chosen by the Beatles (made up of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison) to be on the cover.
It took the princely, then truly staggering budget of three thousand British pounds to create the picture and personal letters from the Beatles to some of the subjects requesting permission to use their images. I do not know if anybody said no. Whoever they were probably regretted their decision to the grave. As for those who said yes, Blake took their pictures, cut them out in an outline, pasted them on cardboard and then arranged them on the collage. Just like that and they were on the road to immortality.
It would be great to find the original completed picture still intact but I do not think that is possible anymore. Owners of the pictures have over these past 50 years, been selling them to collectors. In fact, one just turned up on the web this week. The cutout picture of child actor Bobby Breen who is between Harrison and actress Marlene Dietrich is one of the items up for grabs in a Beatles memorabilia auction. Bidding for the picture, which is pasted on cardboard and signed by artist Blake, is expected to start at $50,000!
Just wondering. Do you think there is anybody around who can buy all of those pictures from their now various owners with the aim of one day recreating the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover again? If such a man exists, I hope he hurries up and get this very special job done.
Original and replica costumes used by The Beatles on the Sgt. Pepper cover—AFP photos
Anyway, I hope you have the album nearby as you read this. Here is something for those of you who have ever looked at that cover and wondered who those people are with the Beatles. This is a list of the personages and other items included from left to right, top to bottom. I was glad that thanks to the Internet, I was finally able to identify everybody after 50 years. I hope you are, too.
Sri Yukteswar Giri, Aleister Crowley, Mae West, Lenny Bruce, Karlheinz Stockhausen, WC Fields, Carl Jung, Edgar Allan Poe, Fred Astaire, Richard Merkin, a Varga Girl, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Simon Rodia, Bob Dylan, Aubrey Beardsley, Robert Peel, Aldous Huxley, Dylan Thomas, Terry Southern, Dion Di Mucci, Tony Curtis, Wallace Berman.
Tommy Handley, Marilyn Monroe, William S. Burroughs, Sri Mahavatara Babaji, Stan Laurel, Richard Lindner, Oliver Hardy, Karl Marx, HG Wells, Paramahanser Yoganarda, a hairdresser’s dummy, Stuart Sutcliffe, another hairdresser’s dummy, Max Miller, a Petty Girl, Marlon Brando, Tom Mix, Oscar Wilde, Tyrone Power, Larry Bell, Dr. David Livingstone, Johnny Weismuller, Stephen Crane, Issy Brown, George Bernard Shaw.
H.C. Westermann, Albert Stubbins, Sri Lahiri Mahasaya, Lewis Carroll, T.E. Lawrence, Sonny Liston, one more Petty Girl, wax figures of George Harrison, John Lennon, Shirley Temple, wax figures of Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, Albert Einstein, The Beatles in their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band uniforms, Bobby Breen, Marlene Dietrich, a Legionnaire from the Antedeluvian Order of Buffaloes charity organization.
Diana Dors, Shirley Temple again, a stuffed grandmother doll, and another Shirley Temple doll, a Mexican tree of life candlestick, a TV set, two stone figures from Harrison’s home, a bust from Lennon’s garden, Lennon’s swimming trophy, a Lakshmi doll, a Sgt. Pepper drumskin, a hookah, a velvet snake, a Fukusuke statue doll for good luck, a stone Snow White, a garden gnome and a tuba.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the eighth album by The Beatles. It was released on June 1, 1967. The songs included are Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, With A Little Help From My Friends, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Getting Better, Fixing A Hole, She’s Leaving Home, Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite, Within You Without You, When I’m Sixty Four, Lovely Rita, Good Morning Good Morning, Sgt. Pepper Reprise and A Day In The Life.
P.S. Want another Sgt. Pepper dream? Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane were originally recorded for this album but were released earlier as two sides of a single. I want to see these songs in the album as I am curious where they will go in the sequence. So, Sir Paul and Ringo, please hurry up on this.