Sgt. Pepper Taught the Band to Play
It was in fact, ten and a half years ago that John, Paul, George and Ringo taught the band to play. In June 1967 they released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to enthralled critical reaction and huge popular success. In the United States, more than 1.5 million copies were sold in two weeks; in Britain, at least a few copies of the album were sold before its release. One of them was purchased by Peter Frampton, a seventeen-year-old guitarist in a band called the Herd that was only a few months away from its own stardom.
“There’s a place in England called Petticoat Lane,” Frampton now recalls, “and…they always used to get the heavy albums like a week before. So I went down there and got it, and I went back home. I didn’t come out of my room for about three days. I just played it nonstop…Sgt. Pepper’s was the best thing I’d ever heard in my life.”
Around the same time, Robert Stigwood, managing director of the Beatles management company, returned to his London flat to meet the Bee Gees, a teenage group he managed who had recently had their first hit (“New York Mining Disaster 1941”) in Britain and the U.S.
“He brought home Sgt. Pepper, which had just been delivered to the office,” recalls Bee Gee Barry Gibb. “Nobody could believe it….It frightened us to death.”
“It was incredible,” says Bee Gee Maurice Gibb. “He just put it on his stereo and we went, ‘Jesus!”‘
On an overcast southern California morning in the autumn of 1977, Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees are riding back and forth on top of a converted yellow school bus along a short street on the back lot of a Culver City studio. They are dressed in pink, purple, orange and yellow uniforms, the uniforms of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The album is becoming a movie, and Frampton and the Bee Gees are becoming the band.
“What we’re doing,” says Robert Stigwood, the movie’s producer, “is enhancing and drawing a dream around those songs.” It is a $12-million dream, with thirty songs from Sgt. Pepper and three other Beatles albums adapted into a non-Beatle fable with a non-Beatle cast. Frampton stars as Billy Shears, the leader of the band. The Bee Gees costar, and George Burns appears as Mr. Kite, mayor of Heartland, the band’s midwestern hometown.
It is into Heartland that the yellow bus now rolls, and the place is one hell of a sight. In the band’s absence, the town has been taken over by Mean Mr. Mustard, the villain of the piece, whose character is derived from a sixty-six-second song on Abbey Road (“Mean Mr. Mustard…sleeps in a hole in the road, saving up to buy some clothes, keeps a ten-bob note up his nose…”). The band has returned to hold a benefit concert (“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”) to save the place. But it looks like they have arrived too late.
Two days ago the Heartland set, newly constructed at a cost of almost $1 million, was a wholesome fantasy of gingerbread Americana. But empty liquor bottles now litter the fresh green sod on the town square. The cute little toy store has been converted to a gun store. The charming old-age home is now an adult motel (“Rooms by the Hour”). The antique bandstand has been surmounted by a twenty-five-foot styrofoam hamburger dripping with yellow vinyl mustard. And the 250 extras who make up Heartland’s population, once dressed in modest calico and neat khaki, have become hot-pants hookers, zoot-suited pimps, leering johns, disheveled winos. As the bus backs into place for another take, loudspeakers broadcast the opening strains of “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” the bus moves forward and Frampton and the Bee Gees, perched on top, smile and wave to the scummy extras and move their mouths to their prerecorded version of the song. In front of the bus cheerleaders march, along with tumblers, clowns, ballerinas, a guy on a pogo stick and two acrobats on skateboards. By the time the band reaches the line, “There will be a show tonight on trampoline,” the loud and happy music has begun to capture the attention of the lowlifes ranged along the sidewalk. In moments they are converted. They start clapping and swaying in time to the music. Whores, still embracing their clients, rush out onto balconies to see the show. A ratty-looking wino grabs the arm of a baton twirler and they start to dance. Two hookers link arms with the drum major leading the parade. It is a grand and colorful spectacle of good triumphing over evil.
Sgt. Pepper Taught the Band to Play, Page 1 of 6