DEPENDING on whom you ask, the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band changed the world. "I bought Sgt Pepper four times and it got pinched four times," says Townsville musician and cultural historian Brian Boulton. "We lived in a party house in Manly and there were parties at all hours.
The album showed music snobs that rock music could indeed be art.
Although fans have long debated which was the best Beatles song, the favourite is usually Sgt Pepper's final track, A Day in the Life. Starting with a haunting melody and peculiar lyrics, and climaxing in a barrage of orchestral instruments, it is unlike anything anyone had previously recorded.
Five months later, the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine hit the stands with John Lennon on the cover.
It was preaching - as it continues to do 40 years on - the gospel and art of rock. It was perfect timing, and not just because of Sgt Pepper.
1967 was rock music's greatest, most significant year and the Beatles were the era's greatest band, but their so-called masterpiece wasn't as much fun as Abbey Road or as great a collection of songs as Revolver.
Nonetheless, 1967 would have been a vintage year for the Beatles even without Sgt Pepper.
They began the year with history's best double A-sided single: Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane. They followed that with All You Need is Love and Hello Goodbye (with its bizarre and beautiful flip side, I Am the Walrus).
Had 1967 been their only year, the Beatles would still have been hailed as one of the best bands of the 1960s.
They, in turn, were influenced by various newcomers. Lennon and Paul McCartney would visit London's strobe-lit UFO Club, where they could watch up-and-coming bands such as Pink Floyd, Tomorrow and Soft Machine.
On January 29, as part of a series at the Saville Theatre arranged by manager Brian Epstein, they witnessed a new threesome from Epstein's private box: the Jimi Hendrix Experience, named after the band's lead guitarist. Hendrix was humble and soft-spoken, but his performances involved wild experimentation, long guitar solos and extreme volume. What this man does with a guitar could get him arrested for assault, said the rock magazine New Musical Express.
Also watching, white with shock, were the guitar heroes of 1966: Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. Hendrix had just raised the bar.
That same week in Alabama, Aretha Franklin was recording her first song for Atlantic Records.
On Valentine's Day she recorded Respect, a plea written (and recorded) by Otis Redding. It took Franklin's rousing, passionate voice to turn it into an anthem for the women's and civil rights movements, quickly earning the 24-year-old the title of Queen of Soul. Redding would describe Respect as a song a girl took away from me .
Undeterred, he moved into the limelight with his own cover version: a rendition of the old Bing Crosby song Try a Little Tenderness.
This was in June, the month that Sgt Pepper was released, and California was the place to be. At the Monterey Pop Festival, the first of the great outdoor rock festivals, Redding wooed a large white audience for the first time.
Monterey attracted 200,000 people to northern California: they came to watch more than 30 popular bands and soloists, from the wild Janis Joplin and the Doors to the gentle Simon and Garfunkel. At one point, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones took the stage to introduce the next act: I'd like to introduce a very good friend, a fellow countryman of yours. He's the most exciting performer I've ever heard - the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
American audiences were still unfamiliar with Hendrix. At Monterey, he added new life to Dylan songs, played guitar with his teeth - a gimmick that he didn't much enjoy, but the kids liked it - and finished by setting his instrument on fire.
It was a great moment in the Summer of Love, during which activists and exponents of alternative lifestyles - including the beatniks and that new invention, hippies - converged on California to turn on, tune in and drop out , as acid advocate Timothy Leary had instructed.
San Francisco was the mecca for hip bands such as the Doors, the Byrds, the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane; meanwhile, one-hit wonders such as the Flower Pot Men and Scott McKenzie advised their listeners to visit San Francisco (preferably with flowers in their hair).
Our parents read us stories like Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, recalled Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick. And our parents are suddenly saying, 'Why are you taking drugs?
' Well, hello.
Perhaps the archetypal Californian album was not from any of the bands that played at Monterey, but Forever Changes by a band called Love. The album's style was apparent from the first song, Alone Again Or, in which the enigmatic Arthur Lee sang: You know that I think people are the greatest love .
Alone Again Or, with its sweet acoustic guitar and unusual lyrical structure, was truly trippy; it was also one of the most beautiful songs of the year.
Forever Changes is still regarded as an essential album and often turns up on top 10 lists. The Doors' drummer John Densmore called it the west coast Sgt Pepper .
London, which was desperately clinging to its 1966 title as the world's coolest city, had its own psychedelic scene at the UFO Club, where Pink Floyd, led by Syd Barrett, were performing childlike songs about gnomes and scarecrows. The Floyd's first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, included the 10-minute jam session Interstellar Overdrive, which used the hi-tech facilities of EMI's Abbey Road studios (where the Beatles were simultaneously recording Sgt Pepper) to take listeners on a space trip.
Although Barrett was a gifted songwriter, his creativity was drug-fuelled.
Within a year, he had turned on, tuned in and dropped out a little too much, becoming one of the best-known casualties of the era. His bandmates were forced to fire their leader.
But not every musician was going psychedelic.
You know, people like the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, all those people are just the most untalented bores that ever came up, said Lou Reed. It's a joke, it's a joke. The kids are being hyped.
While most bands were moving to the west coast, Reed stayed in his home town - the dark side of New York - and hated almost everyone. He called Townshend talentless and Frank Zappa a loser , and said Dylan gets on my nerves . Reed's band, the Velvet Underground, was the antithesis of all that was happening in rock: no flower power, LSD or long hair.
If Sgt Pepper was arguably the most effective drug advertisement in history, Velvet Underground songs such as Heroin and I'm Waiting for the Man suggested that the real world of drugs was not as much fun as the dream world of the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Perhaps Reed and his cohorts took different drugs.
They were from a different art scene as well: the eccentric world of Andy Warhol's Factory.
Warhol took them under his wing and designed the cover of their first album, The Velvet Underground Nico: a simple painting of a banana that became more famous than the actual songs. While everyone else had colourful, extravagant album covers, the Velvets had Warhol.
Hardly anyone heard The Velvet Underground Nico on its release.
It made only No.171 on the Billboard albums chart and not all the songs were tailor-made for commercial radio airplay. Nonetheless, The Velvet Underground Nico compares remarkably well with Sgt Pepper.
The opening track, Sunday Morning (in which Reed reveals a sweet singing voice), is prettier than She's Leaving Home. I'll Be Your Mirror - warbled in the style of a German cabaret singer by Reed's girlfriend Nico - is an even more touching ode to friendship than With a Little Help from My Friends. The finale, European Son, is far more anarchic than A Day in the Life, although, consequently, it's also far less enjoyable.
Cher (still teamed with Sonny) said that the Velvet Underground will replace nothing except suicide . Strangely, this might have been a compliment.
The album led to glam rock (David Bowie was a fan), new wave (Talking Heads), punk and noise pop.
As Brian Eno once suggested, anyone who heard it was immediately inspired to form a band.
But its status as the most important rock album ever (as Rolling Stone later described it) was justified when a black-market copy was heard by the Czech band the Plastic People of the Universe. They didn't even understand the lyrics, says Matt Welch, associate editor of the US magazine Reason Online.
Very few people in Prague spoke English back then, but there was a feeling, a sense of it that was against the sort of mechanisation of the time, of people who held power.
And so these guys got hold of Velvet Underground Nico. They would play in their shows a bunch of Velvet Underground covers and Frank Zappa covers.
Among the dissidents inspired by this music was the young playwright Vaclav Havel. When a bloodless coup restored democracy to Czechoslovakia in 1989, it would be called the velvet revolution after the band. The following year, when the newly elected Havel met Reed, he startled his favourite musician with the question: Did you know that I am president because of you?
But not everything was so revolutionary in 1967. The top-selling song was Lulu's To Sir with Love. Australians were buying Johnny Farnham's Sadie the Cleaning Lady.
Billboard's two top-selling albums of 1967 were both by the Monkees: a clever creation of record producers who knew that rock could be innovative, challenging and fun.
But rock snobs (a growing breed, thanks to Rolling Stone magazine) could look back fondly on the year of Procul Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale, Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl, the Stones' Ruby Tuesday and Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth.
The Doors' first album included the danceable keyboard hit Light My Fire (and an ominous cover photo of the charismatic singer Jim Morrison), but also songs such as The End that revealed an intellectual depth, provided by Morrison's haunting poetry, that was unheard of in rock music.
It was more than a vintage year for rock albums: the Byrds' Younger than Yesterday, Cream's Disraeli Gears, the Stones' Between the Buttons, Albert King's Born Under a Bad Sign, and The Who Sell Out. Bob Dylan, recovering from a 1966 motorcycle crash changed direction with his country-influenced album John Wesley Harding.
Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow provided White Rabbit, the most openly drug-inspired hit single of the time.
There were none of the playful teases of Yellow Submarine or Eight Miles High: this one was blatantly about pill popping.
In rock music, every year has its masterpieces and timeless classics, but no year showcased as much brilliance as 1967. It was music that changed the world.
Mark Juddery is a freelance journalist and entertainment writer. His most recent book is 1975: Australia's Greatest Year.
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