Sometimes You Have to Back Up to Straighten Out: Part III

One way to view the eye-popping psychedelic front cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is to see it as a photograph of a funeral ceremony. And that would be entirely fitting given the directional mindset of the group in the wake of their summer 1966 World Tour. West Germany, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States had been a wounding experience. The group wanted to put an end to the Mop Top, Fab Four, Beatlemania image that had fueled their phenomenal rise to the heights of fame and fortune. They had grown up and grown out of that stage. Sgt. Pepper was laying that corpse to rest.