BILL AND SUE-ON HILLMAN: A 60-YEAR MUSICAL ODYSSEY
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ROCK ROOTS CHAPTER
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On March 30, 1967, The Beatles shot the cover of their Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band album at artist/photographer Peter Blake's Chelsea Manor Studios in London. There are 88 figures, including the band members themselves. Pop artist Blake and his wife Jann Haworth conceived and constructed the set, including all the life-sized cut-outs of historical figures. The set was photographed, with the Beatles standing in the centre, by Michael Cooper. Copyright was a problem as Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, had to locate each person in order to get permission to use their image in this context.
SGT PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND ALBUM
BEHIND THE SCENES
Click to see:
Sgt. Pepper Interactive Album Cover SearchAdolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ were requested by Lennon, but ultimately rejected. The actor Leo Gorcey's image was painted out after he requested a fee. When McCartney was asked why the Beatles did not include Elvis Presley among the musical artists, he replied: "Elvis was too important and too far above the rest even to mention ... he was more than merely a ... pop singer, he was Elvis the King." The final cost for the cover art was nearly £3,000 (equivalent to £53,485 in 2018), an extravagant sum for a time when album covers would typically cost around £50 (equivalent to £891 in 2018).
Blake recalled of the concept: "I offered the idea that if they had just played a concert in the park, the cover could be a photograph of the group just after the concert with the crowd who had just watched the concert, watching them. If we did this by using cardboard cut-outs, it could be a magical crowd of whomever they wanted." According to McCartney, he himself provided the ink drawing on which Blake and Haworth based the design. The cover was art-directed by Robert Fraser and photographed by Michael Cooper.[219] The front of the LP included a colourful collage featuring the Beatles in costume as the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, standing with a group of life-sized cardboard cut-outs of famous people. Each of the Beatles sported a heavy moustache, after Harrison had first grown one as a disguise during his visit to India. The moustaches reflected the growing influence of hippie style trends, while the group's clothing, in Gould's description, "spoofed the vogue in Britain for military fashions". The centre of the cover depicts the Beatles standing behind a bass drum on which fairground artist Joe Ephgrave painted the words of the album's title. In front of the drum is an arrangement of flowers that spell out "Beatles". The group were dressed in satin day-glo-coloured military-style uniforms that were manufactured by the theatrical costumer M. Berman Ltd in London. Right next to the Beatles are wax sculptures of the band members in their suits and mop top haircuts from the Beatlemania era, borrowed from Madame Tussauds. The album's lyrics were printed in full on the back cover, the first time this had been done on a rock LP.
Almost every account of the significance of Sgt. Pepper emphasizes the cover's "unprecedented correspondence between music and art, time and space" (Ian Inglis). After its release, album sleeves were no longer "a superfluous thing to be discarded during the act of listening, but an integral component of the listening that expanded the musical experience". The cover helped to elevate album art as a respected topic for critical analysis whereby the "structures and cultures of popular music" could henceforth justify intellectual discourse in a way that before Sgt. Pepper would have seemed like "fanciful conceit". He writes: Sgt. Pepper's "cover has been regarded as groundbreaking in its visual and aesthetic properties, congratulated for its innovative and imaginative design, credited with providing an early impetus for the expansion of the graphic design industry into popular music, and perceived as largely responsible for the connections between art and pop to be made explicit."
The March 30, 1967 photo session with Michael Cooper also produced the back cover and the inside gatefold, which the musicologist Ian Inglis describes as conveying "an obvious and immediate warmth ... which distances it from the sterility and artifice typical of such images". McCartney explained: "One of the things we were very much into in those days was eye messages ... So with Michael Cooper's inside photo, we all said, 'Now look into this camera and really say I love you! Really try and feel love; really give love through this! It'll come out; it'll show; it's an attitude.' And that's what that is, if you look at it you'll see the big effort from the eyes."
Top row 
(1) Sri Yukteswar Giri (Hindu guru)
(2) Aleister Crowley (occultist)
(3) Mae West (actress)
(4) Lenny Bruce (comedian)
(5) Karlheinz Stockhausen (composer)
(6) W. C. Fields (comedian/actor)
(7) Carl Jung (psychiatrist)
(?? Edgar Allan Poe (writer)
(9) Fred Astaire (actor/dancer)
(10) Richard Merkin (artist)
(11) The Vargas Girl (by artist Alberto Vargas)
(12) Leo Gorcey (image was removed from cover, but a space remains)
(13) Huntz Hall (actor)
(14) Simon Rodia (designer and builder of the Watts Towers)
(15) Bob Dylan (singer/songwriter)
Second row
(16) Aubrey Beardsley (illustrator)
(17) Sir Robert Peel (19th century British Prime Minister)
(18) Aldous Huxley (writer)
(19) Dylan Thomas (poet)
(20) Terry Southern (writer)
(21) Dion DiMucci (singer/songwriter)
(22) Tony Curtis (actor)
(23) Wallace Berman (artist)
(24) Tommy Handley (comedian)
(25) Marilyn Monroe (actress)
(26) William S. Burroughs (writer)
(27) Sri Mahavatar Babaji (Hindu guru)
(28) Stan Laurel (actor/comedian)
(29) Richard Lindner (artist)
(30) Oliver Hardy (actor/comedian)
(31) Karl Marx (political philosopher)
(32) H. G. Wells (writer)
(33) Sri Paramahansa Yogananda (Hindu guru)
(34A) James Joyce (Irish poet and novelist) barely visible below Bob Dylan
(34) Anonymous (hairdresser's wax dummy)
Third row
(35) Stuart Sutcliffe (artist/former Beatle)
(36) Anonymous (hairdresser's wax dummy)
(37) Max Miller (comedian)
(38) A "Petty Girl" (by artist George Petty)
(39) Marlon Brando (actor)
(40) Tom Mix (actor)
(41) Oscar Wilde (writer)
(42) Tyrone Power (actor)
(43) Larry Bell (artist)
(44) David Livingstone (missionary/explorer)
(45) Johnny Weissmuller (Olympic swimmer/Tarzan actor)
(46) Stephen Crane (writer) barely visible between Issy Bonn's head and raised arm
(47) Issy Bonn (comedian)
(48) George Bernard Shaw (playwright)
(49) H. C. Westermann (sculptor)
(50) Albert Stubbins (English footballer)
(51) Sri Lahiri Mahasaya (guru)
(52) Lewis Carroll (writer)
(53) T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia")
Front row
(54) Wax model of Sonny Liston (boxer)
(55) A "Petty Girl" (by George Petty)
(56) Wax model of George Harrison
(57) Wax model of John Lennon
(58) Shirley Temple (child actress) barely visible behind the wax models of John and Ringo, first of three appearances on the cover
(59) Wax model of Ringo Starr
(60) Wax model of Paul McCartney
(61) Albert Einstein (physicist) largely obscured
(62) John Lennon holding a French horn
(63) Ringo Starr holding a trumpet
(64) Paul McCartney holding a cor anglais
(65) George Harrison holding a piccolo
(65A) Bette Davis (actress) hair barely visible on top of George's shoulder
(66) Bobby Breen (singer)
(67) Marlene Dietrich (actress/singer)
(68) Mahatma Gandhi was planned for this position, but was deleted prior to publication
(69) An American legionnaire[5]
(70) Wax model of Diana Dors (actress)
(71) Shirley Temple (child actress) second appearance on the cover- Copied from Wikipedia.
Another photo from the Beatles' Sgt Pepper shoot.
Quite different from the one used on the album
More About the Cover
https://sgtpepperphotos.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/16/
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