Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper [Paperback]

George Martin (Author), William Pearson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1995

On 1 June 1967, at the height of the Summer of Love, the Beatles made "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". In this book the band's producer George Martin tells his story of the nine months it took to make the recording, featuring songs such as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" to "A Day in the Life" and "She's Leaving Home". 1966 had seen a crossroads in the Beatles career, with the band under strain from the pressures of live performances. They decided to make an album that was like a show. Martin follows through the creation of the album's songs and offers an insight into the recording process itself.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 033034210X
• ISBN-13: 978-0330342100
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,309,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books ever written about the Beatles, September 21, 1999

By 

Joseph Scott ([e-mail]) (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper (Paperback)

This fascinating, thorough, and accurate book about the making of the Sgt. Pepper album is the British edition of Martin's With A Little Help From My Friends. It's the same book: same text, same photos, different title. Martin did a tremendous job researching this book, combining his and others' enjoyable first-hand recollections about the making of the album with extensive research at the EMI studios, relistening to the session tapes (including the unreleased alternate takes), checking the detailed notes written on the original session sheets, and so on. (In contrast, for All You Need Is Ears all those years ago, he relied on his memory, and the results were much less complete.) Amazingly, this was the first Beatles book to reveal that Paul McCartney played lead guitar on the "Sgt. Pepper" title track (yes, he sure did), and also the first to thoroughly dispel the tired myth that "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" was "all John": it was a true cocomposition by John AND Paul (as John said himself in at least two interviews). It's refreshing to see a book like this that assumes the TRUTH will be "good enough" entertainment for any sensible reader. Martin, thankfully, simply ignores rock writers' relentless post-Lennon rewriting of Beatles history, which has magnified anything negative Lennon ever said about McCartney while ignoring anything positive (such as Lennon's praise of "When I'm Sixty-Four" to interviewer Anne Nightingale)... and has consistently seized on Lennon's MOST mistakenly exaggerated or misleading claims about his own role in the creation of songs, while "forgetting" about all the many times John happened to give Paul completely fair, due credit (such as his 1965 interview with Valerie Wilmer, in which he described "Ticket To Ride"'s melody as cowritten by McCartney). George Martin, who admired and liked both Lennon and McCartney, has no axe to grind about them, or the other two Beatles... and he finds the right balance of modesty and candor in describing his own important role in the creation of this album, too. The previously unseen session photos are a fine bonus. This book is a keeper.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read about George Martin and The Beatles, March 25, 2003

By 

hyperbolium (Earth, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper (Paperback)

While this book is ostensibly about the making of Sgt. Pepper, it's more revealing of George Martin and his view of The Beatles. The sections detailing album production (coupled with Martin's musical analyses) tend to be rather dry, and the divvying of songwriting credit provides little more than grist for the Lennon-McCartney argument mill. What turns out to be most interesting is Martin and Pearson's ability to communicate some of the feeling of the times, some of the extra-studio influences that brought the Beatles to the making of Sgt. Pepper, and subsequently led to the creation of the album.

With the huge number of books written about The Beatles, one could easily point to other volumes that cover some or all of this ground. But Martin had a unique position in the Beatles coterie, and though this volume is far from a tell-all, it does leverage his vantage point. It's not explosive in a way that radically redefines one's view of The Beatles or their times, but it does provide some first-hand perspective that adds shades to the ever aging picture. How much of this is accurate, and how much is shaded memory, is hard to say. Beatles fanatics may find the so-called McCartney-esque slant infuriating, but those who simply lived through times will find Martin's writing pleasantly evocative.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Read "All You Need is [ouch!] Ears" instead., June 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper (Paperback)

There is very little here that isn't also in George Martin's earlier and much superior (and ungrammatically entitled, alas) "All You Need is Ears". The stories retold are altered, seemingly to jibe with Paul McCartney's relentless post-Lennon rewriting of Beatle history. Veracity aside, this tends to make them banal and humorless.

Recommended: PENTATONIC SCALES FOR THE JAZZ-ROCK KEYBOARDIST by Jeff Burns.