It Was Sixty Years Ago Today

Or so we’ve been told. That's when famous impresario Sgt. Pepper put his band together and started them going on their instruments (it’s never been revealed quite what that training encompassed or what musical proclivities the musicians may have had to begin with). Twenty years after that (which makes it forty years ago today) that moment was enshrined into pop and rock history. And it was twenty years ago today that we suffered through all the "It was twenty years ago today" jokes.

To listen to Sgt. Pepper's today, you'd never know it was the cultural cataclysm that it was. We've so absorbed the various threads that it introduced, the juxtapositions it implied, that it all sounds old hat to our modern ears. Sure, there are certainly some sublime moments, but if you don't already know its significance, you'd never know it by listening to it fresh.

That's an interesting aspect of truly groundbreaking artistic events. The ideas behind the innovation seem so quickly familiar that we can't remember what life was like without them. These former breakthroughs are all around us--I'm writing (and you're reading) on one of them now. Computers aren't as old as Sgt. Pepper's, so it's a bit easier to recall how we lived before then, but even now I wonder how we got by without instant access to worldwide information.

As an interesting experiment, I thought I'd go back sixty years to see what else happened the day Sgt. Pepper formed a band. I didn't come up with much, beyond Ronnie Wood of the Small Faces and Stones and Jonathan Pryce of Brazil being born. It was only a couple of years after World War II--maybe Sgt. Pepper just started his combo up because he and the boys were bored. Or given that they were the Lonely Hearts Club Band, maybe they formed a band for the oldest reason of all--to meet girls. I hope they were successful.