USA - (RAINBOW) CAPITOL - T 2653 (MONO)

A 1967 SOUGHT AFTER COLLECTIBLE =  MONO SONG MIXES (see below)

 .... 1967 original, first pressing vinyl  ...

The 'rare' mono pressing has been long sought after and contains not only different song mixes from the stero but a strong punchy (mono) sound production that is much different from the stereo release.

**** Includes the PEPPERLAND CUT OUTS INSERT as first released ... the pepperland cut outs are highly glossy, not the flat unglossed version ....

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"Pepper was probably the one Beatle album I can say was my idea," McCartney says. "It was my idea to say to the guys, 'Hey, how about disguising ourselves and getting an alter ego, because we're the Beatles '. McCartney added: "I just listened to it and said to myself, 'God, I really love this album.' Still, today, it just sounds so fresh. It sounds full of ideas. These guys knew what they were doing. They're good. And they're inventive. I haven't heard anything for years that's as inventive. I don't really expect to."

After the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, they had time to explore in greater depth the possibilities of the recording studio with producer George Martin. The magnitude of the Beatles phenomenon was starting to encroach on the band - and their experience with psychedelic drugs made that phenomenon seem increasingly surreal. Apart from some relatively modest touches - the colorful uniforms, the opening theme song, the reprise near the end and Ringo's entertaining turn as "the one and only Billy Shears" in "With a Little Help from My Friends" - the alter egos make no discernible appearances on the album. But one look at the cover of "Sgt. Pepper" - festooned with the band's wildly eclectic gallery of heroes and with the wax figures of the youthful Fab Four standing next to their far more hirsute and serious-looking real-life counterparts - eloquently tells how greatly removed the group had grown from what they were. Under the guise of alter egos the Beatles had finally allowed their real selves to emerge.

Interestingly, however, the Beatles had freed themselves not merely to chronicle such weighty subjects as the joys of mind-expanding drugs, in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," the paradoxical wisdom of Eastern religious philosophy, in "Within You Without You," or the sterile absurdity of mainstream values in the astonishing "Day in the Life." On the contrary, Sgt. Pepper is filled with sly inside jokes, broad music-hall humor and completely gratuitous novelties. It is not only the Beatles' most artistically ambitious album but their funniest.

Take, for example, the dog whistle - which humans can't hear - buried on the album's second side. And the famous "Inner Groove" - the snippet of pointless conversation that sticks in the album's run-out groove and that was not included in the original American version of "Sgt. Pepper" - has an equally zany genesis. Around the time of "Sgt. Pepper's" release, McCartney explains, "a lot of record players didn't have auto-change. You would play an album and it would go, 'Tick, tick, tick,' in the run-out groove - it would just stay there endlessly. We were whacked out so much of the time in the Sixties - just quite harmlessly, as we thought, it was quite innocent - but you would be at friends' houses, twelve at night, and nobody would be going to get up to change that record player. So we'd be getting into the little 'tick, tick, tick,': 'It's quite good, you know? There's a rhythm there.' These are minor points, perhaps, in the context of the enormous achievement of "Sgt. Pepper". But such fun-loving experimentalism - born of the optimistic determination to blow away anything that "stops my mind from wandering where it will go" - is "Sgt. Pepper's" best legacy for our time.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (2:02)

CONDITION:The Cover: thick gatefold cover:  VG++ very minor shelf contact strong front cover and back cover (the back red cover is highly wear prone, usually there is shelf wear on nearly all original copies)  All said, the cover retains its vibrant original colors. Has no delete marks, No split seams, no bends, no writing ... Overall a collectible worthy first issue!  

The Vinyl: Very shiny on both sides, rated  VG+(+)  loads of clean shine with only LIGHT scuffs, no deep marks, very decent for the rare MONO format! Plays excellent audio results = very little surface at all. No groove wear ...