By 1966 the Beatles had been actively touring, with only short respite, for nearly four years, and they were exhausted and burned out. Therefore, they announced their retirement from the road to focus on making records. The band's increased attention to sophisticated production and complex composition that began on Rubber Soul and Revolver reached its full potential with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sgt. Pepper's is a concept album in which all the songs (save one) are arranged around the conceit of an alter ego for the Beatles. The album begins with a whimsical tune that introduces Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (the Beatles roadie Mal Evans came up with the name, which spoofed the long names of psychedelic bands emerging in San Francisco), and ends with its reprise. These songs create a frame that defines the fictional space in which Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band exists.
"A Day in the Life" is the only song to stand outside that frame, which to some has suggested that it has special importance. Many have heard it as the most obvious of a series of clues in the Beatles' later albums that indicated that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash and was replaced by a double after 1966. Actually, much of the song is taken directly from contemporary newspaper stories. One refers to socialite Tara Browne, son of Lord Oranmore and Browne and heir to the Guinness beer fortune, who died when his car ran a red light and smashed into a van. The other told of how a city surveyor in the town of Blackburn, Lancashire, had counted all the holes in city roads. Both are examples of the surrealistic "automatic writing technique" of which Lennon was greatly enamored. "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" is another example; its lyrics were taken, verbatim, from an old circus poster.
The avant-garde "apocalyptic" section at the end has garnered much fascination over the years. A forty-one-piece orchestra was hired and the musicians were told to play from the lowest note on their instruments to the highest over the course of twenty-four bars; the climax is a crashing piano chord that ends with a long sustain. That is followed by a sound outside the range of human hearing (but audible to dogs) and a two-second tape loop of spoken gibberish (played backward, one can supposedly hear the phrase "Paul is dead") that on a manual turntable would repeat infinitely until the needle was removed.
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Karlheinz Stockhausen and other avant-garde classical music composers, the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, the Small Faces.
Must Haves:
 "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
"Happiness Is a Warm Gun"
"Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite"
Everyone who made a rock album after 1967, but especially the Who, Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues, and the Small Faces
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