How The Beatles’ Cover for ‘Sgt. Pepper’ Hypnotized Amanda Palmer
The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heads Club Band has one of the most iconic covers in the history of music. The Dresden Dolls’ Amanda Palmer felt the hypnotic power of the cover. She revealed what Sgt. Pepper meant to her.
Amanda Palmer would stare at The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ for 45 minutes at a time
During a 2012 interview with The Quietus, Palmer named the records that influenced her the most. The first she mentioned was Sgt. Pepper. “I don’t think I can explain how significant that record was to me,” she said. “And the more I travel through my life as a musician, the more I find myself coming back to it again and again.
“My mom had a giant stack of vinyl — mostly classical, with a few rock records,” she added. “When I was seven or eight years old and started listening to music by myself, that album became the daily soundtrack to my life. I would ask someone to put the record player on for me and I would sit there with big headphones one, listening, and having the record flipped over again and again and again. I would put the music on and just stare at the cover for 45 minutes. The artwork was so important.”
The artwork for Sgt. Pepper is part of what makes the album so fascinating. The Beatles are depicted surrounded by famous figures from many different fields. The cover includes singers (Bob Dylan, Dion DiMucci), authors (Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde), movie stars (Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe), and mystics (Paramahansa Yogananda, Aleister Crowley).
The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ influenced The Dresden Dolls and many others
Regardless of what it means, the Sgt. Pepper cover has inspired numerous imitations. Frank Zappa spoofed it with the artwork for We’re Only in It for the Money. The Simpsons tipped their hat to the Fab Four with the front of The Yellow Album. Even author Peter Hitchens modeled the cover of his book The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment’s Surrender to Drugs.
It’s easy to see the image’s influence on Palmer. Her aesthetic blends the old and the new in a vaguely steampunk style, just as The Beatles did when they depicted Marx and Dylan within a few feet of each other and wrote a psychedelic song about a Victorian circus. In addition, Palmer went on to understand the importance of good album art. Look at The Dresden Dolls or Who Killed Amanda Palmer and the images will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Amanda Palmer didn’t know anything about the Fab Four as people
While The Beatles had immense musical (and visual) talent, they were also tabloid figures. Paul McCartney’s relationship with Jane Asher, John Lennon’s comments about Christianity, and George Harrison’s conversion to Hinduism all made their personal lives legendary. However, not all Beatles fans were aware of the dramas surrounding the Fab Four.
Palmer was one of the fans who just appreciated The Beatles for their art. Palmer loved Sgt. Pepper because she felt that it took place in its own little world. “I didn’t have any clue who The Beatles were or what they meant, I didn’t have any f****** context,” she said. “I just knew that if there was a party, this was the one I wanted to be at.”
Sgt. Pepper and its artwork are so great that they stood on their own for Palmer.
