May I re-introduce to you the act you've known for all these years? The 40th anniversary of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band passed a few days ago with moderate fanfare, a bit of historical revisionism and a fair amount of iconoclasm. But the Pepper you're probably listening to might not be the one you would've heard 40 years ago today, thanks to a 1987 decision by Parlophone/EMI to reissue the stereo mix of the album on CD, rather than the mono mix - arguably the definitive version.
"The only real version of [Pepper] is the mono version," says second engineer Richard Lush in Mark Lewisohn's indispensable The Beatles: Recording Sessions. Yes, there have been two Peppers out there for all this time, and the one you can buy on Amazon.com isn't necessarily the one the Beatles wanted you to hear. The Fab Four themselves were present for the creation of the mono mix; they were off getting high somewhere when producer George Martin did the stereo mix. The mono mix took about 40 hours to assemble, while the stereo mix took 10. Furthermore, the mono record outsold the stereo version for the first few years it was available. It's not exactly a rough draft.
For me, there were three crucial spins:
∙ Circa 1976 - The way I remember it, the album jacket for the monoPepper lies on a yellow chair, face down. I'm about four years old, staring at the back cover where the lyrics are printed, and my ears are wide open. If I had to pinpoint a single moment when I became hooked -- not just on Pepper, but on pop music in general -- this is it.
∙ June 1987 - The stereo CD reissue hits stores, and I'm one of the first customers. I connect headphones to Discman, and soon I'm hearing things I've never heard before. I mistakenly attribute this to the magic of digital remastering, never realizing that in fact I'm listening to an entirely different album.
∙ May 2005 - I wind up with a mono Pepper from a late friend's estate. After 18 years of listening exclusively to the stereo version, my mind is blown once again. I hear hotter guitar leads, trippier effects, slipperier edits and even a faster song - "She's Leaving Home," a half-step higher in pitch and a few bpm's quicker -- on the old LP, and Pepper is new to me again.
It's not just CD buyers who have been stuck with the "wrong" Pepper for all these years. If you purchased an LP in the late 70s or early 80s, you got a stereo one, probably with a yellow banner across the top edge of the jacket proclaiming as such. By that point, monaural sound was simply considered outdated, regardless of an artist's intentions; even 1964's Meet The Beatles! was sold only in highly inferior stereo mixes. When the Beatles CD reissues appeared in February 1987, some consumers were confused by Parlophone/EMI's correct decision to issue the first four albums in mono; only the hardcore fans, however, were distressed to hear the next three in stereo.
The casual listener probably won't hear much difference between the mono and stereo albums, but serious fans and audiophiles will likely know right away that the mono Pepper isn't the same record. (Or, at least, by the last verse of the first song, when George Harrison's lead guitar dominates over Paul's vocal, something you wouldn't hear on the currently available CD.) George Martin reportedly once said that the stereo version was intended for "hi-fi freaks" -- ironically, the exact audience that became interested in the mono Pepper in time. Since EMI never decided to give it a proper reissue, the only people who have been listening to it for most of the past twenty years have been turntable owners, rather than a general audience hooked on CDs and the Beatle-free iTunes.
Pepper, as likely as any record to be called the best of the rock'n'roll era, deserves to be heard as the band wanted us to hear it. Instead, we've relegated the mono album to collector's status, the province of garage-sale bargain hunters, dollar-bin mavens, and nerdy completists. The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, a key Beatle inspiration, is usually (and rightly) heard in glorious mono, and Pepper should be too.
So what can curious listeners do? Petition the label for a box set, thereby giving them an opportunity to sell us Pepper for a third time? I wouldn't hold my breath. It's hard to keep a good idea down in the age of broadband, and resourceful downloaders should be able to find the "real" Pepper without much trouble. Sure, I'd gladly pay for a proper reissue, but in the meantime, an adequate digital transfer from someone's clean vinyl will do. Happy hunting. (And wait till you hear the mono White Album.)