Is Sgt Pepper Prog?

There is a hell of a lot of tosh written about the Sixties, none of it particularly accurate and most of it exaggeration and hearsay. The adage "if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there" (or paraphrases thereof) being the biggest fib of all - if you were there and can't remember them then your testimony is questionable at best. The vast majority of the record buying youth were not hippies or freaks (those wastrels were hardly likely to be buying records anyway), they were normal folk who either went to school clutching copies of Record Mirror and The New Musical Express or had regular day jobs so they could earn money to spend in record shops and fashionable boutiques, and attend gigs in evenings and weekend. [There was a lot more to the gig scene back then than just the big-name venues and festivals that get remembered now]. Those are the youth who bought Sgt. Pepper, and they are the record-buying public that made those 'underground' albums popular. Can they remember the Sixties? Of course they bloody can. Did they recognise Sgt. Pepper as something special? Of course they bloody did. What we can say about them with a fair degree of accuracy is, like us die-hard prog fans today, they were incredibly knowledgeable of the music scene at the time. They read the weekly music papers and magazines from cover-to-cover because that was all there was, copies of each publication would get passed around common rooms, staff canteens and youth clubs. And they listened to the radio. While a lot of hot air and noise is made about FM stations in the US, most of that is inconsequential because it was too localised - tiny stations broadcasting line-of-sight transmissions to a limited audience. Here in the UK underground music was on national radio (albeit late at night but that's the only time this knowledgeable record-buying youth would listen to it anyway) with programmes such as The Perfumed Garden and Top Gear playing the kind of music that wouldn't get broadcast on daytime programming but was widely reported in all the weekly music papers. While a teenager growing up in the sticks would be unable to see their favourite underground band playing live in The Marquee or The Roundhouse in London, they could hear them on the radio and read about them in the music press and thus buy their albums in Woolworths and Our Price.

At this point I should address the 'Tron issue thing: There is no 'tron in Sgt Pepper (although as Alan has noted there is some on Strawberry Fields Forever) and nor should there be because you have to remember what the 'Tron was invented for, which was to replace the costly studio orchestra that many bands couldn't afford to use in their recording sessions. While a couple of the Beat-less bought the new fangled instrument they didn't need to use them in the studio simply because if they wanted flute, trombones or strings playing on their tracks they'd employ someone to play the real acoustic instrument.  Ironically, because they'd then apply studio treatment to those acoustic recordings sometimes the end result sounds more like a 'tron than the real 'tron did. It would take later albums like ItCotCK to elevate the 'umble 'tron beyond its usage as an ersatz orchestra replacement to an bona fide instrument in its own right.