TL;DR:
- A future rock star could only hear part of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
- Hearing an off-kilter version of the album changed his attitude toward music in a major way.
- The star’s band later released a track-by-track cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
A star initially heard The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) on a malfunctioning stereo. He fell in love with the distorted music. Subsequently, this strange listening experience inspired his band’s audio experiments.
The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne initially couldn’t hear the 2 halves of ‘Sgt. Pepper’
Wayne Coyne is the lead singer of The Flaming Lips, a neo-psychedelic band. During a 2017 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Coyne said he didn’t initially hear Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the intended way. “For the longest time, the stereo system in one of my older brother’s bedrooms wasn’t working right,” Coyne recalled. “One side of the stereo didn’t actually work.
“Most of the things they would play, you couldn’t really tell,” Coyne added. “But Sgt. Pepper’s, what’s playing in the left side of the stereo and what’s playing in the right side of the stereo, this quite changes the feel of the song if you don’t hear both of them together!”
The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne felt distortion must’ve been cool if The Beatles embraced it
Coyne was a huge fan of this fractured version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “I fell in love with the strangeness,” he said. When he finally heard the album in full, he was put off at first.
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Coyne remembered that John Lennon’s voice drifted in and out of his speakers when he listened to the album on his family’s broken radio. “I thought, ‘Oh yeah, the voice can drift in and out of a song. If The Beatles do that, it must be something cool,’” he remembered. “Then realizing, later, ‘No, they didn’t really do that, they were just drifting from side-to-side and you’re supposed to have both sides going!’”
Coyne said this experience inspired some of The Flaming Lips’ avant-garde audio experiments. One of the band’s most famous albums is Zaireeka, which contains four different CDs meant to be played separately or at the same time.
How ‘Sgt. Pepper’ performed in the United States and the United Kingdom
The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a huge hit in the United States. The album topped the Billboard 200 for 15 weeks. The album lasted on the chart for a total of 233 weeks. It’s the only Beatles studio album to spend over 200 weeks on the chart besides Abbey Road and The White Album.
In 2014, The Flaming Lips covered Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band track-by-track for their album With a Little Help From My Fwends. The album includes appearances from singers such as Miley Cyrus, Tegan and Sara, and Moby. With a Little Help From My Fwends reached No. 58 on the Billboard 200 for a single week.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band made an impact on Coyne and he later recorded his own version of it.
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