Happy Birthday Sargent Pepper!

I was going to title this "It was 40 years ago today" but Daniel Levitin beat me to it. His article about the impact of the Beatles, including Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released 1 June 1967, is an interesting read.

It reminds me of a story. Back in 1994 or so I attended an international conference in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Bishkek's airport didn't have much fuel, so I and other attendees actually flew into and out of the airport in Almaty, Kazakstan. (I flew there from Frankfurt on a Lufthansa DC-10, stuck in the middle seat in the center row of five seats with two drunken Central Asians on the left and two drunken Central Asians on the right. Not my best flight ever... )

The Kyrgyz conference organizers piled us onto a bus after the conference to take us back to Almaty and eventually, civilization. We were all in a good mood on the road to Almaty, a trip that lasted about 3 hours. Soon, the booze was flowing and the singing began. One Canadian guy with a good strong voice led us American/English/Canadian types in a round of "What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor." A couple of Russians sang some folk songs. A guy from Georgia (the one in the Caucasus, not the one that Sherman marched through) sang a song solo. So did a Finnish guy.

Then we hit the Beatles catologue. One wit (I think it was the Canadian dude) started us off with "Back in the USSR." A very appropriate song as we drove along a rural highway in one fragment of the former Soviet empire. We sang "Yesterday" and other upbeat Beatles tunes -- and EVERYBODY on the bus knew these songs, even the Georgian and Russians and the one Japanese dude who didn't even speak much English. If we had been young and cute kids instead of a bunch of semi-drunken men (mostly) bundled up against a Central Asian February night, it would have been a real "It's A Small World" moment.

As Levitin said in his piece, these Beatles songs will likely still be sung on Sgt Pepper's 100th birthday, although by then few may realize that they were first performed by four guys from Liverpool called Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr.