Review: The Beatles' Christmas Records Box & the 'Sgt. Pepper's' Picture Disc

In December of 1963, UK kids received their biggest reward for joining the Beatles’ Official Fan Club: a flexi-disc arrived in the post containing messages of good will and “Happy Crimble” from the Fab Four. Each year throughout The Beatles’ brief career, fan-club devotees received such a holiday record from their fave group.

Review: 'Sgt. Pepper at Fifty: The Mood, The Look, The Sound, The Legacy of The Beatles’ Great Masterpiece'

Like 1955, 1977, and 1991, 1967 was a pivotal year for Rock & Roll. There was now a permanent place for ART in the raw and raucous genre, and critics and older people started taking it seriously. The LP replaced the single as Rock’s main medium. Pop bands were no longer limited to guitars, bass, and drums. All of this is tightly tied to the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and when you’re on the 50^th Anniversary of such watershed events, a lot of retrospectives naturally follow.

Review: 50th Anniversary Edition of 'Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band'

They can call those blues-peddling Stones a bunch of middle-class poseurs. They can call The Beach Boys too square. They can accuse The Monkees of being phony or The Who of being pretentious, but even the most hostile critics can’t say “boo” about the unassailable Beatles. This has been the prevailing consensus for some fifty years now— and let’s be honest— as far as pop legacies go, The Beatles’ is as airtight as it gets.

That does not mean that it’s perfect or that there is no room for improvement. Even The Beatles’ most influential and definitive album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, could use some gussying up, largely because of the obvious flaws of its original stereo mix which committed the same crimes as so many of The Beatles’ stereo mixes. As the now well-known story goes, The Beatles were mono purists who usually baled on George Martin’s hastily performed stereo mixing sessions. Those stereo mixes tended to be poorly balanced and lacked some of the carefully considered signature touches of the mono mixes. On Sgt. Pepper’s, songs that were treated with effects in the mono mix might lack them in stereo. Tracks that had their speed altered in mono might not receive the same colorations in stereo. Consequently, and perhaps ironically since stereo is made for hearing the full spectrum of trippy music through headphones, the mono mix of The Beatles’ psychedelic opus ended up more psychedelic than the stereo mix.