Would "Sgt. Pepper's" be a better album if.....

Within You and Without You of course was a George Harrison song, George was learning sitar from Rabi Shankar at the time. The sitar also popped up on Paint it Black (the sitar was played by Brian Jones (who one assumes was not adverse to ingesting acid or anything else within reach), a pop psychedelic song from the Stones. The India connection of WYAWY smacks of Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Book of the Dead, the original Book of the Dead, a book that is psychedelic at its core.

On Dark Side of the Moon the bit with the guy running around a circular track and breathing heavily is pretty cool and has terrific soundstaging. You could just put that on REPEAT. Oh, also the bells and glockenspiel!

Psychedelic music is somewhat of a misnomer since the music is not necessarily linked to drug use, probably very seldom, or even a drug lifestyle nor would the group or singer had to have taken LSD or any other drug to write or play psychedelic music. Maybe to listen to the music, though. 😃 Exceptions perhaps are Morrison and Joplin who performed with bottle in hand frequently and Carlos Santana who ingested LSD just prior to Santana’s set at Woodstock. Whaaaat! Yes, I know alcohol is not considered a psychedelic.😁 Of course the Stones’ Something Happened to me Yesteday was most definitely about taking LSD. 😳

The reason SPLHCB is almost always at the top of lists of best albums is because of its originality and great songs and inventiveness for the time and to a large extent it survived very well. It was you could say a benchmark. Actually, now that I think about it, there were really good albums by individual Beatles after they broke up, All Things Must Pass, Lennon and Plastic Ono Band and Band on the Run to name a few.

Hey, that would be a good title for a song, The Long and Pointless Road.

At the time the album was great. But things should be taken in a certain perspective. The album was released 50 years. Hel-loo! It should be compared with other music of the time. Every thug is relative.

Great cover photo. The amazing thing is the Stones came out with their 3D cover only 3 months later. Pretty fast work.