Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
April 24, 2023 11:25 AM - Subscribe

Whether you love it or hate it or are simply confused by the fact that anybody ever made it, it's hard to be completely indifferent to this one-of-a-kind product of seventies excess, in which Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees are cast as a small town band trying to follow the example of hometown hero Sgt. Pepper to save their beloved Heartland, USA from the sinister Future Villain Band and its brainwashed minions.

Besides Frampton and the Brothers Gibb, also features performances by Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Steve Martin, George Burns, Billy Preston, and Earth, Wind, and Fire, plus others.
posted by Nerd of the North (37 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've been shedding hipster credibility for years so I'm just going to fling what remains to the wind by confessing my secret liking for this movie.

I fully agree with those who describe it as a bad idea, terminally cheesey, embarrassingly misguided, and so many other things that can be said about it. And yet..

It had the courage to be all those things, has a number of really fun musical performances, is unapologetic about its vapidness, and in the end manages to be a fun way to kill an hour and a half while imagining an alternate reality version of seventies music.

Completely inessential, but a bit more enjoyable than it has any right to be.
posted by Nerd of the North at 11:32 AM on April 24, 2023 [4 favorites]


(post inspired by several comments on this movie in this thread)
posted by Nerd of the North at 11:33 AM on April 24, 2023


It's true that I remember both Aerosmith's and Martin's covers, but I saw this 44 years ago and I don't even remember Peter Frampton.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:43 PM on April 24, 2023


It's true that I remember both Aerosmith's and Martin's covers, but I saw this 44 years ago and I don't even remember Peter Frampton.
That's okay, you can be forgiven for forgetting his performance. He's only got the lead role in the movie.
posted by Nerd of the North at 1:06 PM on April 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


In case it wasn't clear - the sarcasm above is directed at Frampton, or whoever cast him, not at the previous commenter. In point of fact Frampton isn't at all memorable in the role, does very little musically, and has so little criticality to the plot that it's no big surprise when his character leaps to his (soon-to-be-reversed) death.

Anyway, mostly he smiles amiably and lets his curly seventies locks handle the heavy work of emoting for story purposes and of course he gets overshadowed in that because every moment of the film he's surrounded by Bee Gees.

Look, mistakes were made, nobody's saying otherwise. But for some reason I still like the movie.
posted by Nerd of the North at 1:13 PM on April 24, 2023 [3 favorites]


The one thing that I liked in this movie, despite liking the majority of the performers in it (including the Brothers Gibb and Frampton) was Steve Martin's gloriously over-the-top version of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" as being about a different sort of plastic surgeon; it's kind of a companion piece to his role as a greaser dentist in Little Shop of Horrors. The rest of it just didn't make a big impression on me, which was counter to the original Beatles album that this was supposedly based on, which made a huge impression on me as a kid.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:08 PM on April 24, 2023 [3 favorites]


I grew up with The Beatles cartoon (and Monkees, Banana Splits, Kaptain Kool and The Kongs) and then this, when the entire cast was already mega popular. A credulous grade-schooler, it seemed akin to The Muppets and all the other celebrity mashups of the day.

Is it redeemable? Doubtful, but I can't shake those kid associations and now the feeling that it was just normalized "postmodern" culture becoming explicitly wtf (if particularly shameless about it).

I agree that Steve Martin did what that role required, and Aerosmith personified scary rock n rollers long before I had any knowledge of things like Altamont. It's certainly not Gene Wilder's Wonka boat ride, but another indication that popular arts are not all about nice and cute.

Idk, it's still a puzzler and argue it can be privately enjoyed it as such, if you're of that time.

It's funny, an elderly relatively, a lifelong Beatles fan, had never seen it so we very-anachronistically watched a few years ago and afterwards the room was just confused glances and silence. Is that what it's like, for example, for a young Skinny Puppy fan to see Alice Cooper on (again) The Muppets?
posted by Claude Hoeper at 2:30 PM on April 24, 2023




Btw, who/what was its intended audience in 1978?
posted by Claude Hoeper at 2:49 PM on April 24, 2023


It's not a good movie, but I like it.
posted by cuscutis at 3:09 PM on April 24, 2023




I saw it in the theater. I do not remember much about it other than it was not what I expected at all.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:33 PM on April 24, 2023


I have this album. Found it in my parent’s basement while hunting for old records. I’ll need to give it a spin.
posted by Eddie Mars at 7:04 PM on April 24, 2023


Three of us, who were all 14, drove 230 miles to see the film it's opening weekend in the movie theater. Easily the longest distance I've traveled to see a movie. I just this moment recalled that it might be the case that my friends wanted me along because I'm from the city we drove to. I know I wasn't at all enthusiastic about it and it was puzzling me why I went.

Interestingly, I did have Frampton's great live album at the time; not because I'd bought it, but it was among a group of albums my dad gave me that he no longer listened to — another was Aqualung. I didn't know enough at the time to truly appreciate his skill.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:06 PM on April 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


Thanks for the link, chavenet. I can't for the life of me remember when or how I saw it back in the day, but I did. Maybe the Z Channel. Definitely not in a theater. Seeing it again is really tickling some of those dormant memory cells.

I can remember being mystified by what was the resurgence of George Burns's career. To me he was just some really old guy who told a bunch of pretty flat jokes. There seemed to be a certain amount of novelty over his age and nostalgia that I was too young to appreciate.

It's kind of amazing how little of the movie I remembered. I sort of combined Peter Frampton with Paul Nicholas into one person in my head. And I can swear I remember the characters (other than Burns) having dialogue. I'd totally forgotten how many musical acts other than Frampton and the Bee Gees were in it.

The biggest recollection I have is unfortunately the one that was spot on: it was boring and too long. And despite all the talent involved and source material, the music is surprisingly uninspired.

I do have a weird almost-connection with the production. In the 90s, I was making trumpets in a small manufacturing shop here in L.A. The heart shaped trumpet was made in that shop by the founder of the business. I think there might have been at least two of the props made, but made by different sources. By the time I worked there, it was being run by his grandson, who unsuccessfully tried very hard for years to get that prop back in his possession. I'm not sure he was even sure it still existed.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:13 PM on April 24, 2023 [1 favorite]


Oh, and if there's a single redeeming quality of the movie, it's the closing number. Try to make a game naming as many people as you can in that singing crowd.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:17 PM on April 24, 2023


Not only did I have the album (a double fold out album if I recall) … but I also had the “Scrapbook” (one of those “making of” things) … AND ALSO had the NOVELIZATION which, yes, was a thing that some poor soul got paid to bang out.

The movie is not good but it is delicious in its bonkers-ness. I was particularly obsessed with the “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” billboard-comes-to-life sequence. (That obsession was followed up by a fixation on the mural-comes-to-life number in Xanadu a couple years later.)

I just wonder how this was pitched to everyone involved…

Also, the fact that Carol Channing is in the group of celebrities at the end says so, so much.
posted by profreader at 2:31 AM on April 25, 2023


Btw, who/what was its intended audience in 1978?

I recall one of the Brothers Gibb saying something to the effect that a full decade after the original album, kids had never heard of Sgt. Pepper’s so his band was going to enlighten them and also become the iconic representation.

The idea is not totally impossible: it’s safe to say the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart is better-remembered than the 1931 Ricardo Cortez version, but the execution here was not quite up to it. Clearly there was a lot of cocaine in the seventies.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:12 AM on April 25, 2023 [3 favorites]


I recall one of the Brothers Gibb saying something to the effect that a full decade after the original album, kids had never heard of Sgt. Pepper’s so his band was going to enlighten them and also become the iconic representation.

IIRC it was in heavy rotation during early HBO because I watched it a lot as a kid. At the time I wasn’t all that familiar with the Beatles’ music, so I’m pretty sure this was my first exposure to some of the songs - so yeah, that was me. My memory is super fuzzy about this since it’s been at least 40 years since I saw it (and the link is geographically blocked), but after the girl (Penny Lane?) dies, they sang “The Long and Winding Road” either at or right before her funeral and it was really sad. And then when I heard the real version I was disappointed because the Bee Gees / Frampton version was much more heartfelt for me.

Like I said, I was a kid.
posted by Mchelly at 4:40 AM on April 25, 2023


I was 14 in 1978 and owned a copy of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper (on 8-track) and all my friends were into the Beatles still too so I don't know who Gibb was talking about.
posted by octothorpe at 5:10 AM on April 25, 2023


Frampton learned all he needed to know about acting from watching Marty Feldman in Silent Movie.
posted by Catblack at 5:42 AM on April 25, 2023 [3 favorites]


Steve Martin's gloriously over-the-top version of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"

Hey, Steve Martin! You missed one!
posted by Naberius at 6:14 AM on April 25, 2023 [1 favorite]


IIRC it was in heavy rotation during early HBO because I watched it a lot as a kid. At the time I wasn’t all that familiar with the Beatles’ music, so I’m pretty sure this was my first exposure to some of the songs - so yeah, that was me.

My experience is about the same. This was one of those movies that HBO ran ten million times, and I probably watched it (or pieces of it) at least a dozen times. I really didn't know much about the Beatles at the time, and this was kind my entry point into that music.
posted by briank at 8:03 AM on April 25, 2023


I did have Frampton's great live album at the time; not because I'd bought it

There was a throwaway joke in the Wayne's World movie sequel about this that cracked me up but good; Wayne's girlfriend had just gone to a used record store and was showing off her purchases, and Frampton Comes Alive was one. She asked if he'd ever heard of it, and Wayne said, "Are you kidding? If you lived in the suburbs in the 70s you were ISSUED a copy!"

Btw, who/what was its intended audience in 1978?

Everyone. No, seriously - this kind of thing happened all the time in the 70s - this was the era of Variety Show Specials on TV, most staffed by people who were just starting to come down off the peak of their Fame Era. All the people who go do Dancing With The Stars today, in the 70s they either guest-starred on Love Boat or they'd do a TV special or be in a movie like this. Another movie also released in 1978, Sextette, starred an 84-year-old Mae West and saw her being romanced by Dom DeLouise, Tony Curtis, Ringo Starr, and Timothy Dalton, who wins her over with a rendition of Captain and Tenille's "Love Will Keep us Together".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:07 AM on April 25, 2023 [6 favorites]


In 1978 (and to this day) I remain completely indifferent to this production.

Now, All This and World War II, from a couple years earlier -‌- that's the weird mid-70s Beatles remake worth investigating. (trailer)
And it's a true story.
posted by Rash at 8:28 AM on April 25, 2023 [3 favorites]


During a brief Beatles phase in my adolescence I recall watching this, maybe even with my parents, when it popped up on Toronto's CityTV (I think) in the 80s. I wasn't much of a music person then, as now, but I recall being utterly confused (I remember thinking "Where's the Beatles?") though I recall very little about this movie other than the ending. I was a weird enough kid in the 80s to know who Frankie Howerd (Mean Mr. Mustard in the movie), Dame Edna (as a guest of Heartland) and Donald Pleasence (B.D. Brockhurst) were that their presence sustained and perhaps buoyed my interest. And I, of course, knew Alice Cooper & Steve Martin from their Muppet show appearances.

that's the weird mid-70s Beatles remake worth investigating.

Wow, I was totally unfamiliar with that movie though I weirdly know a lot of the songs on the album (Elton John’s version of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Rod Stewart doing Get Back, Helen Reddy doing The Fool on the Hill among others). I'll have to keep an eye out for it.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:06 AM on April 25, 2023


IIRC it was in heavy rotation during early HBO

There were so many things I remember being on heavy rotation. People forget Blockbuster wasn't a thing for many years. I'm sure there's a fan site that has all the listings somewhere. But a movie like this, or Bugsy Malone (or so many more) you'd have ended up watching, or coming halfway into one of these movies in the afternoon in the summer, and they'd repeat it throughout that month so you saw it a few times. Oh look, there's Brainstorm again, or Krull. And you'd sit and watch it.

Later my oldest brother was friends with a family who owned a video store so having a huge stack of movies freshly rented in a stack on the VCR was common. But back when we still had a betamax and cable was new to us, shlocky films like Sgt Pepper's got watched so many times because they were on constant rotation the month they premeired.

I have probably seen this movie more than 5 times, never intentionally sitting down to watch it beyond the first time. Though my (other) brother was into Earth, Wind and Fire. So I recall him pointing them out to me and me not really caring who they were. I only knew Alice Cooper from his Muppet Show appearance.
posted by Catblack at 12:18 PM on April 25, 2023


“I was 14 in 1978 and owned a copy of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper (on 8-track) and all my friends were into the Beatles still too so I don't know who Gibb was talking about.”

Same age as you and I didn't really listen to the Beatles until a few years after I graduated high school because to me that was old music that my parents sometimes listened to. I had a ferocious bias against music more than even four years old. It was dumb, but I think it was more common then — perhaps partly because of how rapidly popular music changed in those days. I think perhaps the 70s saw more change than even the 60s and certainly more than the decades which followed.

The way that kids now have tastes that span half a century boggles my mind every time I think about it. It's a good thing.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:42 PM on April 25, 2023


Most of the kids in high school that I knew listened to "old" music from the sixties and early seventies. They hated late seventies disco, punk and new wave.
posted by octothorpe at 4:11 PM on April 25, 2023


saw it in the theatre when it was new. It struck me as profoundly not very good at all except maybe the Aerosmith and Earth Wind and Fire moments. Earth Wind and Fire in particular.
posted by philip-random at 11:17 PM on April 25, 2023 [1 favorite]


I saw it in the theater at age 10 and the Computerettes rocked my world (have the OST on vinyl and CD, no less). Have it on DVD and treasure it as a delicious high point in low points where an intent to produce something camp is contaminated and elevated by an accidental earnestness. I'd contend that it, in its way, accelerated my cultural gayness and created a lifelong maxim for me that people who can't enjoy the tragic splendor of full-tilt not-quite-on-purpose camp are not going to my cup of tea when it comes to chosen family or funtime social circles. It was like Star Wars for wry observers of the desperate spectacle of the ill-advised venture.

Plus, it's loads more fun than All This And World War II, though that foolhardy failure at least gave us the absolutely all-time way-better-than-the-original definitive version of "Come Together."
posted by sonascope at 12:18 AM on April 26, 2023 [1 favorite]


I think an interesting comparison can be made between this film and Julie Taymor's 2007 film Across the Universe, also a jukebox musical built around the songs of the Beatles.

Taymor's film has hugely higher production values and a lot more thought, effort, and time went into choreographing and filming it and yet I find it cringe-inducing in a way that Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, for all of its obvious cheeseyness, largely escapes. Possibly it's that nobody involved with Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is under the impression they are making Art with a Capital A?

Across the Universe is more accomplished filmmaking but significantly less watchable for me.
posted by Nerd of the North at 11:38 AM on April 26, 2023 [1 favorite]


the absolutely all-time way-better-than-the-original definitive version of "Come Together ."

I think Ms. Turner may have changed the meaning of the title.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:42 PM on April 26, 2023


the absolutely all-time way-better-than-the-original definitive version

Well then let's have the real thing, rather than some live version, years after the fact. All This And WWII, Part 1; and Part 3, queued at the beginning of "Come Together."
posted by Rash at 3:22 PM on April 26, 2023


This post suddenly made me remember not only having seen this (as an early teen), but also having read the novelization, which I remember as being a fucking trip and a half.

Turns out it was written by the same guy who wrote the screenplay, Henry Edwards. Back cover copy, in part: "Like the movie, the novel is an experience for the senses - to be felt, remembered, and most particularly, loved."
posted by Pallas Athena at 5:36 PM on April 26, 2023


Btw, who/what was its intended audience in 1978?

I saw it in the theater. My grandma took me (10) and my brother (13), and the only review was grandma saying it was the worst movie she'd ever seen. I knew the Beatles, I knew Sgt. Pepper, and this movie is based on both, but it's not the Beatles. It's like that "Yesterday" movie, a totally different universe, except in Yesterday they have NPCs who like the music.

This movie also put Robert Stigwood on my mental map as as suspect character. I dig through a lot of records and any album with that "RSO" logo is an instant put-back.
posted by rhizome at 6:14 PM on April 26, 2023


I just saw this last night, at a friend's backyard party. The friend who had scheduled the viewing got up beforehand to explain some backstory about the movie's production, some trivia about it, etc, which, uh, elevated the viewing experience a little, I guess.

The movie was awful. One friend commented that it seemed as if they had no script at all, and just decided day by day how they were going to string things together. which seems plausible. I like the music it's based on, so some of the covers have some entertainment value, though a few were excruciating.
posted by adamrice at 12:51 PM on April 14 [1 favorite]


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