3 endless debates about Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s” album on its 50th anniversary

June 1 is the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” considered the most influential album ever. The surviving Beatles — Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr — and Apple, their record label, will mark the event next week by releasing a variety of new versions of the album, some of which include alternate recordings of the 13 original songs. The hype over the anniversary has already begun building and is likely to become a pop-culture phenomenon by May’s end.

Many music historians buy the idea that “Sgt. Pepper’s” virtuosic eclecticism and its instrumental and technical experimentation — mostly by McCartney and songwriting partner John Lennon and producer George Martin — inspired pop music to new heights of ambition. Many also accept the view that it elevated the importance of the album over the single — at least until the iTunes era made it so easy to buy songs a la carte.

But after 50 years, what’s also true is that there is huge dissonance over “Sgt. Pepper’s” value, legacy and more. Here are three examples:

It’s the best album of all time/it’s not even the best Beatles album: In 2012, “Sgt. Pepper’s” topped Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, based on a survey of dozens of critics and music industry veterans. The magazine wrote ...

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time. From the title song’s regal blasts of brass and fuzz guitar to the orchestral seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of “A Day in the Life,” the 13 tracks on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” are the pinnacle of the Beatles’ eight years as recording artists. ...

Yet “Sgt. Pepper” is the Number One album of the RS 500 not just because of its firsts — it is simply the best of everything the Beatles ever did as musicians, pioneers and pop stars, all in one place.

“Sgt. Pepper’s” has also topped many other similar polls, with effusive praise for the stunning originality of “A Day in the Life,” the haunting story told in “She’s Leaving Home,” the raucous snark of “Good Morning Good Morning” and the pop showmanship of the title song.

But there are plenty of music critics and Beatles historians who don’t even agree that it is the best Beatles album, much less the best album ever. “Revolver” in particular is considered superior, with less polish than “Sgt. Pepper’s” but better and more enduring individual songs. Writing last year for BBC.com, critic Greg Kot made the case:

It does everything Sgt. Pepper did, except it did it first and often better. It just wasn’t as well-packaged and marketed. ...

“Tomorrow Never Knows” set a high standard for an album that moves from one peak to the next: [George] Harrison’s corrosive guitar lick and McCartney’s commanding counterpoint bassline in “Taxman” made for one of the Beatles’ toughest-sounding tracks ... .

The melancholy beauty of “Here, There and Everywhere” answered the challenge of Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys masterpiece “Pet Sounds,” “Doctor Robert” and “And Your Bird Can Sing” achieved jingle-jangle guitar-pop perfection, and the horn-fueled “Got to Get You Into My Life” channeled Motown and Stax soul.

Other critics prefer “Rubber Soul,” which inspired Wilson to be bold and come up with the seminal “Pet Sounds” album, which in turn inspired The Beatles on “Sgt. Pepper’s.” “The Beatles” (the White Album) and “Abbey Road” also have their fans.

It launched the “concept album”/it doesn’t even have a coherent concept: Beatles scholar Aaron Krerowicz notes that Woody Guthrie’s 1940 “Dust Bowl Ballads” album about life during the Depression certainly has a better claim to be the first concept album. But the concept that McCartney came up with and sold to his bandmates — the “simulation of a live performance by a fictitious band ... [helped] bring the idea of a concept album to the attention of the mass media and public — it was (and arguably still is) the most famous example of one. In doing so, ‘Sgt. Pepper’ legitimized the rock album ... an artistic achievement arguably unequaled before or since.” This reverence is shared by Rolling Stone, which in 2012 called the album “an unsurpassed adventure in concept.”

But many other critics think this is an utter crock. They note “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” Lennon’s description of a psychedelic experience, has absolutely nothing to do with McCartney’s jaunty “When I’m Sixty-Four,” about an Englishman imagining life as he ages. That song in turn has absolutely nothing to do with Harrison’s “Within You Without You,” an ode to Hindu mysticism inspired by his trip to India. Only a few of the songs deal with the fictitious band.

The list of people who think the concept claim is absurd includes Lennon. As Salon magazine pointed out this month, just before Lennon was murdered in 1980, he told journalist David Sheff that ...

“Sgt. Pepper” is called the first concept album, but it doesn’t go anywhere. ... All my contributions to the album have absolutely nothing to do with the idea of Sgt. Pepper and his band, but it works ’cause we said it worked, and that’s how the album appeared. But it was not as put together as it sounds, except for Sgt. Pepper introducing Billy Shears and the so-called reprise. Every other song could have been on any other album.”

That seems a pretty definitive debunkment.

It features Lennon and McCartney’s collaboration at their peak of creative genius/oh, baloney, they barely worked together: The 2012 Rolling Stone tribute to “Sgt. Pepper’s” asserts that the album was the Beatles’ main songwriters’ zenith, with each egging each other on to greater inventiveness and bolder choices. Certainly “A Day in the Life,” which many consider the band’s single finest song, fits this assertion — McCartney’s gloriously caffeinated middle section (“Woke up/fell out of bed”) book-ended by Lennon’s darker vision of life in England. So does the back and forth role-playing between Lennon and McCartney in singing the lyrics of “She’s Leaving Home” and “Getting Better.”

But as Ian MacDonald laid out in “Revolution in the Head” — his endlessly entertaining 1994 book about the context and the circumstances of the recording of every single Beatles song — by 1967, such collaboration was mostly the exception. Unlike the early years of constant touring, when Lennon and McCartney would work up songs in hotel rooms, on buses and anywhere they had a free moment, the men were increasingly crafting songs almost entirely on their own while continuing their longstanding practice of sharing credit on every song either penned. The title song and its reprise version, “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “Fixing a Hole” and “Lovely Rita,” were McCartney’s. “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “Good Morning Good Morning” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” were Lennon’s.

So there you have it: the yin and yang of the Beatles’ most famous work. And also fodder to disagree with just about anyone who says anything about “Sgt. Pepper’s.”

Reed, an ASCAP member (really) who has never written a song, is the deputy editor of the editorial and opinion section. Twitter: @chrisreed99. Email: chris.reed@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion