Description: As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the most momentous year in the life of the Beatles, the contributors to The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love perform wide-ranging analyses of the group's enduring sociocultural influence and achievements.
Brief description: Kenneth Womack is one of the world's foremost writers and thinkers about the Beatles and Professor of English and Popular Music at Monmouth University, USA. He is the author of Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans (2023), John Lennon 1980: The Last Days in the Life (2020), Solid State: The Story of "Abbey Road" and the End of the Beatles (2019), and several other books on the Beatles. He serves as the music culture critic for Salon and has contributed to a host of print and web outlets, including Slate, Billboard, Time, Variety, USA Today, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, The Independent, and NBC News.
Review Quotes:
"Largely because of the Beatles, 1967 was the most important year for song since 1840. This study of the Beatles' work of 1967 offers deep and stimulating new research and speculation on the surrounding politics, communications media, commerce and the counterculture; inspiration ranging from non-western to avant garde musics; tension in the Beatles' masquerade; the role of gender in reception; and the album's influence on followers." --Walter Everett, The University of Michigan
"In this fifty-year retrospective on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Magical Mystery Tour film/EP/LP, Womack, Cox, and their writers have done what a good recap of these pop artifacts should do: not merely to 'celebrate' them for having aged so well, but to wrench readers out of their by now routine responses to the Beatles so as to have them experience, as if for the first time, the group's supreme masterpiece, their subsequent misadventures in film-making, and all of the lasting music they created in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love." --Steven Hamelman, Coastal Carolina University