"The cover concept was originally conceived by Paul McCartney and London art dealer Robert Fraser as a tableau for a fictitious Salvation Army-style brass band. But in the hands of its designers, then-husband-and-wife Pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth (who ended up choosing more than half of the faces), it became a droll satire of celebrity and influence. While many of the famous figures in the gallery were heroes to the Beatles, others were chosen out of sheer, Beatlesque audacity. The group's record company, EMI, rejected three of John Lennon's suggestions--Jesus, Gandhi, and Hitler."
James Sullivan in The Boston Globe revisits the cover shoot for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
"On both sides of the Sgt. Pepper's divide—hyperbolically pro and knee-jerk con—there is a tendency to treat the album as an icon stripped of historical peculiarity, floating outside of time and place. Yet Sgt. Pepper's is the definitive Beatles record not necessarily because it contains their best music, but because it captures them at their zeitgeist-commandeering peak: It is the Beatles album of, and about, history's Beatles Moment. It's worth reflecting further on the Beatles' particularity. Today, the band belongs to the world. But they were an English group, and no album was more local and particular, more steeped in the life and lore of Old Blighty, than Sgt. Pepper's."
And Jody Rosen in Slate puts the album in context.
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