In the autumn of 1966, the Beatles wanted to call the Beatles quits; their fame had hemmed them in, surrounded them with trouble. “We were fed up with being the Beatles,” Paul McCartney said years later. “We really hated that fucking four-little-moptop approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming – we didn’t want any more.”

After their August 29th concert in San Francisco, they left live performing for good. Rumors of tension within the group spread as the Beatles released no new music for months. Up to this point, their influence had been unequivocal – their popularity had fostered myriad rival bands in the mid-1960s – but as a new, adventurous, hallucinogen-informed style of music began emerging from the U.S. (and from London bands like Pink Floyd), it suddenly seemed as if popular music might in fact bypass them. The winds were rapidly shifting.

Read more about the making of Sgt. Pepper’s here.

Photo Credit: Apple Corps Ltd.