Watch a wacky-yet-kinda-great Beatles Sgt. Pepper medley from the late ‘60s!
From the era when Sinatra duetted with the 5th Dimension and wore a Nehru jacket….
The rise of the counterculture in the late ‘60s shattered a lotta nerves. Which admittedly is what it was designed for: disruption. The established order was put on notice that the old ways weren’t going to do, and a new generation was taking over, erecting a whole new value system totally rejecting what came before. Which, of course, is the job of youth. This is why there are factions who try so vehemently to discredit Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or The Linda Lindas.
Up until the psychedelic era, rock ‘n’ roll hadn’t managed to completely unseat old school pop from the charts. Hence, Gogi Grant’s “The Wayward Wind” knocked “Heartbreak Hotel” off the charts in 1956. But once the times, they a-changed in 1967, old school pillars of adult pop such as Frank Sinatra scored less and less regularly. Youth pop now ruled the day, because such current chainsaws-in-the-daisy-patch as Jimi Hendrix were still too strong a distillation of The New Ethic for most.
Oddly, certain pillars of The Old Order actually struggled to remain hip and relevant. Hence you get such bizarre spectacles as Sinatra, in the course of a late ‘60s TV special, attempting to duet with pop-soul wunderkinds The 5th Dimension in a rather questionable costume:
Then Sinatra chides himself (“Don’t look now, Francis Albert, but your generation gap is showing!”), before donning a Nehru jacket(!!!) to sing one of his more typical numbers:
Perhaps he was struggling to seem relevant to his then-wife, actress Mia Farrow?
But what in the Holy Hell possessed the show runners at The Carol Burnett Show to present Carol, Phyllis Diller, Gwen Verdon and country-pop singer Bobbie Gentry to perform a medley of selections from The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album?
To be fair, it’s actually not bad, for all its cultural appropriation. The costume designers and makeup artists did a remarkable job reproducing the look of Pepper — I particularly love Carol as Ringo back there on the drums! Gentry was riding high on Billboard at the time with her massive crossover hit “Ode To Billy Joe,” and she convincingly strummed the Japanese electric guitar the prop department handed her. And who knew Phyllis Diller could sing?!
All in all, this actually is not as bad as it could be, considering the provenance. It’s a lot more credible than Sinatra in a Nehru jacket!
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