Yuto Shimizu
Get Back Wisconsin plans to re-create every Beatles album on the LP’s 50th anniversary. For Sgt. Pepper’s, they’ve gathered a 20-piece orchestra.
Back when bands regularly released two studio records each year, the Beatles issued what Rolling Stone calls “the most important rock & roll album ever made” in June 1967 — just 10 months after releasing another ground-breaking LP, Revolver.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has attained such mythical status that it’s difficult to listen to the 13-song record 50 years later with fresh ears — especially when it’s been hailed as a “sacred” album that “changed the world” and “an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology.”
Rolling Stone announced this week that the remastered version of Sgt. Pepper’s had risen to the Top Three of the Billboard 200, for the first time since 1967.
That’s great news for Get Back Wisconsin, a five-man Madison band that re-creates nothing but Beatles songs onstage. They will honor Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by playing the entire album live on June 16 at the Barrymore Theatre, the largest venue yet for a Get Back Wisconsin album-anniversary show. In addition to filling out the night with some pre- and post-Sgt. Pepper material, the band will also play “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” which were recorded during the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions but released as a double A-sided single in February 1967.
“After 1966, the Beatles stopped playing live, and that freed them to make better recordings, because they knew they would not be limited in a live setting,” says Get Back Wisconsin’s Sean Michael Dargan, who took over on vocals and guitar after the 2014 death of Charlie Johnson. “We’re doing the opposite of what they did. We play these songs note for note in a live setting.”
Nothing wrong with that; in fact, we should be grateful for a group like Get Back Wisconsin.
Guitarist, keyboard player, music teacher and longtime Beatles aficionado Aviv Kammay started the band a few years ago with the goal of celebrating the 50th anniversary of every Beatles album by performing it live as it was originally released in the U.K. Please Please Me from 1963 was the first album covered by the band, which also includes drummer John Nokovic, bassist Steve Morgan and guitarist Geoff Blake-Horst.
Other notable Madison musicians, including a 20-piece all-star orchestra, will join Get Back Wisconsin at the Barrymore. “People are excited about this being the 50th anniversary of Pepper’s,” Dargan says. “We want to make sure Madison gets a healthy dollop of the Beatles with this show, and we’re really pulling out all the stops.”
Although Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band might be Get Back Wisconsin’s most ambitious undertaking yet, the band won’t have much time to rest. After all, the Beatles released Magical Mystery Tour in November 1967.
