24. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

For the Beatles, it was a decisive goodbye to screaming crowds, world tours, and assembly-line record making. “We were fed up with being Beatles,” Paul McCartney said decades later. “We were not boys, we were men … artists rather than performers.” Sgt. Pepper christened the Summer of Love with the lavish psychedelic daydream “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” the jaunty Ringo Starr-sung communality anthem “With a Little Help From My Friends,” the album-closing multilayered masterwork, “A Day in the Life,” and the title track, which introduced the alter egos the Beatles had developed for the ambitious project. “It liberated you,” McCartney said. “You could do anything.” It is hard to imagine a more perfect setting for the Victorian jollity of John Lennon’s “Being for the Beneﬁt of Mr. Kite!” (inspired by an 1843 circus poster) or the sumptuous melancholy of McCartney’s “Fixing a Hole,” with its blend of antique shadows (a harpsichord played by the Beatles’ producer George Martin) and modern sunshine lead guitar executed with ringing precision by George Harrison). The Sgt. Pepper premise was a license to take their music in every direction — rock spent the rest of the Sixties trying to keep up. - RollingStone.com

24. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

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