Forty years ago, pop music was largely a singles world and the instrumentation of rock bands seemed as solidly fixed by tradition as a string quartet. Then the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, making June 1, 1967 opening day for the Summer of Love. With its radical mix of musics and instruments, from English dance hall to North Indian classical, from Baroque to psychedelic, the album marked a step forward in the evolution of rock and roll and revolutionized the way we think of rock bands and orchestras working together.

The Beatles' musical and technical collaborators on this project were Sir George Martin, who provided orchestral arrangements and produced the album, and Geoff Emerick, who engineered the project. Thirteen years after the release of that historic album, power-pop band Cheap Trick released their sixth album, All Shook Up. Heralded by critics as "America's answer to the Beatles" for their intelligently crafted, harmony-laden songs, the band this time worked with none other than George Martin and Geoff Emerick, who again provided orchestral arrangements as well as producing and engineering the album. As a tribute to Cheap Trick, Martin recreated in the studio the famous drone that ends Sgt. Pepper's and used it as the intro to All Shook Up, thereby forever linking the two bands and the two albums.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was recorded over a four-month period, from December 1966 to April 1967. Much of the unique sound of the project was created on the fly, as the four Beatles, Martin, and Emerick ranged over the entire orchestral line of instruments and exploited the latest technology and studio effects. Critic Kenneth Tynan labeled the album's release "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization" in The Times of London, and it was the top-selling album in the UK for the next 23 weeks. It was the first rock album to win the Grammy award for Album of the Year. The album has remained a consistent and influential presence on the charts, and in 2003 Rolling Stone put it at the top of its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.