The Velvets vs The Beatles: 50 years on from the release of two landmark albums and their battle for the soul of rock ’n’ roll

What a difference a half-century can make, especially when considering the impact of two landmark albums released only a few months apart 50 years ago. That they are even being considered in the same sentence today would’ve seemed preposterous in 1967. And the same is true now, except the albums have traded positions.

In the months leading up to the release of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles knew that every word and sound they were recording would be scrutinised and likely celebrated, and they set their sights on the centre of a youth culture that hung not just on their every song, but the way they dressed and styled their hair, what they said and how they said it.

The mainstream media would be primed as well – established publications such as Time and The New York Times praised the grown-up sophistication of Sgt Pepper when it was released on June 1, 1967. It was hailed as a “decisive moment in western civilisation” and its artistic reach was compared to that of George Gershwin and T.S. Eliot. Years later, critic Langdon Winner amplified the hype in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock’n’Roll: “The closest western civilisation has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt Pepper album was released.”

The Velvet Underground, on the other hand, clearly knew that with its debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico, released on March 12, 1967, they were making an album that failed almost every test of pop culture currency. Band members were seen as vile pornographers by those who superficially scanned and demeaned their risqué subject matter: drugs, decadence, deviant sex.