If you’ve never heard the hidden feature in “A Day in the Life” from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it’s probably because you have one of the American album versions. Or you’re not a dog.
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The Sgt. Pepper “inner groove” refers to a loop of gibberish and random noises that plays indefinitely on record players that don’t shut off automatically. Some listeners believed the Beatles were saying something naughty about Superman in reverse. Others viewed the nonsensical feature as a sort of yoga mantra.
While we can’t know what the dogs do or don’t hear in the hidden “A Day in the Life” feature, it certainly makes their ears perk up.
The Hidden “A Day in the Life” Feature Closes The Album
The Beatles’ 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, ends with the sprawling, multi-faceted song, “A Day in the Life.” Most people recognize John Lennon’s melancholy verses, Paul McCartney’s bouncing B-section about running to school and having a smoke, or the instrumental cacophony that precedes it. But fewer know about the “inner groove,” a seconds-long loop that plays on repeat on record players that don’t shut off automatically. It was McCartney’s idea to incorporate actual audio on the run-out groove, something that hadn’t been done before.
So, the Fab Four went down into the recording booth and spoke gibberish into the microphone, which producer George Martin spliced and diced into the seconds-long loop. “Not content with his nonsense in the run-out groove, Paul had said, ‘We never record anything for animals. You realize that, don’t you? Let’s put on something which only a dog can hear,’” Martin later recalled. “‘All right,’ I said. ‘A dog’s audio range is much higher than a human’s. Let’s put on a note of about 20,000 hertz. It was a little private signal for dogs. They heard it, all right. But they weren’t Beatles lovers. They hated it, and they whined whenever it was played.”
The 18-kilocycle whistle is imperceptible to the human ear and even beyond some phonographs’ capabilities. But on hi-fi equipment, a dog would be able to pick up on this subtle whistle…if that dog is listening to a U.K. pressing of Sgt. Pepper’s. The whistle was removed from the American repressings of the album.
Other Secret Messages and Sounds Were Less Intentional
As was often the case for Beatles records, particularly in the band’s later psychedelic years, fans would scour the albums backward and forward for hidden meaning. When the inner groove played in reverse, some fans claimed to hear the words, “We’ll f*** you like supermen.” In an interview with Keith Badman in 2008, Paul McCartney recalled two giggling fans visiting his home. “I said, “Hello, what do you want?’ They said, ‘Is it true that bit at the end? Is it true? It says, ‘We’ll f*** you like supermen.’ So, I said, ‘No, you’re kidding! I haven’t heard it, but I’ll play it.’”
McCartney said he went back inside and played the album backward. Eventually, he turned the phonograph motor off and played it backward using his thumb as a manual turntable. “There it was, sure as anything. Plain as anything. ‘We’ll f*** you like supermen.’ I thought, ‘Jesus, what can you do?’” In the late 1960s, McCartney marveled, “It’s amazing people should go into it to that extent.” Though, to be fair, one could argue that including a special track just for dogs is no less understated than a hidden message, however dirty.
Photo by Roy Cummings/THA/Shutterstock
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