Would "Sgt. Pepper's" be a better album if.....


....."Within You Without You" was dropped from the LP and Side 2 began with either "Penny Lane" or "Strawberry Fields"? If so, which of these would best kick off the second side?
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Within You and Without You of course was a George Harrison song, George was learning sitar from Rabi Shankar at the time. The sitar also popped up on Paint it Black (the sitar was played by Brian Jones (who one assumes was not adverse to ingesting acid or anything else within reach), a pop psychedelic song from the Stones. The India connection of WYAWY smacks of Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Book of the Dead, the original Book of the Dead, a book that is psychedelic at its core.

Marijuana is in the halucinagin class of drugs. 

So, I guess, if merely taking a halucinagin while playing or listening to music makes it psychadelic music, then Reggae and Rap are types of psychedelic music. Well, probably not.
BTW, i think SP is great just the way it is and it sounds  as good  today as when I first experience it back in 1972. Yes, that was well after it came out.

Austinbob, I too really like Spirit’s 12 Dreams album (have it on LP, bought at the time of release), though it doesn’t sound psychedelic to me. It was sad to see Mark Andes join Heart, such a low-class, tacky band.

monsignor, I am a fan of The Beatles, though with some reservation and of the opinion that they are not "the best", as they are pretty universally considered to be. There are songwriters I like more than them, singers I like more than them, musicians I like more than them, and ensembles I like more than them. For me, they prove the wisdom of the old adage "The whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts".

As for the rest on your list, I liked the first two doors (they didn’t use an uppercase d in their name) albums at the time of their release, and saw them live twice, in ’67 and ’68 (in ’68, the opening act of the day was a local San Jose band named Fritz, whose members included Buckingham and Nicks!). By the time of their third album, my taste in music had, ahem, evolved. They now to me sound hopelessly dated, corny even.

I’m not missing out on the rest; I have heard them all, and just don’t care for them or their music. In late ’68, a non-musician friend told me our college library had an album by a new band whose music he loved, that I should check it out. I got to the library, found the LP, and saw Jimmy Page’s name and pic on the cover of that first Led Zeppelin album. I love, love, loved The Yardbirds, but their last album (Little Games), after Jeff Beck had left and Page had taken over, was a real pos. I thought the same of the LZ album. Talk about corny! Can white men sing the blues? If this is your evidence, the answer is a resounding no. The musicianship on that album is just SO bad---everyone playing in the pursuit of glorifying themselves (don’t listen to him, listen to me. Aren’t I good?), not serving the song. Very immature, musically. But then, there is not much in the way of songs to serve, is there?

But what does LSD have to do with Led Zeppelin, Queen, or Yes?

Taste is a purely subjective and personal matter. I was surprised to read that Glenn Gould didn’t like Mozart’s music!

SP was pure creative genius, particularly the work done in the studio at a time when recording electronics were archaic by today's standards.  I agree with several here that a couple of the songs are not the Beatles best, but in usual Beatles fashion they seem to make them better than they are.

One of my favorite stories I recall reading at the time was Brian Wilson of Beach Boys relating that he was at a party when someone showed up with a newly released SP LP and  they started playing it.  He stated the Beach Boys were completely blown away.