Michael Frontani, associate professor of communications and author of “The Beatles: Image and the Media” (University Press of Mississippi, May 2007), gave an invited talk to faculty and students at Union College, Schenectady, NY, on Friday, June 1, the 40th anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
Frontani described the album and the image of the Beatles within the context of Rolling Stone magazine’s promotion of the counterculture, the importance of the album to the legitimization of rock and roll as an art form, and the centrality of the Beatles to the magazine’s legitimization of the counterculture lifestyle among a growing readership. He further described the ultimate break of the magazine, and the Beatles, with New Left radicals in the United States and Great Britain.