The second party is on May 28, at Brian’s recently purchased country home. While Paul doesn’t attend, John does—in spectacular fashion. He uses the occasion to unveil that he’s had his enormous (nearly twenty-feet-long and six-and-a-half-feet-wide) 1964 Rolls-Royce Phantom V painted in vibrant colors reminiscent of a gypsy caravan. “It was sprayed all yellow first,” John’s chauffeur, Les Anthony, says, “then hand-painted” with ordinary latex house paint in elaborate Romany designs and astrological symbols. “The first time I drove it, I was followed by hordes of photographers and Pathé News.”

“John and friends floated in on his gaudy yellow Rolls, through bucolic country lanes adrift with clouds of May blossoms, as if in a magic pumpkin on the way to the ball,” says fellow party guest Tony Bramwell. Cynthia Lennon remembers that inaugural drive as having “all the feeling of a school outing. Every time the car passed through town or villages it stopped the traffic. Crowds of jeering, waving people pressed up against the tinted windows trying to get a better look at the occupants of this crazy car.”

Not everyone approves of the paint job—“You swine! How dare you do that to a Rolls-Royce!” John often gleefully recounts an old woman once shouting at him—but there’s no question that his “psychedelic Rolls” is as subversive and of-the-moment as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band itself.

The crescendo toward the June 1967 worldwide release is building as powerfully as the resounding orchestral chords that George Martin engineered to close the album’s anchor track, “A Day in the Life.”

EMI won’t be releasing any singles from Sgt. Pepper, so disc jockeys and reviewers who receive advance copies are forced to listen to the album from start to finish—just as the Beatles intend.

Joe O’Brien, DJ at New York’s WMCA, is the first to spin the record live. He tells The New Yorker that “listeners are unprepared because this album is not a teen-age album, but a terribly intellectual one.”

The album soars to the top of the British and American charts. While the fans’ warm embrace generates 2.5 million US sales in its first three months of release, and although it stays at number 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for fifteen weeks, critics engage in a protracted war of words.

Even as Time magazine reports that the album is touted by legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein as being on par with the work of Robert Schumann, and even as The Guardian declares, “There is no longer any need, thank goodness, to apologize for talking seriously about Beatles music,” The Observer argues, “The record is not perfect, even on pop terms” (calling out George Harrison for being increasingly under the influence of his Indian mentor, Ravi Shankar: “On the musical side there is tendency to overdo the curry power”).