‘But I thought that you might like to know’

It was 50 years ago that a bogus band broke hearts, blew minds and battered barriers. The band: Sgt. Pepper. The minds: Members of the music industry. The barrier? For starters, Album of the Year: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” became the first rock LP to receive this hallowed honor.

But this isn’t about that. Why? Because you’ll see greater stories about this ground-breaking album, written better and broader than anything I could pen. What you might not stumble across, however, is an obscure event that occurred a few days after the album’s debut, on June 4, at the Saville Theater, during one of the first performances by Jimi Hendrix in London.

Beatles bass player Paul McCartney was in the audience.

Hendrix and crew played eight tunes that night, including “Foxy Lady,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Manic Depression,” “Hey Joe,” and “Purple Haze.” But it was the opening song, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” that still jingle-jangles in a few people’s memories. Because it was so well-done? Nope. (In fact, it was raunchy-rough.) It’s because the Beatles’ album was so fresh (not even a week old) that covering one of its songs — especially in front of McCartney — had to be daunting, perhaps even intimidating.

“Watch out for your ears, OK?” Hendrix shouted to the crowd after feedback blasted from the speakers. “Watch out for your ears.”

Here’s McCartney’s reaction, excerpted from the book “Many Years from Now”(1998) )by English author Barry Miles.

“To think that that album had meant so much to him as to actually do it by the Sunday night, three days after the release. He must have been so into it, because normally it might take a day for rehearsal and then you might wonder whether you’d put it in, but he just opened with it. It’s a pretty major compliment in anyone’s book. I put that down as one of the great honours of my career.”

Hendrix died three years later, on Sept. 18, 1970, at age 27. His brief (four-year) career is sprinkled with highlights — singer, songwriter, guitarist, performer. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame described him as “arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music.”

Here’s a text-chunk from his Wiki write-up:

“In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year, and in 1968, Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Disc and Music Echo honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970, Guitar Player named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Rolling Stone ranked the band’s three studio albums, Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland, among the 100 greatest albums of all time, and they ranked Hendrix as the greatest guitarist and the sixth greatest artist of all time.”

For all that, it’s worth remembering his raggedy-taggedy, resonatedly raw “Sgt. Pepper” recital at the Saville Theater — if only as an homage to an album that transformed the musical landscape in the tumultuous Sixties.