It’s funny to think that this is the closest the Fab Four ever got to creating an unmitigated disaster as a band. And even then, the slapdash semi-improvised Carry On Ken Kesey film this album soundtracked was far less of a defining presence than the actual music — which, at the very least, built off the music-hall frivolity and psychedelic reverie of Sgt. Pepper’s to almost-as-revolutionary effect. The kaleidoscopic brassiness of the theme tune (featuring one of the most compellingly off-kilter outros in the band’s whole catalog) and John Lennon’s unsettling nonsense-as-bad-omen of “I Am the Walrus” are the clear highlights, but the rest lingers, too, whether they’re instant standards like the nonconformist melancholy of Paul McCartney’s “The Fool on the Hill” or deep cuts like George Harrison’s dazed, hallucinogenic sleepwalk “Blue Jay Way.” Lucky Americans got all that stuff on the A side of an LP that collected a bunch of the Beatles’ other 1967 singles on the flip, and since those singles included the beloved “Strawberry Fields Forever”/"Penny Lane” double A-side, the giddy simplicity of “Hello, Goodbye,” and the infectious, idealistic singalong “All You Need Is Love,” this album wound up becoming one of the best bodies of work the band ever had their name attached to. Not bad for a crummy TV movie.

– Nate Patrin