Robert Fraser (art dealer) first met John Lennon. Fraser art-directed the cover for The Beatles' 1967 LP "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" – he dissuaded the group from using the original design, a psychedelic artwork created by the design collective The Fool, instead suggesting the pop artist, Peter Blake, who created the famous collage cover design. Fraser also gave McCartney a small painting of an apple by René Magritte which is believed to have been the inspiration for the name and logo of the Beatles' record company, Apple Records. It was also through Fraser that Richard Hamilton was selected to design the poster
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the Life" as the "Sgt. Pepper" track that best exemplifies this approach. In his book on ambient music, "The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby", Mark Prendergast describes the album as the Beatles' "homage" to Stockhausen and Cage, adding that its "rich, tape-manipulated sound" shows the influence of electronic and experimental composer Pierre Schaeffer. The musician and producer Alan Parsons believes that with "Sgt. Pepper" "people then started thinking that you could spend a year making an album and they began to consider an album as a sound composition and not just a musical composition. The idea was gradually