"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was released on 26 May 1967, with "Within You Without You" sequenced as the opening track on side two of the LP. Greene notes that for many listeners at the time, the song provided their "first meaningful contact with meditative sound". In his 1977 book "The Beatles Forever", Nicholas Schaffner likened "Within You Without You" to Hermann Hesse's "Siddhartha" – an influential novel among the counterculture during the Summer of Love – in terms of the song's evocation of Hesse's "idealization of individuality" and "vision of a mysterious East". Eager to separate the song's message from the LSD experience at a time when the drug had grown in popularity and influence, Harrison told an interviewer: "It's nothing to do with pills ... It's just in your own head, the realisation."