The White Album Ensemble brings Sgt. Pepper’s to the Golden State Theater.

In 1967, The Beatles issued their biggest musical statement to date with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. A meticulously recorded 13-song album, Sgt. Pepper’s was groundbreaking in many ways. It features probably the most recognizable album cover in the world—which has The Beatles posing with people that they admired, including writer Edgar Allan Poe, rocker Bob Dylan, comedian Lenny Bruce and a handful of Indian gurus, among other notables. It has an epic single, “A Day in the Life,” that effortlessly shifts from spacey pop to experimental orchestral noise in seconds. And it showed that the formerly mop-topped band had fully embraced ‘60s counterculture from Eastern music (George Harrison’s “Within You Without You”) to drugs (“I get high with a little help from my friends”) to dress (the multi-colored pseudo-military uniforms).

Dale Ockerman, who plays keyboards and trumpets for the local White Album Ensemble, sees that embrace as the primary reason that Sgt. Pepper’s is such an enduring musical statement.

“I think it really expressed getting away from Beatlemania,” he says. “It was really revolutionary. It was the right record at the right time.”

Now, after having performed legendary Beatles works like The White Album, Rubber Soul and Revolver in the Monterey area, the White Album Ensemble—a team of crack regional musicians featuring former members of The Doobie Brothers and Snail—will play The Beatles master statement, Sgt. Pepper’s, as well as the subsequent Magical Mystery Tour album, in their entirety.

Ockerman says the band has already played the two works for enthusiastic audiences at Santa Cruz’s Rio Theater and San Jose’s Cesar Chavez Plaza. But the multi-instrumentalist says the band is very excited to bring the ambitious recordings to life in a venue as majestic as Monterey’s Golden State Theatre. In addition to the venue’s ornate beauty, Ockerman says, the theater is perfect for the show because the 40-foot wide stage is big enough to accommodate his band—which swells to 16 people during some songs—and it already has a movie screen for the group’s accompanying video presentation.

For the White Album Ensemble, nailing down all the complicated parts of Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical Mystery Tour, which features hard-to-recreate numbers like “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am the Walrus,” has been no easy task. Ockerman says the eight core members of the group spent six months planning how to play the records live and another three months rehearsing their parts. “This is more difficult than The White Album, Rubber Soul and Revolver,“ Ockerman says of the project.

One impressive feat the White Album Ensemble accomplished was finding pair of local musicians to play some of the rare instruments found on the two recordings. Ockerman says Barry Phillips will play an Indian instrument called the dilrhuba on “Within You Without You,” while Shelley Phillips will perform with a swormandel, zither and a cor anglais.

Since the White Album Ensemble only performs studio material that The Beatles never played live (with the exception of Rubber Soul and Revolver), the band is running out of pieces. Ockerman says that this January the group will probably start work on adapting Abbey Road to local stages. The keyboardist says that instead of also mastering The Beatles’ uneven swansong Let It Be, the band will most likely focus on getting together Beatles singles like “Lady Madonna” for the next round of performances.

While Ockerman says it will probably be May 2006 before the White Album Ensemble unveils their Abbey Road show, local rock and pop music fans will probably have a handful of performances at the Golden State Theatre to look forward to in the meantime, says Warren Dewey, owner of the venue. Though the theater will continue playing old movies, Dewey—an engineer and producer who has worked with rock acts like Kiss and Boston—says that he is planning on trying to get what he calls “great players” once a month in the venue after the start of next year. “We are hoping to get some fairly major acts in the theater,” he says.

THE WHITE ALBUM ENSEMBLE PERFORMS SGT. PEPPERS LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND AND MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR AT THE GOLDEN STATE THEATRE, 417 ALVARADO ST. IN MONTEREY, THIS SATURDAY AT 8PM. $20/BALCONY; $25/FLOOR; $37.50/CENTER SECTION OF THE FIRST 10 ROWS. 372-4555.