Critical Mass

Sgt. Pepper turns 50

Beatles, rock ’n’ roll mature in masterpiece of an album

Best rock ’n’ roll album ever? The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released 50 years ago this month.
Best rock ’n’ roll album ever? The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released 50 years ago this month.

"A decisive moment in western civilisation ..."

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The Beatles — Ringo Starr (from left), John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney — were photographed in the studio while recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

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All dressed up for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: Ringo Starr (from left), John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.

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A 50th anniversary reissue of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band contains four CDs, two DVDs, a book and other memorabilia.

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A studio portrait of The Beatles taken some 50 years ago — Paul McCartney (clockwise, from top left), Ringo Starr, John Lennon and George Harrison.

-- theater critic Kenneth Tynan on The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the Times of London, shortly after the album's release in June 1967

The 50th anniversary commemorative edition of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was inevitable. The pricey (about $150) four-CD, two-DVD set is something you'll either feel compelled to buy or not. I'm glad to have it, for I can finally recover the novelty cardboard cutouts I so cavalierly cut out (and lost) when I was a kid.

The second and third CDs contain 33 additional recordings from the studio sessions, most previously unreleased and mixed for the first time from the four-track session tapes, sequenced in chronological order of their recording dates. And, nerd alert, new stereo mixes of "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" are included.

A number of ancillary products have been released, chief among them former EMI press officer Brian Southall's coffee-table book Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: The Album, The Beatles and The World in 1967 (Imagine!, $30) and Rob Sheffield's Dreaming The Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World (Dey Street Books, $24.95). While I'd recommend these books to the faithful, I'm not sure I learned much new from them.

Album listening can be a ritual, a solemnized habit that is the greater part of religions. It doesn't matter that the stories are familiar. That's how a song is like a prayer. You understand that it's held sacred.

It all comes down to context: I received the moptops as a child and loved them as the cartoons they aspired to be. A decade later I threw them off for reasons that had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with my self-image as an angry young artist. Had someone asked in those days, I might have attacked Sgt. Pepper as a betrayal of the iconoclastic mission of rock 'n' roll, a music hall tea party with artistic pretensions.

But youth makes rash judgments, charged with Oedipal imperatives. That is why rock 'n' roll exists and why the perfect trajectory for a rock 'n' roll band is three years and a (figurative, please; no one should die before they get old) plane crash. Better to burn out than fade away.

While The Beatles transcend rock 'n' roll, in the '70s they seemed in retrograde, as stars sometimes do ... not because their orbits change, but because our perspectives do.

By the time the Sgt. Pepper CD was finally released amid hype in 1987, I had figured out that The Beatles were sublime and Sgt. Pepper was overrated. Rubber Soul and Revolver were better albums; so were -- I subversively suggested -- the bloated "white album" and the blighted Let It Be.

These days I think its silly to try to impose hierarchical rankings on living art and that, whatever else it is, Sgt. Pepper is the strongest argument ever made for rock 'n' roll as serious art. Even though it's not really a rock 'n' roll record.

Posit The Sun Sessions, Pet Sounds, Thriller, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Born to Run, Never Mind the Bollocks or London Calling or something Dylan did as more significant or affecting and we'll listen politely until it's our turn to talk.

Dither the definition of rock 'n' roll -- which is, as Robert Fripp and Daryl Hall observed, "something in four-four time," a simple music based largely on major, minor and seventh chords that can be played (and is often best performed) by enthusiast amateurs -- if you like. Deny that it's a kind of musical theater designed to be experienced live, that the immediate interaction between performer and audience is a critical part of it. Rock 'n' roll is a communal practice that happens in a crowd.

Sgt. Pepper happens in your head.

...

I remember lying on the floor of a schoolmate's bedroom in 1969, parsing the lyrics of the domestic homilies "Getting Better," "Fixing a Hole" and "She's Leaving Home" which we somehow -- and, all these years later I still believe, correctly -- identified as the heart of the album, anchoring it to the world beyond the Vaudeville ersatz the lads cooked up.

"She's Leaving Home" was, like "A Day in the Life," inspired by a newspaper article.

Paul McCartney read in the Daily Mirror about 17-year-old Melanie Coe, who disappeared from her comfortable Stamford Hill home in North London in February 1967. Pregnant, afraid of her parents' wrath, she ran off with a croupier from a quasi-legal London casino (who was not the father of her child). They holed up in a Bayswater flat for a week before her parents tracked her down. (No word on what became of the croupier, who might have known he was playing with fire -- Melanie's mother was a hairdresser whose clients included the mother of notorious mobsters Reggie and Ronnie Kray.)

McCartney didn't realize it at the time, but he'd met Coe three years earlier on the set of the BBC's pop music show Ready Steady Go! after she'd won a lip-sync contest. In a 2008 story in the Daily Mail, Coe remembered:

"We had spent a long day in the studio filming. John Lennon was aloof and unapproachable, Paul shook our hands but Ringo and George were sweethearts, chatting to us all day. ... Something probably clicked in Paul's mind when he read the story about me running away from home three years later, as it was pretty unusual back then."

"She's Leaving Home" is lovely, as intricate and precise as a Schubert lieder with its dreamy array of ninth and 11th chords, and a fine example of what McCartney and Lennon could do in collaboration. McCartney wrote and sings the verses, while Lennon came up with the Greek chorus counterpoint ("We gave her most of our lives ... sacrificed most of our lives") that comments on the narrative from the parents' point of view. It's also the first Beatles' song on which no member of the band plays an instrument. George Harrison and Ringo Starr weren't involved at all, and while producer George Martin conducted the string orchestra that performed the track, he was not involved in the arrangement.

Martin wasn't available, so McCartney handed the arrangement off to Mike Leander (who'd later play a role in the creation of Gary Glitter). (Aside from Phil Spector's infamous work on Let It Be, Leander was the only outside producer other than Martin to work with The Beatles during the active recording of a song.)

"Getting Better" is also interesting in that while it's sung by McCartney (and generally credited to him), it's Lennon's confession:

"All that 'I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved' was me," Lennon told Playboy magazine shortly before he was murdered in 1980. "'I used to be cruel to my woman ... physically -- any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace. Everything's the opposite. But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster."

And "Fixing a Hole," which my junior high buddies insisted was about cooking up heroin, looks from this end of the telescope like nothing more than an alienated young rock star's attempt to remain connected to some reality beyond the scary obsessives lurking just beyond his doorstep. People always read too much into lyrics -- "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" probably was about a drawing Lennon's son Julian made.

Never was the artistic tension and competition between Lennon and McCartney more useful than in the making of Sgt. Pepper. They both contributed fragments to the masterful "A Day in the Life." Lennon's druggy Joycean musing on the alienating effect of the media on modern man might seem stuffy without McCartney's jouncing middle section ("Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head ...") and McCartney's sweetness -- which dominates the album -- might seem a little cloying were it not for a sprinkling of Lennon's acerbity.

Harrison contributes a strong effort, "Within You Without You." (No other Beatle plays on the track; it was recorded with Harrison on sitar, guitar and tamboura along with a host of uncredited Indian musicians and members of the London Symphony Orchestra.) Often regarded as the album's weakest track, a dour sermon in the midst of a loopy carnival, it presents a prescient merging of musical cultures, a peek at a pop world to come when artists like Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon would bring world music back home.

It also serves as a kind of intermission -- a moment of self-reflection between the stomping circus goofiness of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" and the insouciance of "When I'm Sixty-Four." It adds ballast to an album that otherwise might seem precious and light.

Here's what Robert Christgau wrote about the album in Esquire in December 1967:

"'Fixing a Hole' is not like other songs by stupid groups that say I am alienated and junk like that ... I can't believe that The Beatles indulge in the simplistic kind of symbolism that turns a yellow submarine into a Nembutal or a banana ... I think they want their meanings to be absorbed on an instinctual level, just as their new, complex music can be absorbed on a sensual level. I don't think they much care whether Sgt. Pepper is Great Art or some other moldy fig. And I think they are inordinately fond (in a rather recondite way) of what I call the real world."

Christgau's review was really more a review of the reviewers. For lots of people (including Capitol Records, which bizarrely proclaimed Sgt. Pepper "The Beatles' first great album") made a lot of claims about it. According to Christgau, Newsweek compared The Beatles "unpejoratively and in order, to Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edith Sitwell, Charlie Chaplin, Donald Barthelme, Harold Pinter, and T.S. Eliot" but "not to Elvis Presley or even Bob Dylan."

In retrospect, a lot of those other reviewers, especially Jack Kroll, the Newsweek critic Christgau was playfully calling out, were right. Kroll wrote that "A Day in the Life" was "The Beatles' 'Waste Land,' a superb achievement of their brilliant and startlingly effective popular art."

...

In the months before The Beatles began to work on Sgt. Pepper, an extraordinary number of what might be called progressive rock 'n' roll albums were released. Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, The Who's A Quick One, The Byrds' Fifth Dimension, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, The Rolling Stones' Aftermath and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention's Freak Out all sought to extend the frontiers of the rock album.

Especially Pet Sounds.

As musically sophisticated as any pop album ever made, graced with sublime harmonies, descending minor chords and gossamer-weight cascading strings that belie the straightforwardness of the lyrics, Pet Sounds imbued the myth of innocence with an innate, ineffable sadness and sense of longing. Brian Wilson's invented California had room for Charles Manson as well as little surfer girls. It and the other experimental albums of the era asked a poignant question that The Beatles needed to answer: "How do you grow up as a rock 'n' roll musician?"

By 1966, that question must have weighed on them. With 1965's Rubber Soul and 1966's Revolver, they'd shed their "yeah-yeah-yeah" pop style for a more mature, Dylan-influenced identity. They were artists, more concerned with expressing ideas than selling units. But while the band had evolved, by and large, their fans hadn't. They had become too large a phenomenon to continue playing rock 'n' roll in any traditional sense.

On March 4, 1966, London's Evening Standard published the infamous interview with Lennon in which he was quoted as saying, "Christianity will go. It will shrink and vanish. We're more popular than Jesus now."

More an expression of exasperation than blasphemy, by the time the band arrived in America for their third and final tour they were figures of widespread opprobrium. Beatles gear was being heaped into bonfires and burned and Lennon's public apology couldn't prevent the tour from being a commercial and artistic disaster. About half the seats went unsold. After the band's final concert in San Francisco's Candlestick Park, Harrison impulsively announced he was leaving the band. The center could not hold.

The Beatles were done with rock 'n' roll as public performance art.

Yet another way presented itself. While Revolver couldn't be accurately reproduced on stage by the band alone, it was a tremendous critical and popular success. If anyone could find a way to escape the conventional demands of a music career -- the staging of actual concerts -- it would be The Beatles.

And they did.

The facts of Sgt. Pepper's creation have passed into legend. It took four months to assemble (compared with one day of recording for the first album) on a four-track tape machine without any of the modern technology that enables musicians to lock in rhythms or synchronize tapes. Martin was constantly mixing the four tracks down to one and then starting again. Somehow he turned chicken squawks into guitars and manipulated the recording tape to give his piano playing a kind of honky-tonk wobble.

From the opening tuning-ups and crowd murmurs to the ultimate piano chord (and on to the silly gibberish), Sgt. Pepper is a masterpiece of aural engineering.

And it is the most important pop album ever made. Wrought of luck and magic, of ingenuity and a remarkable synergy, it's just one of those things, like the Grand Canyon or Mount Everest. It's an inexplicable wonder of the world, a mystery that renews our faith.

The Beatles only existed for about a decade, decades ago. They weren't rumor, and they weren't swamp gas. They were very real and very vital and the further we get from them the larger they appear, the less avoidable they seem.

It doesn't matter whether you believe in them or not.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style on 06/04/2017

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