You might have heard of this one.
*****
Oh, were you expecting Revolver?
There’s been a lot of talk going around these days that Revolver is a better album than Sgt. Pepper. And I don’t know about that.
We’re all entitled to our opinion, de gustibus non est disputandum, yadda yadda yadda, but this has really gotten out of hand. You like Revolver? Fine. But you’re telling me that not only is Revolver is a better album than Sgt. Pepper, but that it’s better than Rubber Soul, the White Album, Abbey Road … in other words, are you trying to tell me Revolver is the best Beatles album?
Revolver? The album with “Yellow Submarine” on it?
And by extension, if the proverbial greatest album of all time is a Beatles album (a claim few would consider outlandish), have we awkwardly turned Revolver into the greatest album of all time? Something smells fishy here – and it ain’t my submarine.
Critical opinion can be a funny thing. For many years, there was another album that, by consensus, used to be considered the greatest album of all time (I’ll have a few words to say about it in a moment). But then came the scariest word in the English language:
Backlash.
If you haven’t been paying much attention, you might think the backlash against Sgt. Pepper is a recent development. But oh no, this all started ages ago. According to Gillian Gaar in Sgt. Pepper at Fifty, in 1979, Greil Marcus “regarded it as an album that had outlived its usefulness, one ‘which today seems artificial where Rubber Soul seems full of life’ and went on to dismiss it as a ‘Day-Glo tombstone for its time,’” while in 1980, Lester Bangs similarly wrote that “the garage-rock classic ‘Louie Louie’ had ‘already lasted longer than Sgt. Pepper … who in the hell does any songs from that album anymore?’”
I guess that’s one way to look at it. To be fair, “Louie Louie” is a lot easier to play. Summarizing his take on the Beatles’ catalogue in his 1988 book Tell Me Why, Tim Riley wrote:
Their early sound peaks with A Hard Day’s Night, progresses uneasily through Beatles for Sale and Help!, ripens and blooms on Rubber Soul and Revolver. By 1966, after barely four years of recording, Revolver stands as the pinnacle of all they can do: there are no weak tracks, and most of what follows deserves to be measured against it. The rest of the catalogue maps their dissolving partnerships: Sgt. Pepper, the most famous, is also the most overrated; Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine are embarrassments; the “White Album” is a patchwork interwoven by great playing; Let It Be is an overhauled modesty. Abbey Road, although a success, doesn’t quite extend or improve upon what Revolver attained.
There you go. It was all downhill after Revolver. You heard it here first. But this was only the beginning. In my college years (1998-2002), I used to stare incredulously at critics’ polls, published by everyone from VH1 to Virgin Records, which would place Revolver at #1 and Sgt. Pepper who knows where. These days, even when Revolver is not at the top, I usually see it placing higher than Sgt. Pepper. For example, Acclaimed Music currently ranks Revolver at #3 and Sgt. Pepper at #6.
You’re probably looking at all this numerical hairsplitting and saying, “Honestly, who cares?” I mean, #6 is pretty close to #3, right? The short answer is: I care, damn it. The longer answer is: I’ve yet to hear an argument for why Revolver is better than Sgt. Pepper that I’ve found to be truly persuasive. And I think this elevation of one album over the other says something about the misguided priorities of most music critics. You want to go to bat for Revolver? Be my guest. But you better convince me that Revolver means as much to you as Sgt. Pepper means to me.
Besides, in some polls the discrepancy is ridiculous. Somewhere in that stack of “greatest albums” lists that I printed out in my dorm one night and still needlessly keep in a box on my shelf is a 1999 poll by the New Musical Express which put Revolver at #3 and Sgt. Pepper at #33, only a few spots below Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, and a 2001 Mojo Magazine poll which put Revolver at #3 and Sgt. Pepper at #51, only one spot below Moby Grape’s Moby Grape. Moby Grape? That wasn’t even the tenth best album that year.
WARNING: If you’re one of those people who has always thought Sgt. Pepper was overrated and that all the praise directed its way has annoyed the shit out of you, then this essay might annoy the shit out of you too. I fear the collective groan I just heard as internet users the world over saw my pick for #1 could rival the disturbance in the Force that Obi-Wan felt when the Empire blew up Alderaan. But one thing this essay won’t make you think is that I’ve put Sgt. Pepper at #1 because someone told me I’m supposed to. Honest question: these days, is this pick clichéd or contrarian?
I support the notion that widely accepted opinions should be challenged. Since the moment it was released, both the public and the critical establishment alike placed Sgt. Pepper on such a lofty perch that I imagine many people found it super irritating to be told, repeatedly, that Sgt. Pepper was “The Greatest Album of All Time.” Oh yeah? You call anything The Greatest Anything of All Time and it just makes you want to hoist a middle finger.
But Revolver? I feel like Revolver has become The Greatest Album of All Time by default, because hey, people used to say it was Sgt. Pepper, but we can’t say that anymore because, well, there are all kinds of issues with it that we didn’t notice before, since we were so blinded by, you know, how awesome it was, so the crown goes to … Revolver! But I rarely see the love for Revolver as Revolver.
Two examples. In his essay on the Beatles’ catalog in the 2004 edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide, Rob Sheffield (AKA my secret nemesis) lists all the genres the Beatles tackle on Revolver, including acid rock, chamber music, raga, and R&B (as if diversity alone makes album great?), before concluding, “These days, Revolver has earned its reputation as the best album the Beatles ever made, which means the best album by anybody.” Really? That’s all he’s got? This might be the most passive-voiced greatest album endorsement ever. Translation: “It’s the album a broad swath of critics has the least issues with, so by default, I guess it’s the best?” But I want to know what the album means to him personally. Hell, he sounds more excited writing about Help! a couple of paragraphs earlier: “Help! was a big step forward, exploring doubt, loneliness, alienation, adult sexual longing, acoustic guitars, electric piano, bongos, castanets, and the finest George songs known to man” (and I thought I was the only one who liked “You Like Me Too Much” too much). While he’s not too hard on Sgt. Pepper, he doesn’t consider it better than Revolver, writing, “It’s a masterwork of sonics, not songwriting – the words and melodies are a lot more rickety than on the previous three albums.”
Uh-huh.
On Team Revolver, Sheffield has a partner in All Music’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine, and how do I know this? Listen to how Erlewine starts his review of Sgt. Pepper: “With Revolver, the Beatles made the Great Leap Forward, reaching a previously unheard-of level of sophistication and fearless experimentation. Sgt. Pepper, in many ways, refines that breakthrough …” Aw, isn’t that cute? A “refinement.” Let’s pat Sgt. Pepper on the head and give it a biscuit. In other words: despite all the fancy bells and whistles, the Beatles didn’t do much on Sgt. Pepper that they hadn’t already done on Revolver. In his Revolver review, he does what every reviewer of Revolver does (because through how many lenses can you review Revolver?), which is discuss John’s songs, Paul’s songs, and George’s songs separately (as if evaluating a great album is like adding up groceries at the register and seeing which album’s total comes out the highest?), before concluding:
The biggest miracle of Revolver may be that the Beatles covered so much new stylistic ground and executed it perfectly on one record, or it may be that all of it holds together perfectly. Either way, its daring sonic adventures and consistently stunning songcraft set the standard for what pop/rock could achieve. Even after Sgt. Pepper, Revolver stands as the ultimate modern pop album and it’s still as emulated as it was upon its original release.
But again, how much does the album mean to him? The discussion is all too clinical for my taste. The album looks nice and clean on a spreadsheet, but that’s not enough.
I suspect Capitol Records is partially to blame for the shift in the two albums’ reputations, considering that, back in 1966, they didn’t even give U.S. listeners the full Revolver. Instead, they infamously plucked three John songs from the U.K. version (“I’m Only Sleeping,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” “Doctor Robert”), and replaced them with … nothing. Thus, Americans got a Revolver with five Paul songs, one Ringo song, three George songs, and … two John songs? George getting more songs than John? That’s cool, except it totally fucks with the balance of the album. Naturally, the CD release of Revolver standardized the U.K. version, and as Sheffield points out, “Ever since Revolver has been steadily climbing in public estimation.”
And yet, even with the three Lennon songs added back in, I still don’t think it’s better than Sgt. Pepper.
Am I some ornery grouch who hates revisionism? Am I stubbornly clinging to the Sgt. Pepper “myth,” whatever the hell that may be? No. I’ve been reading about this crap for three decades now, and I’m sick of rock critics putting words into my mouth. You think you know Revolver vs. Sgt. Pepper? Well you don’t know shit.
To me, the chief difference between Revolver and Sgt. Pepper is a difference in the quotient of part-time Buddhism. In other words, I find Revolver to be the Beatles at their least part-time Buddhist. It’s the sound of sex, drugs, and empty hedonism – the Beatles at their most self-absorbed. Artistically innovative and cutting edge, yes, but … self-absorbed. Revolver is the party that I wasn’t invited to. Speculate on my personal life as you see fit, but I find the vibe of Revolver, at least compared to the albums it’s sandwiched between, to be ice cold. It’s the favorite Beatles album for fucked up druggie people.
I’m not sure what happened. Rubber Soul feels like a rustic cottage in a pristine forest on a rainy autumn evening. While branching out into more adult lyrical themes, the band were still interlacing those themes with a beauty and wisdom that gave them warmth and humanity. “Nowhere Man,” “In My Life,” “Norwegian Wood” … I feel like John, in particular, was somehow learning to fuse joy, regret, nostalgia, and bitterness into one terrifyingly new Lennon super-emotion.
(Note: If not for my self-imposed “three Beatles albums max” rule, Rubber Soul most likely would have slipped into my top ten, although I can’t decide if I prefer the U.K. or the U.S. version, and when you’re ranking albums, that is kind of a problem.)
And then some dentist slipped acid into his coffee, and, for one album at least, that fusion went bye-bye. Instead we got songs like “Doctor Robert,” an ode to John’s drug dealer? So moving. So touching.
Yes, “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It’s weird, adventurous, forward-thinking, and also, in terms of its overall vibe, kind of … unpleasant? It’s the sound of John tripping on acid, thinking he’s found “the answer” because he’s read one Timothy Leary book. “But what else do you want?” say my Revolver partisan readers. “He’s incorporating Eastern philosophy into rock music; what could be more part-time Buddhist than that?” Well, I’m on board with the essence of what’s being said, but I’m not convinced by the spirit behind it. As George Harrison observed in The Beatles Anthology: “I am not too sure if John actually fully understood what he was saying. He knew he was onto something when he saw those words and turned them into a song. But to have experienced what the lyrics in that song are actually about? I don’t know if he fully understood it.”
I feel comfortable answering that with more confidence than George did. John had zero understanding of it. He thought it sounded cool. “Listen to the colour of your dream”? “Love is all and love is everyone”? These are first-time user’s insights. It’s like when Paul first smoked pot with Dylan in 1964, jotted down what he thought was the meaning of the universe, looked at it the next morning, and saw a note that read “There are seven levels.” First-time users’ insights are fine, but they’re also … shallow? Compare these lyrics to the ones in “A Day in the Life,” which read like the entire 20th century shedding a single, solitary tear for itself.
I’m not saying the “Tomorrow Never Knows” praise is undeserved. Ringo’s drumming? Hypnotic. The sped-up tape loop of Paul’s laughter? Sounds like a seagull in need of an exorcism. John’s vocal recorded through a Leslie speaker? Sounds like that moment in The Sword and the Stone where Merlin transforms into a germ inside Madame Mim during the battle of the wizards. Perhaps the most impressive feat is that, despite all the unhinged experimentation, the song is outright catchy. But, I mean … “A Day in the Life,” you feel me? Maybe I can buy John the sarcastic suburbanite more than I can buy John the transcendental guru.
Or take “She Said She Said.” Who can’t relate to having a bad trip with Peter Fonda in the pool of someone’s Hollywood mansion? Just a few months earlier, John was giving me lyrics that felt like a comforting hug around my soul (“There are places I remember/All my life, though some have changed”), and now, he’s giving me lyrics that feel like I’m giving a ride to the sketchy hitchhiker with a nose ring in a Skinny Puppy t-shirt (“She said/I know what it’s like to be dead”). I’d like to keep my distance, please. Nice drumming, though.
I get the same vibe from George’s Revolver material, like “Love You To.” Ooh, he’s exploring Indian mysticism! I mean, if this isn’t part-time Buddhism, then what is? But again, I find the general sentiments to be trivial. “Make love all day long/Make love singing songs”? Translation: “Look at me, I’m rich and famous, I’m dropping acid, I’m listening to Indian music, I’m getting laid three times a day.” Compare that to “We were talking/About the space between us all.” As with John, I feel like he had to sit with the repercussions of the hallucinogenic experience for a little while before being able to take his insights in a more contemplative direction.
A lot of the lyrics on Revolver strike me as examples of “maturity” that aren’t true maturity. “Taxman”? Ooh, it’s a huge step forward because it’s “social commentary.” Well yes, but it’s also … whiny social commentary. George bitching about paying too much in taxes? Lame. Points given for pushing the band’s subject matter into non-romantic territory, but points deducted for whininess. I once saw “Taxman” on a list of “Top Ten Rock Anthems For Conservatives,” so there you go. Love the bass line, though. To be fair, the tax rates for high earners in Britain at that time were steep (“one for you, nineteen for me” was not, if you can believe it, an exaggeration). On the other hand, listening to this album sixty years later, who cares about George Harrison being richer than everyone else? Where was Krishna there, huh buddy?
Unlike John and George, Paul was reluctant to drop LSD and didn’t do so until the Sgt. Pepper sessions, which means that, in some ways, I find his Revolver material more grounded and relatable, since he hadn’t quite flown the coop. But how much do I relate to expressions of romantic bliss like “Good Day Sunshine” and “Here, There, and Everywhere,” no matter how well-crafted?
“Wait,” you say, “prior to Revolver, weren’t all Beatles songs just expressions of romantic bliss?” Yes, but I always got the sense that those early lyrics were placeholder lyrics. Early Beatles songs were all about the subtext. They may have been singing “She Loves You,” but what they were really singing was, “Life is exciting!” Suddenly I get to “Here, There, and Everywhere,” and I feel like Paul is genuinely singing about running his fingers through his extremely attractive girlfriend’s hair. It’s a self-absorbed love song. Possibly the most flawless self-absorbed love song anyone has ever written, but … I can only embrace this kind of thing so much.
And “Good Day Sunshine”? What goes for “Here, There, and Everywhere” goes double for “Good Day Sunshine.” I don’t care how blissful Paul is frolicking with his paramour by shady trees and shit. It’s way too “I’m in love and it’s a sunny day” for this allegedly mature stage in their career. Come on Paul. I thought you’d graduated on to moodier relationship portraits like “I’m Looking Through You” and “You Won’t See Me.” Yes, it’s “I’m in love and it’s a sunny day” in a more tasteful, artful fashion than earlier songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Feel Fine,” but that only makes me resent it more, because no one claims those lyrics are profound. I love upbeat, optimistic McCartney songs as much as the next guy, but this feels like an ignorant kind of optimism. Where’s my “I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved” in there to balance things out? Navel-gazing. Admit it. And there are some weird production choices that have always irked me, like the oddly muffled piano that’s playing abnormally low notes. Who wants ‘60s Swinging London pop with super-deadened piano?
“Got To Get You Into My Life”: ostensibly another love song, potentially with more moodiness to it than the other two, although Paul later admitted that he wrote it as a love letter to smoking pot. Deep dude, really deep. And the mix is too trebly. Who records a soul pastiche by making the mix trebly? I’ve got an idea. Remove some of the muffled piano sound from “Good Day Sunshine,” add it to “Got to Get You Into My Life,” and things might even out.
So, “Yellow Submarine.” My favorite Beatles movie. Not my favorite Beatles song. I ask you: what kind of a chorus is this? “We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine”? Doesn’t a chorus need to have a rhyme? Couldn’t we at least have come up with a rhyme in there somewhere? It reads like a song they spent five minutes on and didn’t finish. “And our friends are all aboard/Many more of them live next door”? Next door to what? Our friends who are aboard? Anyone living next door to them would be living in the ocean. It doesn’t add up, people. It doesn’t … add … up. “And the band begins to play …” Interesting, but we need another line that rhymes with “play,” right? Nope, here’s a snippet of off-key tuba in its place. And Sheffield calls the songwriting on Sgt. Pepper “more rickety.” Sure.
But “Yellow Submarine” “adds to the album’s eclecticism.” I guess so. And kids like it. It doesn’t reek of sex and drugs, so shouldn’t I be all over it? I don’t know. Compare it to the Ringo track on Sgt. Pepper, “With a Little Help from My Friends,” which kids also like, but which hides a sense of loneliness and inadequacy beneath its jolly surface. “Yellow Submarine” is just … jolly surface. Hell, compare it to “Octopus’s Garden,” which at first glance also seems childish and stupid, until you realize that Ringo not only composed it himself, but became inspired to write it after he temporarily quit the Beatles, went on holiday in the Mediterranean to get away from it all, and realized he’d rather be an octopus than have to deal with the Beatles’ breakup. But I digress.
“I’m Only Sleeping” does have a serenity to it, but I’d call it a chemically induced serenity. In other words, Lennon only sounds at peace with his lethargy because he’s high as a kite. Take the drugs away, and aren’t the venom and resentment still underneath, waiting to be dealt with later? It’s like having a runny nose and just pinching your nose.
Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t see any way they could have made Sgt. Pepper without making Revolver first. But that doesn’t mean I like it more. It’s a smashing album, by most bands’ standards. But the Beatles aren’t most bands. To use a David Lean analogy, Revolver is like the Bridge on the River Kwai to Sgt. Pepper’s Lawrence of Arabia. (I guess this would make Magical Mystery Tour … Doctor Zhivago? A Hard Day’s Night … Brief Encounter?)
The problem with whining about Revolver track-by-track is that “Eleanor Rigby” is on it. Now this is what I want to hear the Beatles singing about: lonely spinsters and the lonely priests who fail to save them. You’d expect a lesser band to sing about tripping on acid with Peter Fonda in a Hollywood pool, but Eleanor Rigby, Father McKenzie … aren’t these the kind of people the cool kids overlook? What set the Beatles apart was their willingness to elevate these random, forgotten souls into the focus of artful, poetic snapshots. I want more of this on my Beatles albums.
With “For No One,” Paul gives me more. A relationship disintegrating, but … what era is it even disintegrating in? Listening to “For No One,” I don’t get mid-‘60s Britain; I get an 18th century French chateau. I’m wiping the wine off my lips with my intricately embroidered napkin, as my estranged spouse straightens her ruffled collar in the mirror by candlelight. Here’s the kind of world I want the Beatles to transport me to, not the one with laughing seagulls and muffled pianos. So I’ll give Revolver “Eleanor Rigby” and “For No One.” The thing is, I feel like Sgt. Pepper took this vibe and ran with it.
Honorable mentions go to “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “I Want to Tell You,” where John and George explore the frustration to connect, the inability to communicate, the desire to be understood by their companions and, in a sense, their broader audience. If Revolver had a little more of that and a little less whining about taxes, I might rank it higher.
Revolver people like Erlewine claim that “all of it holds together perfectly,” but honestly, I hear an album that’s quite disconnected, with Paul sounding like he’s on a completely different page than John and George are. When I think of the songs on Sgt. Pepper, I don’t think of them as “John songs” or “Paul songs,” I just think of them as Sgt. Pepper songs, magically springing out of the Sgt. Pepper universe they reside in.
Even in the album cover contest, Revolver gets its ass kicked. If one of the tape loops from “Tomorrow Never Knows” got sick and vomited out an album cover, it might have vomited out the album cover for Revolver. Line drawings of lizard Beatles with other tiny photo-Beatles living inside their ramen noodle hair? Does it give anyone else the creeps? It’s like a good Bee Gees album cover. And the back cover: “We’re so hip, we’re wearing sunglasses indoors.”
Despite what Riley, Sheffield, Erlewine, and others have written over the years, I don’t see Revolver as the Great Leap Forward (and how did the Beatles suddenly become Communist China here?). A leap forward sonically, perhaps, but not a leap forward philosophically. And to a part-time Buddhist, that’s the leap forward that really matters.
*****
What does it mean to be an entertainer? A celebrity? An artist? A spiritual/cultural leader? Is it possible to be all four?
The first sentence of Erlewine’s Revolver review is, “All the rules fell by the wayside with Revolver, as the Beatles began exploring new sonic territory, lyrical subjects, and styles of composition.” But I don’t think that’s accurate. Sure, one rule fell by the wayside: their recorded music could now sound like anything and be about anything (even griping about taxes). In terms of the Beatles’ larger career arc, though, all the rules, as I see it, were still in place. They still had to tour in silly suits, still had to be cautious during press conferences at the behest of their manager, still had to put gaps between songs, still had to let Capitol Records butcher their albums, etc. However much they may have been chafing at it, they were still playing the entertainment game.
Few 20th century artists ever found themselves in the position to shatter the entertainment paradigm. Elvis was one of those few, but I think he … fumbled it? Didn’t have it in him. Too passive, too deferential. To fair, when you’ve been raised in the rural, Depression-era South as he had, you’d be wise to be passive and deferential. Make too many waves in that environment and you might end up hanging from a tree.
But when Elvis became a superstar, he could have told Colonel Tom Parker and RCA what’s what, but he was fine with getting a mansion and some gold lamé suits and a bunch of fancy cars and not pushing the envelope. Given the opportunity to herald the dawning of a new age, he just kind of shrugged. As most of us would have, perhaps. He’d already made some daring choices in my view, but the man hit his limit. And for that first generation of fans – the Beatles’ generation – I think the failed promise of Elvis stung. They’d put their faith in him. “At last, an entertainer who’ll show some guts and make some waves!” But handed the chance of a lifetime, he squandered it on campy movie soundtracks.
Painful as his “failure” was, I think he served as a useful example for the Beatles. When Brian Epstein told them they had to keep touring because “that’s what the big acts do,” they told him to shove it. The Beatles took the so-called road less traveled, and here I am today, writing an essay about their iconic concept album, and not Elvis’s iconic concept album (although Elvis Country [I’m 10,000 Years Old] has its moments). No one back in 1967 could have anticipated that the Elvis story had one more glorious chapter in it, but … that’s an essay for another day.
My point is, when you’re at the top, it’s tempting to be safe. To quote an apocryphal Mike Love: “Don’t fuck with the formula.” That’s why I admire artists who push their audience, sometimes unwillingly, into places the audience doesn’t know it wants to go yet. Anybody can become popular. Hell, a record company can make you popular. No, it’s what you do with your popularity once you receive it that separates the famous from the truly heroic.
I wonder if we’ve wasted our time praising the Beatles for their musical talent; they themselves often stated that it felt like a gift. Paul said he dreamed “Yesterday.” John claimed that “Nowhere Man,” “In My Life,” and “Across The Universe,” to name a few, came to him as he fell asleep. Sure, and I’m an Eskimo. What I’m saying is, maybe the Beatles couldn’t help writing great songs, but they could have written great songs and stuck with the status quo.
I don’t find Revolver particularly brave or risky in that sense. From what I understand, even in the UK, where the public got the full Revolver, they saw it as another very impressive Beatles album with some cutting-edge stuff on it. I don’t think Revolver is where the Beatles shattered the entertainment paradigm, or showed that they were prepared to fulfill the promise Elvis had failed to deliver on. Imagine if the Beatles had all died in a plane crash in September 1966. How would they be remembered? Maybe they’d be remembered in the same way the Beach Boys are remembered (and Brian Wilson’s story might be more tragic than Elvis’s, because, like the Beatles and unlike Elvis, he made the “brave” artistic choice, but, unlike the Beatles, the rest of his band said, “What the hell are you doing?”).
For me, 1967 is where the Beatles dared to leap across an alligator pit on a motorcycle, while everyone in the bleachers held their breath, or screamed out “You fools, you’ll kill yourselves!,” and when they landed somewhere in the next county, all their doubters had to eat crow.When given the opportunity to smash the paradigm, they proved, unlike every entertainer before them, that they were indeed up for it. If anything, they mischievously turned the question around, with their audience suddenly finding itself being asked, “But are you up … for the Beatles?”
*****
Between the release of Revolver in August 1966 and the release of the “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane” single in February 1967, something happened. I don’t even need to listen to the music to know that. I just need to look at a photo:
Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. Has a band ever looked cooler than this? No. The answer is no.
And I don’t mean cool in a “wearing sunglasses indoors” sort of way. I mean cool in a “sullen, jaded Lost Generation poet smoking outside a Parisian café, mourning the death of the Age of Enlightenment” sort of way. I mean cool in a “Leonard Bernstein and eleven-year-old me could equally dig it” sort of way. I find this a more inclusive cool than the Revolver cool. I have to stop and ask myself, “What era am I looking at?” The Beatles quit touring, took a hiatus, and when the calendar hit 1967, they opened a hidden portal in the time-space continuum which allowed their music and image to simultaneously travel backward and forward in time. Retro-futurism, I’ve heard one book call it.
In his review of the Red Album (1962-1966), Erlewine writes that “perhaps it would have made more sense to include the Revolver cuts on its companion volume, 1967-1970.” No, stop, let go it man. Quit trying to make “fetch” happen. True, the Beatles already started using cellos and brass instruments in 1966, but what I hear in the 1967 material that I don’t hear as much in the 1966 material is a world-weariness. It’s like all the subliminal trauma from their World War II childhoods bubbled to the surface, the opening mellotron notes of “Strawberry Fields” signifying both a return to an infant state and a shift into the murky shadows of the past. Basically, in 1967, the Beatles became the Star Child.
Yes, “Strawberry Fields” is trippy and manic and carries a sense of foreboding, like “She Said She Said” or “Tomorrow Never Knows” do, but it’s also soothing and inviting in a way that I’d say those songs are not. It’s more fairy tale weird than acid trip weird. Not everyone can relate to tripping with Peter Fonda in a Hollywood mansion, but who can’t relate to feeling sad about their own childhood? What I hear in “Strawberry Fields” that I don’t hear in John’s Revolver songs is the pervasive melancholy and distant echo of pre-‘60s Britain that I hear in “Eleanor Rigby” and “For No One,” or, in John Harris’s words, a “collision of serenity and almost gothic eeriness.” There’s this mixture of the childlike and the ancient – two impulses that don’t seem reconcilable, but somehow, the man made it happen.
If there’s any song in popular music that conjures up a long-lost psychological habitat of youthful refuge to which one can never fully return, and which perhaps never existed to begin with, it’s this one. I feel like “Strawberry Fields” is the resurfacing of the “real” John, the one who was beginning to emerge on “Help!” and “In My Life” but found himself temporarily buried under piles of LSD, but now the trip is wearing off and he’s alone, afraid, and wondering, “Who am I?”
Yes, I know, “Strawberry Fields” isn’t on Sgt. Pepper. But it set the tone.
As did the “Strawberry Fields” promotional film. Is this film footage of the Beatles in a misty English park, or the mutual opium hallucinations of Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Gramme, and A.A. Milne? Compare this clip to the clip for “Rain,” where the Beatles look like the Byrds circa “Eight Miles High,” before Gram Parsons showed up to, you know, give their music soul and pathos.
Sometimes, a leap isn’t just about the music. Or it is about the music, but it happens under the surface. And not in a submarine.
*****
Even the guys on my own team hamper my argument.
In 2003, when Rolling Stone published their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, they placed Sgt. Pepper at #1. But their reasoning. Dear lord, their reasoning:
From the title song’s regal blasts of brass and fuzz guitar to the orchestral seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of “A Day in the Life,” the thirteen tracks on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band are the pinnacle of the Beatles’ eight years as recording artists. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were never more fearless and unified in their pursuit of magic and transcendence.
No, no, no. First of all, you start comparing Sgt. Pepper on a track-by-track basis with other Beatles albums, and you’re just going to give the Revolver people an opening. (Even though, on a track-by-track basis, I still prefer Sgt. Pepper.) But that’s not the way to make the case. It’s not exactly thirteen “Strawberry Fields Forevers” back-to-back.
Also, I wouldn’t say the four Beatles were “unified” in their intent or vision while making it. As far as I can tell, the two people involved with the making of Sgt. Pepper who truly loved making it and who were extremely proud of it afterward were Paul McCartney and George Martin. George Harrison … wasn’t that into it. Ringo … wasn’t that into it. John was fairly into it, and then the album came out, and then he met Yoko, and then he realized that Sgt. Pepper didn’t have nearly enough songs about Yoko on it, so he spent ten years telling interviewers that he thought it sucked. Therefore, the “Sgt. Pepper is overrated” crowd can say, “Look, even three out of the four Beatles thought the album was overrated!” I can see where those three were coming from but … never ask an artist to judge his own work. The thing is, whether they realized it or not, I think John, Paul, and George were very much in agreement while creating Sgt. Pepper, but it wasn’t so much an artistic agreement as it was a philosophical agreement.
Here’s another fun one. Before All Music replaced it with Erlewine’s respectful if not quite enthusiastic website review, my old print edition from 1997 features a notably more enthusiastic review from William Ruhlmann:
The Beatles’ finest album is a song cycle full of childlike whimsy and irresistibly catchy songs. Its playfulness belies an amazingly fluid arrangement of melodies, lyrics, and sounds that flow together into a whole, creating its own magical world. An open-ended embrace of light pop, hard rock, Indian music, swing, classical music, and blues, the album makes the case for musical unity-in-diversity, seemingly gathering all that came before it into surprising yet perfect combinations. The Beatles only occasionally approached this achievement in isolation moments afterward, and nobody else even came close, then or since.
Easy there, tiger. Clearly this guy’s not on Team Revolver. Look, I like the album too, but is it really necessary to make grandiose statements like “nobody else even came close”? Is it a contest? And does one reviewer get to decide what the Beatles’ “finest album” is? Do we need an official “Beatles’ finest album”? A six-way tie is probably fine with me. And “childlike whimsy,” “catchy songs” … he’s just feeding the naysayers’ narrative. Reviews like this, positive as they might be, aren’t helping the cause.
Then there are the people who say that Sgt. Pepper is great because it was the first “concept album.” But that just leaves an opening for detractors to point out that the execution of the alleged concept is pretty half-assed. “So the first track sets you up to think this is going to be a concert by some fictional band, and then they introduce the fictional singer, and then, OK, there’s a reprise at the end, but … did they just lose interest in the concept?”
Well, a rock opera, it isn’t. Paul has done this counterargument no favors by blabbing on about how “I thought it would be really interesting to actually take on the personas of this different band” and “When John came up to the microphone or I did, it wouldn’t be John or Paul singing, it would be members of this band.” I suspect he gave this idea to the other three, and the other three smiled, nodded, and went on making the normal Beatles album they thought they were making. As John famously put it, “All my contributions have absolutely nothing to do with this idea of Sgt. Pepper and his band, but it worked because we said it worked.” Nevertheless, “Mr. Kite” and “When I’m Sixty-Four” feel almost tailormade to fit in with the premise of some sort of pre-World War II variety show, and George even added audience laughter to the end of “Within You Without You” (although it sounds like it belongs to five people in a parlor rather than 5,000 people in an auditorium, but whatever).
No, Sgt. Pepper is not the story of four musician alter-egos with four intricate backstories. I guess that could have been an album. If that’s what you’re looking for, try The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands. Let The Who or the Moody Blues go off and make an actual concept album where all the songs explicitly address the concept, you know? In other words, I often hear Baby Boomer critics claim that, well back in 1967, the concept gave the album a veneer of superficial sophistication, and then that veneer rubbed off right around the same time the drugs did (1974?). Accuse me of inventing defenses of Sgt. Pepper if you want, but I’ve never seen the thinness of the fictional band concept as any sort of flaw or gimmick. Even as an eleven-year-old, I knew there was a reason why the album felt so unified, but at that age, I couldn’t put it into words.
In his essay in the 50th Anniversary booklet, classical scholar Howard Goodall suggests that the concept is chiefly a musical rather than lyrical one:
It takes a musical attitude and uses it to create architecture. If Revolver is like a photo album – fourteen exquisite, self-contained vignettes showcasing the talents of each Beatle in under three minutes each – Sgt. Pepper is like a film: not a passive record of a life, but a moving picture of it. Or perhaps, a dream of it. True, there is no narrative, but there is nevertheless forward momentum, an ebbing and flowing, like no other album before it. The ebb and flow comes from its unusually complex and sophisticated management of harmony and rhythm.
He goes on to cite the album’s repeated use of melodic techniques such as chromaticism, modulations, Anglo-Celtic modes, and aleatoric composition as a kind of auditory glue. I suspect that’s all true. But that’s not my angle.
See, to me, Sgt. Pepper is a concept album. Perhaps an unintentional concept album. But the real concept, in my view, is much better than the fake band idea. I like to think of Sgt. Pepper as an album with three layers.
The first layer is “We’re a fake band, and here is our show.” But that layer’s just a ruse, a decoy, a sly means of misdirection aimed to keep the listener off-balance. The point of the fake band concept isn’t for that concept to dominate the album. The point of the fake band concept is to disorient the shit out of you. OK, here’s Billy Shears, and then … “Picture yourself in a boat on a river”? So they’re not a fake band? Hold on, the album’s almost over, and the fake band is back? Are they the fake band or aren’t they?
Exactly.
The second layer of the album is the cheerful, whimsical, McCartney-dominated collection of singalong ditties that reek of Swinging London and the Summer of Love but is basically just another Beatles album, and, to its detractors, kind of an annoying one at that. I’ve heard people call Sgt. Pepper the Beatles’ “tea and crumpets” album. Sounds good to me, but I guess it’s not everyone’s cup of tea (and/or crumpets). I had a friend who claimed not to like Sgt. Pepper very much because it had songs like “When I’m Sixty-Four” on it. But when I kept naming other songs on the album, and he kept saying he liked the other songs I was naming, I realized that he basically just hated “When I’m Sixty-Four.” As if the whole album were that.
Also, I like “When I’m Sixty-Four.” My second favorite movie of the ‘60s is Mary Poppins. You think I wouldn’t like “When I’m Sixty-Four”?
A lot has been said about Sgt. Pepper in the last 60 years, but to me, most people have gotten it all wrong. They make it sound like it’s this sunny, optimistic album that describes some naïve hippie utopian vision, a vision which idealistic Baby Boomers once pinned all their hopes and dreams on, as if the album had been heralding the Second Coming, but then came Reagan and crack and all their hippie friends got jobs as lawyers and stockbrokers and the promise of the album turned out to be one big, fat lie.
None of those people, I suspect, have listened very closely to Sgt. Pepper.
Because the third layer of the album, the one that can be glimpsed between the cracks of the second and first layers, is the real Sgt. Pepper. And this layer is haunting, mysterious, menacing, unnerving, and, if you’re not careful enough, can burn a hole through your skull. There are a lot of words in the album’s title, but to me, the key word in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is “lonely.”
The secret of Sgt. Pepper is that it’s a dark record masquerading as a cheerful one. It pulls you in with its whimsy until, once your guard is down, it hits you hard with its existential dread. Like “Strawberry Fields Forever,” I see the album as possessing this surreal, schizophrenic quality that makes even the happiest moments slightly threatening. Let’s call it “whimsicholy”? We’re talking some real “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” shit here.
Naïve hippie utopian vision? Are we listening to the same record? If I hear one more rock critic describe Sgt. Pepper as “an endless parade of psychedelic giddiness” or what have you, I am going to lose it. Sgt. Pepper is more like one of those flesh-eating plants that lures you in with its beautiful petals, and then snaps shut, slowly dissolving your bones with acid.
I’ve rarely heard anyone accurately describe what strikes me as its real concept – not even Paul McCartney. Perhaps when you’re that close to something, you can’t quite see it. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to call it a theme than a concept. But I think, for six decades, people have felt the concept, even if they couldn’t have articulated it. To reduce it to a couple of words, I’ll steal the tagline from the 1999 film American Beauty: “Look closer.” Or, to paraphrase another film from 1999, do you want the blue pill or the red pill?
Or, in the words of the album itself: “I’d love to turn you on.”
*****
I used to be mad at my parents for forcing me to discover the Beatles on my own, but now I think it might have been a blessing. I feel bad for those kids who came to the Beatles as their “parents’ music,” and thus came to resent it. Your parents’ music? Yeesh. Could anything be worse?
Prior to March 1991, I knew as little about the Beatles as any child of Baby Boomer parents possibly could have. I’d heard cover versions of Beatles songs (The Carpenters’ “Ticket to Ride,” the Chipmunks’ “Help!,” the Sesame Street Beetles’ “Hey Food” and “Letter B”) without knowing they were Beatles songs. I’d seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, so I must have heard “Twist and Shout,” but I didn’t know the Beatles were the ones performing it. A few months before my fandom began, I’d seen a TV special about the Ed Sullivan Show, so I’d recently learned about American Beatlemania and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and seen clips of all the girls going apeshit, but I didn’t quite understand why they were going apeshit. Four guys in funny suits and funny haircuts? Explanation, please?
Until that point, I had grown up on ‘80s Top 40 radio, and in March 1991, was knee-deep in early ‘90s Top 40 radio, via my favorite radio station, 99.7 X100. We’re talking the sounds of the day: Madonna, Janet Jackson, Roxette, Paula Abdul, Milli Vanilli, Soul II Soul, Bell Biv Devoe. Glimpses of pre-‘80s music that I had received from my father had been amusingly random: some expected fare like “Whole Lotta Love,” “American Pie,” and “Hotel California,” some less expected fare like the Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run,” Peter and Gordon’s “I Go to Pieces,” Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” Judy Collins’s “Amazing Grace,” and Poco’s “You Better Think Twice” (which hadn’t even been a Top 40 hit when it came out). A year or so prior, I’d found a cassette copy of the Beach Boys’ Endless Summer lying around the house, so that was a useful taste of ‘60s pop to receive.
Then one day, without warning, in March 1991, a month before I turned eleven, 99.7 started playing a documentary about “The History of Rock and Roll,” one of those four-hour audio documentaries put together by lord knows who, and they played it on repeat for about a week. Some anonymous narrator went on about Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and … what the hell had happened to my Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli? I was kind of annoyed, but the documentary was compelling, in its nostalgic Baby Boomer way. I felt like it was describing an ancient story that I needed to acquaint myself with if I’d wanted to consider myself more cultured. But at some point, X100 was coming back, right?
Then, after playing that documentary for a week, 99.7 started playing a “Top 100 Countdown” for another week. I think this was supposed to be a countdown of the “100 Greatest Songs of All Time,” but in retrospect, it was one bizarrely assembled countdown. This certainly wasn’t a countdown of the most successful Billboard Hot 100 songs of all time. Years later, I concluded it must have been compiled via a random fan survey, but alas, the countdown did not present its methodology.
It was the first time I heard many staples of oldies radio: “My Girl,” “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch),” “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (both the Marvin Gaye and Gladys Knight & the Pips versions), “In the Midnight Hour,” “Respect,” “Good Vibrations,” “Runaway,” “Chantilly Lace” (which I initially thought was a commercial), “Down on the Corner” (whose lead singer I initially thought was black), etc. The number one song on the countdown was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Solid choice. Hearing “Maggie May,” I thought, “Wait, Rod Stewart’s career goes back that far?” The countdown also included random ‘80s songs I already knew but hadn’t heard in years, like “Material Girl,” “Every Breath You Take,” “How Will I Know,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” Genesis’ “In Too Deep” … honestly, what kind of “Greatest Songs of All Time” countdown would include Genesis’ “In Too Deep”?
Anyway. Somewhere in the back half of this countdown, perhaps in the 70 or 80 range, was a very strange song indeed. It started out with ambient crowd noise, and then the singers started spending an inordinate amount of time explaining exactly who they were: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Why would a band bother singing about themselves? I mean, New Kids on the Block sang about themselves, but they had earned it. Was this a commercial too? The production style sure didn’t sound like early ‘90s radio commercial production. Was it some kind of … TV theme? And speaking of TV themes, why did it suddenly morph into a mellower, more up-tempo version of the theme from The Wonder Years? It was the darnedest thing I’d ever heard. But I couldn’t help singing along.
My father and I used to kill time in Circuit City by running down the aisle full of stereo systems, powering them on, and tuning the radios to five different channels at once. Good times. Well, the week of the countdown, horsing around in the Circuit City aisle, I tuned one of the radios to 99.7, and at that point the countdown had cycled back around to that strange “Sgt. Pepper” song.
“Hey, it’s ‘Sgt. Pepper,’” my dad said.
“Who’s Sgt. Pepper?”
“You don’t know Sgt. Pepper?” He said it as if I didn’t know who Mary Tyler Moore was, or Elliott Gould.
“No, who’s Sgt. Pepper?”
“Sgt. Pepper? Sgt. Pepper is nobody. Sgt. Pepper is the Beatles.”
The Seas parted. The Planets aligned. The Great Stone Door creaked open.
At first, I didn’t understand. The countdown included a few other Beatles songs on it, like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You,” but those sounded like the kind of songs I would have associated with the guys in funny suits and funny haircuts. This other song was … also the Beatles? Was he messing with me?
Not quite sensing my confusion, my father went on. “I think we’ve actually got a few Beatles records at home in our stack of records somewhere. Maybe when we get home I’ll pull them out.”
Fast-forward a couple of hours later, when my father proceeded to pull, from a long-buried pile of records, for the first time in my ten-plus years of living with him, original US LP copies of Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, and the White Album.
“Maybe we can put one on, if you want.”
Based on my fresh discovery of its title track, you can guess which album I gravitated toward first.
I don’t remember much about the first time I listened to Sgt. Pepper, other than I realized it was probably time to kiss Roxette and Bell Biv Devoe goodbye. Frankly, I was too busy soaking in the album cover to pay much attention to the music.
You give an eleven-year-old kid that album cover, and watch out. Where do I start? My feelings toward the Revolver and Sgt. Pepper album covers mirror my feelings toward albums themselves. Black and white, two-dimensional, and navel gazing vs. colorful, multifaceted, and outward looking. Everything I had to say about the Revolver album cover, I said in about two sentences. I could easily write a 30-page essay about the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Just the album cover. Not even get around to the music.
There are so many lives that intersect on the album cover, so many cultural and intellectual crosscurrents shooting off in unexpected directions. We’ve got people who were famous then and still famous now (Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, Karl Marx, Carl Jung), people who were famous then but not as famous now (Mae West, Tony Curtis, Lenny Bruce, Tyrone Power, Sonny Liston, Laurel and Hardy), and people who weren’t even particularly famous then (Issy Bonn, Albert Stubbins, Terry Southern, Karlheinz Stockhausen). We’ve got writers (Aldous Huxley, Edgar Allan Poe, William S. Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll), obscure artists mostly chosen by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, the married couple who designed the album cover (Aubrey Beardsley, Wallace Berman, Richard Lindler, Larry Bell, H.C. Westermann), George’s Indian gurus (Sri Yukteswar Giri, Mahavatar Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, Lahiri Mahasaya), deceased early Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, and … hey, isn’t that T. E. Lawrence?
The gang’s all here. But what does it mean? If the Sgt. Pepper cover could talk, what stories would it tell?
When I was eleven, I think I recognized Marilyn Monroe and Edgar Allan Poe and that was about it. I had questions. Why were some of the faces in black and white, while others were tinted in odd yellows and oranges? What was wrong with the sky? Why was there a doll that said “Welcome the Rolling Stones” on it? Why, on the left, were there wax figures of the Beatles – or rather, what I had previously thought of as the Beatles, with the funny suits and funny haircuts? And who were these other guys in the center, with the mustaches and the multi-colored uniforms? Were these the Beatles too? From the 50th Anniversary booklet: “The Beatles were not really depicted twice because, as Peter Blake explained, ‘It made sense that the Beatles would be fans of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’” Come again?
The Sgt. Pepper cover was my first glimpse of the later Beatles. No one had told me about the later Beatles.
And I was digging the later Beatles.
This changed the whole thing. This changed them from having been some silly cultural fad into having been something much … better?
(In addition to the wax dummies on the Sgt. Pepper cover, there are two other self-aware callbacks the 1967 Beatles made to the moptop Beatles which I find equal parts charming and chilling: 1) In the “Hello Goodbye” promotional film, there’s a brief cutaway to the four of them dressed in their moptop suits, Ringo and George looking especially incongruous with mustaches; 2) In the “All You Need Is Love” fade-out, amid the quotations of “love songs” that span the entirety of music history, Paul and/or John [there’s a whole internet controversy about this, I kid you not] ad-libs the chorus of “She Loves You,” and it’s merely a self-referential wink, but there’s something about the deepness of the voice, the grogginess of the delivery, and the usage of “love” in a vastly different context that brings the starkness of their evolution home. Like, how did we get from there … to here?)
And the gatefold photo. Oh man, the gatefold photo. In a way, this hit me harder than the front cover. I became the gatefold photo, and the gatefold photo became me. I longed to live in a world with Edwardian military uniforms and a bright yellow sky.
And the back cover. During that first listen, I think I spent more time staring at the back cover than the front cover. I obsessed over all the seemingly haphazard choices, like why “With a Little Help from My Friends” had been printed as “A Little Help from My Friends,” or why some lyrics had periods and commas after them and some didn’t, or how the lyrics to “Within You Without You” were barely decipherable due to their overlapping with the back of Paul’s blue uniform, or the meaning of all the random credits at the end (“Cover by M C Productions and the Apple”?). But despite a faint air of artistic grandeur, I grasped a certain humor behind it all. I felt like the only person on Earth who noticed, underneath the credit for Madame Tussauds, the text “A splendid time is guaranteed for all.” I want to know whose idea it was to put that in there. Paul? John? I’m guessing John. The Revolver back cover could have used a few easter eggs like that, is what I’m saying.
Also, the back cover was where I could find the lyrics. Even if you don’t consider Sgt. Pepper to be the best Beatles album, I doubt few would argue with me that it’s the Beatles’ most literary album – “the cameo storytelling, the narrative vernacular,” as Ed Vulliamy calls it in the 50th Anniversary booklet. And perhaps this goes hand-in-hand with how literary it is, but I would also call it the Beatles’ most British album. That Britishness annoys the crap out of some people, but it’s a big part of why eleven-year-old me was sucked right into it. The Isle of Wight? Bishopsgate? The House of Lords? The Albert Hall? Blackburn, Lancashire? The album almost needed footnotes. It had this unmistakable flavor of lives, cultures, and institutions that pre-dated me, and yet was all brand new to me. Whatever time and place the album was transporting me to, it felt far away from my mom’s pile of Slim Fast smoothies and aerobics tapes.
Here … was my means of escape.
*****
When people debate what the greatest album opening in rock history is, part of me finds all suggestions other than Sgt. Pepper suspect.
The album was – how shall I say this – anticipated? In the ten months since Revolver and Candlestick Park, there had been … chatter? Rumblings? Restlessness? What in God’s name were the Beatles up to? Were they done? Were they stuck? Sure, “Strawberry Fields”/“Penny Lane” shut everyone up for a while, but … a ten month wait between albums? Bad sign, right? As Paul described it years later, “I remember the great glee seeing in one of the papers how the Beatles have dried up … and I was sitting rubbing my hands, saying ‘You just wait.’”
A less confident band might have ignored audience expectations. Not only did the Beatles acknowledge expectations – they toyed with expectations. Instead of shrinking from the moment, they fed off the moment. Instead of floundering under the weight of their fame, they were thriving. They had everyone wrapped around their little Liverpudlian finger.
The album literally starts with the sound of that restless anticipation. The needle hits the record. You’ve waited all these months, expecting to hear the Beatles, and the first sound is … an orchestra tuning up?
What the …?
That snippet of soon-to-be-infamous ambiance, taken from EMI sound effects library tape Indoor Crowd Atmosphere and Background, is like the audio equivalent of the record buying public on June 1, 1967. Murmurs, whispers, someone in a tuxedo coughing. “Have you heard anything from the Beatles lately, Muffy?” “I haven’t heard anything from the Beatles lately, Buffy.” “Hmm. They must be bereft of ideas, then. Pass the caviar.”
About that.
Screaming guitars and Ringo’s unfathomably well-mic’d drums burst through the chatter like the Kool-Aid Man bursting through a brick wall. The audience rumblings were a calm, untouched swimming pool, and the Beatles are doing a cannonball into it. It’s an auditory encapsulation of the Beatles gatecrashing the world of highbrow classical music with their all-encompassing rock-plus-classical swagger. What’s wrong, Muffy and Buffy? Not the music you were expecting?
Pepper naysayers like to gripe about the album not really being a “rock” album, but tell that to the title track, because it rocks, and it rocks hard. As Exhibit A, I submit the recently released first take of the rhythm track. Ringo’s snare sound, so I’ve been told, is still illegal in every state aside from Nevada and New Jersey. Dried up, eh? More like kicking ass.
Disorienting. That’s what the opening to Sgt. Pepper is. It’s disorienting. You think it’s going to be one thing, and then it’s something else. And then once you think you’ve got a grip on what that something else is, there’s another wild left turn, and you’ve got to reorient yourself all over again. Disorienting is the word that so perfectly encapsulates what makes Sgt. Pepper tick, I’m tempted to turn my usage of it in this essay into a drinking game. (I almost went with “dislocating,” but that has too much of an aura of literary theory speak to it.) Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream? I don’t think so. With the sonic topsy-turvy ride that is Sgt. Pepper, let your attention slip for a moment, and you’ll be lost.
The title track isn’t just disorienting, though – it’s also funny. They’re satirizing the entertainment business! They’re mocking precisely the kind of hokey lounge act that the public had been expecting them to become (but that they pointedly had not). They don’t leave a single cliché out: “It’s wonderful to be here, it’s certainly a thrill” … taking the piss out of all the music hall crap they would have heard in their British childhoods must have felt like second nature. Is there a more surreal moment than the one at the 0:48 mark, when the fake audience presumably laughs at something presumably hilarious the fake band has presumably just done on the fake stage? What’d they do? What happened?! Paul elaborates in the 50th Anniversary booklet: “There had always been a moment in a radio show, with somebody like Tommy Cooper, where he wouldn’t say anything and the audience would laugh. And my imagination went wild whenever that happened. I had to know what made them laugh. When we did Pepper there’s one of those laughs for nothing.”
In other words: the Beatles are fucking with us! And it’s working.
And the French horns. Move over, John Entwistle. The stately brass and wonky electric guitar could have been an ugly combo, but by 1967, after all the experience the group and George Martin had gained with the baroque experiments of “Yesterday,” “In My Life,” and Revolver, it’s just another day in the neighborhood. (Another sly joke: how come stringed instruments were heard tuning up at the start, despite Sgt. Pepper’s being a brass band, hmm?)
Anyway, the auditorium was already buzzing, but now the singer’s going to sing a song? It’s our lucky day. (Side question: so, the other guys we just heard … weren’t singers?) This is gearing up to be the intro to end all intros: the superstar steps up to the microphone, the girls erupt in hysterics, the rest of the band rolls out the three syllable audio equivalent of the red carpet (“BILL … LLLY … SHEARS! …), our minds are totally going to be blown, and…
“What would you think if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and walk out on me?”
That’s … not where I thought this was going.
It’s another curveball. And the curveball isn’t just that the “superstar” is Ringo, the Beatle voted in high school “least likely to.” Or that the Ringo song appears so early in the album (something prior Beatles albums would have never dared to do). The curveball is that the title track sets us up for something zany, comical, and satirical, only for the second song to swerve into territory of self-doubt and inadequacy. You thought the album was going to be one big light-hearted joke? “With a Little Help from My Friends” arrives, with its intimate, if amiable, vulnerability, and suddenly, the joke’s on you.
They say the “concept” of Sgt. Pepper only lasts two songs, but in a way, it barely survives past the first segue, because at some point during the course of “With a Little Help from My Friends,” you get the feeling that the song isn’t being sung by Billy Shears at all, but by Ringo – the real Ringo. Let’s call him Richard Starkey, even. And with his “I’m not sure I really belong in this band” persona, and his mopey, shaggy dog croon, Ringo lends the song an authenticity it wouldn’t have had coming from one of the other three. He sounds like a man who really does need a little help from his friends. (Speaking of friends: he’s getting plenty of help from Paul’s bass playing. Good gravy. Sometimes I listen to this song and I just hum the bass line.)
Perhaps the biggest irony of “With a Little Help from My Friends” is that the man terrified that the audience might walk out on him delivers arguably the best vocal performance of his career. Suddenly Ringo being the superstar doesn’t seem so far-fetched? Like Keith Richards on “You Got the Silver,” it’s the suspense, the tightrope walk, that I think makes Ringo’s nailing of that final high note oddly moving. He’s about to fall, he’s about to stumble face-first into a pie, and then … there it is: Ringo’s razor-thin triumph, preserved for all eternity, the other three belting out a cascading waterfall of harmony behind him. Who thought that a song announcing a fictional band was going to land in such a poignant place?
It’s a moment worthy of an audience cheer but … huh, that’s funny. Where’d the audience go? The unexpected silence between “Friends” and “Lucy” is confirmation that the first layer has been stripped away.
Or has it?
A Lowrey organ enters on the left channel (or perhaps a tiptoeing arachnid), and the mood of sweetness and poignancy switches to one of mystery and … almost a kind of menace? That comforting “With a Little Help from My Friends” vibe sure didn’t last long. I didn’t even have time to grab my popcorn.
Not sure about the rest of you, but when the first verse of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” whisks me away to a strange new kingdom, I can’t tell whether it’s a place I want to be or don’t want to be. “Tangerine trees and marmalade skies”? That doesn’t sound good. Are the Beatles good witches or bad witches? It’s back to the ambiguity of the orchestral warmup sound, but this time things are a little more … lysergic. “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes”? Sounds like you don’t want to fuck with her. Am I getting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland vibes, or Dante’s Inferno vibes? What the hell happened to this album? Only moments ago, Ringo’s friends were rallying around him and now … taxis made of newspapers? I’m trapped on Willy Wonka’s boat, and I want to go back to the chocolate room.
Instead of clarifying the mood, the entering of drums, the additional echo applied to John’s voice, and George mimicking John’s lead vocal note-for-note with a sarangi-like guitar, might make the pre-chorus even creepier than the verse. I’m almost expecting Rumpelstiltskin to jump out of the bushes and do an evil jig.
But then: “Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she’s gone,” four tom-tom hits, a switch from 3/4 to 4/4, a switch from B-flat major to G major and … euphoria. What felt like a nightmare now feels like a triumph, a celebration.
Or does it?
As with John’s Revolver material, why do I get the sense that this euphoria isn’t entirely free of chemical enhancement? But unlike John’s Revolver material, and more like “Strawberry Fields,” I feel like it’s an acid trip that’s fun for the whole family, inspired (or so he claimed) by a child’s drawing, not Peter Fonda ranting in a Hollywood pool. The song has this mixture of glowing, radiant, and unsettling. Which is the “true” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”? The creepy one, or the euphoric one? Does it matter? Even though the song fades out during the euphoric section, I’m not fully convinced I’ve landed in paradise. The rocking horse people might still come and get me.
And so on and so on. Despite Are You Experienced? featuring a song named “Manic Depression,” I declare Sgt. Pepper to be the great manic-depressive album of the Summer of Love. In a way, it’s the musical cousin to Bonnie and Clyde, its cinematic 1967 counterpart in uneasiness. Whenever the record becomes cheerful, it doesn’t stay cheerful for long. Although the Beatles’ drugs of choice during this era were (famously) marijuana and LSD, I’ve also read that Paul was giving cocaine a whirl around this time. This would not shock me.
“I have to admit it’s getting better, it’s getting better all the time”? Clearly this one’s an upper. “I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved”? Hmm. Perhaps not.
Back and forth it goes, from playful to disturbing, often within the same song. The bulk of “Lovely Rita” is like a tongue-in-cheek portrait of modern courtship rituals. See, a lesser songwriter would have received a parking ticket and been inspired to write a screed about the attendant. But no, Paul McCartney realized it would be funnier if he wrote a love letter. I have a question: how did they get this song to sound so airy and weightless? What was the secret ingredient? Ringo’s loping drum groove? George Martin’s second best-ever sped-up piano solo (behind “In My Life”)? The blowing across combs covered with toilet paper (look it up)? Forget Lucy in the sky: I hear those breezy acoustic guitars and vocals smothered in more reverb than a Ricola commercial, and I feel like I’m hearing Rita in the sky.
But then what’s with the eerie 40-second tag that sounds like Mean Mr. Mustard and his buddies grunting and groaning over a minor key vamp? If, as one theory goes, this is the narrator and Rita finding themselves alone after the sisters have left the sofa, why does it sound like the kinky boot beasts from Yellow Submarine’s Sea of Monsters are joining in? Has Rita given her full consent?
In Tell Me Why, Tim Riley paints the starkness of “A Day in the Life” as some kind of outlier on an album featuring “an unabashedly fun set of songs” and “freak-out optimism.” Did he even listen to the album? Get a load of these fun, optimistic lyrics: “She breaks down and cries to her husband, ‘Daddy, our baby’s gone.’” “We were talking about the love that’s gone so cold, and the people who gain the world and lose their soul.” “Nothing to do to save his life, call his wife in.” Oh yeah. So much fun. I’m rolling around in it. I mean, it’s not like the lyrics are printed on the back or anything. Even at the center of the allegedly lighthearted “When I’m Sixty-Four” is a fear of abandonment, the singer worrying, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me?”
And don’t get me started on “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” You thought a trip to the circus was going to be fun, did you? At first you’re munching on cotton candy and Cracker Jacks, but by the end you’re cowering in your room like a toddler Bart Simpson chanting, “Can’t sleep, clown’ll eat me, can’t sleep, clown’ll eat me.” I can see John now: “Oh, you wanted to go to the circus, did you? I’ll show you the bloody circus!” Suddenly the bearded lady is running around with a lizard’s head and the conjoined twins are emitting poison gas from their nostrils and you just want to go home.
Also, it’s awesome.
Riley, to his credit, acknowledges its disturbing flavor, calling it “twisted carnival burlesque,” aptly comparing it to “Tommy’s Holiday Camp,” and commenting on how it’s almost the evil twin of the title track:
Paul’s emcee at the top of the record was dashing; Lennon’s salesmanship is sinister, clicking the last d in his ‘in his way Mr. K. will challenge the world!’ … There’s something demented about Lennon’s ringmaster … As he announces Henry the Horse’s waltz, everything shifts into a whirling ¾ meter; lights and colors suddenly burst forth from the sound, and a labyrinth of organ textures intrudes, like spirits set loose in the house of horrors … The song darkens the Sgt. Pepper fantasy of fame – its characters aren’t lovable old show-biz types but freaks and misfits. These performers live outside the real world and do stunts with animals for a living; the song suggests the lunacy of a marginal world rather than a child’s idyll.
And how. The piano and drums come in at the end of the waltz interlude like a lid being slammed on Pandora’s Box, but they can only hold down the demons for so long before the multitracked, heavily reverbed Lennons shout “And tonight Mr. Kite is topping the bill!” and the lid pops open again.
Then come the tapes. Oh, I’ve read all the books. I know the story. John told George Martin he wanted to “hear the sawdust,” and Martin thought, “Come on, John, work with me here.” But then he realized, “Wait, what sounds like a carnival? Steam organs!” So, he and engineer Geoff Emerick took old, pre-existing tapes of steam organ recordings, chopped them up, spliced them back together at random, some forwards, some backwards, and then played the tapes in the background during the outro.
Here’s the thing. I understand the technological wizardry behind what I’m hearing, but my brain doesn’t care. All my brain hears is the ghosts of a thousand murdered clowns howling in their clown agony, being sucked forwards and backwards through their dead clown dimension. I swear, in addition to the main calliope tapes, way back in the distance, I hear a second layer of tapes, adding a kind of calliope neutron wash. It’s like the dark matter of the universe, except it’s sparkling? Do I sound like a madman? There’s even a brief moment at 2:17, where one of the allegedly “random” calliope bits plays a little answer riff to George Martin’s soloing organ. It’s in the correct key and everything. There is no way that was a random calliope bit. That must have been a secret overdub. Come on guys. No one gets that lucky – not even on Sgt. Pepper.
Maybe it’s a lazy oversimplification to chalk up the album’s bipolar mood swings to John and Paul’s contrasting temperaments, so I’m not about to do that. However, this does allow me to point out that, unlike on Revolver, many of the songs on Sgt. Pepper are true Lennon-McCartney collaborations. Everyone knows about “A Day in the Life,” but do you know about “With a Little Help from My Friends,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Getting Better,” “She’s Leaving Home,” and, if an aging Paul is to be believed, “Mr. Kite”? These weren’t necessarily 50-50 collaborations, but 70-30 and 80-20 collaborations are still collaborations. Compare that to Revolver, where the major collaborations were, from what I’ve gathered, “Eleanor Rigby,” “Yellow Submarine,” and … that was about it. On Sgt. Pepper, the myth of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership wasn’t much of a myth at all, and I think we all benefited (not just Mr. Kite).
*****
Criticisms? Sgt. Pepper is the kind of album where the criticisms I have aren’t really criticisms, they’re more like half-criticisms.
When I was younger, there were four songs I didn’t think were quite on the same level as the other nine: “Getting Better,” “She’s Leaving Home,” “Within You Without You,” and “Good Morning Good Morning.” Over time, “Getting Better” and “Within You Without You” have left this category.
I think what used to bother me most about “Getting Better” was John’s wildly wavering backing vocals on the chorus, where it sounds like he’s singing “Bet-UH-uh-UH-uh” while someone is vigorously shaking him by the shoulders. But now I kind of like that they put something so bizarrely unpolished in such an otherwise polished song. Not to mention the lyrical juxtaposition of forward-looking self-improvement and regret over beating the crap out of one’s girlfriend. Thanks for keeping it real, John.
Initially I thought “Within You Without You” was boring, but at that age I also thought black and white movies and 19th century novels were boring. This song doesn’t merely sound like India; it smells like India. You can practically taste the bugs, humidity, and omnipresent poverty. I’m reminded of tagging along whenever my father would visit the local Indian food store and staring at all the strange artwork and lettering on the packages. Right from the opening seconds, the whiff of Nag Champa incense sticks hits with a pungency from hell. You know the brand.
Hold on, I hear the Revolver people now: “But George had already done an ‘Indian’ song on Revolver – what was so special about this?” I don’t know, doesn’t “Within You Without You” feel more refined, cohesive, and lived in than “Love You To”? I think he needed another year to truly marinate in the India juice. “Love You To” plays like “Look at me, I’m experimenting with a sitar!” while “Within You Without You” plays like “I am the sitar.” George’s disembodied vocals almost sit in the mix like another instrument.
Speaking of sitting in the mix like another instrument: George Martin’s string arrangement tiptoes into the meditation room so unobtrusively that I didn’t even notice it was mingling its way in there until something like my 55th listen. Martin handles what might read on paper like a radical, cross-continental hybrid with such elegance that I suspect most Sgt. Pepper listeners have spent decades not noticing how weird this truly is. Think about what’s happening during the instrumental interlude, with the Dilruba and the strings performing a kind of musical Eastern-Western tango. It might be at this exact moment where all remaining genre boundaries in rock melted away like Bert’s chalk pavement drawings in Mary Poppins. Question: how did we get from “Please Please Me” to whatever the fuck this is? The tastiest part of the interlude might be how it comes to a close, the swarmandal (?) glissando conjuring images of a curtain being parted, the descending cello line suggesting an airborne feather wafting its way to the floor, about to fall asleep on a cushion.
Enchanting. That’s what this song is. It could be a mess, but I find it enchanting.
Nor does it hurt that the lyrics are the shining essence of part-time Buddhism (or, at the very least, part-time Hinduism?). “The time will come when you see we’re all one”? Sign me up. George may have only gotten one track, but he managed to present the album’s overriding themes in what feels like their most explicit form; perhaps he doesn’t possess John and Paul’s subtlety, but cut him some slack, he was the youngest. The one line that strikes me as the most cringey and potentially naïve is “With our love, we could save the world, if they only knew.” Oh really, George? What exactly, may I ask, would “saving the world” look like? When would this theoretical saving of the world be completed? I think individual people can become happier and increase the level of enjoyment in their day-to-day lives, but I don’t believe the world is something that can be “saved.” Like if we just took Steps A, B, and C, then all human suffering would magically cease. Fine, George, you took acid, discovered meditation, and now you’re enlightened. There were things you didn’t know, and now you know them, and you want to use what you’ve learned to help people. But I don’t think the world needs “saving,” whatever that entails.
A more charitable interpretation, however, is that the lyrics are capturing the kind of late-night musings of young artistic types sitting around spouting pretentious ideas to each other (“We were talking …”), and not necessarily stating what George definitively believes. Also, mere seconds later, he more or less redeems himself: “Try to realize it’s all within yourself, no one else can make you change/And to see you’re really only very small, and life flows on within you and without you.” Whoa. To see smallness as a virtue? Doesn’t that run counter to everything society teaches us? Isn’t every children’s story about a hero who becomes big and important and powerful? In a way, weren’t (and aren’t) the Beatles themselves seen as precisely those kind of heroes? And yet here’s one of them, puncturing the balloon: You’re not important. You’re small. You’re meaningless. You’re connected to all this other stuff. Can’t you see how adopting that perspective makes your stresses lighter?
Saving the world? George, you may have just saved your own ass.
That leaves two songs I don’t enjoy quite as much as the others, but if they’re your favorites, then send me a postcard, drop me a line. In the Revolver vs. Sgt. Pepper contest, the “chamber music” song is the one spot where I would give the edge to Revolver, because “She’s Leaving Home” has always struck me as a poor man’s “Eleanor Rigby.” Whereas the earlier song speeds along with a crisp, intricate logic, I feel like “She’s Leaving Home” is more stilted and labored.
I have a theory that the issue might not be compositional, per se, but orchestral. Fresh off writing it, Paul was itching to work on the orchestral arrangement with George Martin, but Martin was – gasp – not available that day! Now, did Paul set the task aside and patiently wait like a gentleman? No, instead he found some other guy who was available on a moment’s notice (Mike Leander) and worked with him instead. I wish Paul would’ve waited. I don’t know what a George Martin arrangement would have sounded like, but I suspect it would have had more zip and fire to it than what Leander came up with (I’m aware that the original mono mix and the 2017 remix play at a faster speed, but for me, this isn’t about the tempo). The three repeated violin chords at the end of each chorus? Too cutesy, too irritating. And too much solo harp. It needs more edge, or something. It’s too programmatic, commenting on the action like a film score, afraid we might miss something (“Daddy, our baby’s gone” – DEE-DEE-DEE! DEE-DEE!). George Martin would’ve trusted us to piece it together; his arrangements tended to function more like counterpoint to the lyrics. But does “She’s Leaving Home” kill the buzz? Pfft. I remember hearing Harry Nilsson’s cover version and thinking, “Yeah, it’s a solid composition.” It changes the pace, adds to the stylistic variety. I wouldn’t kick it out of bed for eating crackers.
Still, it’s one of the rare Beatles songs I find to be more impressive lyrically than musically. This has to be the least cool, least sexy topic for a rock song ever (though to be fair, that’s equally true of “Eleanor Rigby”). I like how, sitting right in the middle of the album, is a mini short story, one that’s worthy of literary merit in its own right, and like any juicy literary work, one that’s open to interpretation. Are the parents wrong? Is the daughter wrong? What makes a person happy anyway? Stability? Protection? Sympathy? Excitement? I applaud the lyrics for not saying one way or the other. Although I don’t think the daughter’s as right as she thinks she is, what strikes me about the parents is how blind they are to their own culpability. “We never thought of ourselves, never a thought for ourselves”? Talk about self-serving. How many of the actions they told themselves they were taking on their daughter’s behalf were actions they were really taking on their own behalf? But again, those yummy Sgt. Pepper themes: wasted potential, connection unrealized, life half-lived.
Whenever I read quotes from Beatles contemporaries like Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, and Lou Reed knocking Sgt. Pepper for being overproduced and smothered in studio trickery, I usually think, “Too bad when I was an eleven-year-old kid, I couldn’t have cared less about that.” But with “Good Morning Good Morning,” I might concede their point. This one feels a bit … busy? Between the canned horns and the manic backing vocals, I want a little more space to breathe. “But isn’t the song supposed to make you feel agitated and annoyed?” In that case, good job? Even Paul’s guitar solo feels overly busy. I will defend to the death, however, the parade of animal noises. As with “She’s Leaving Home,” this one seems to be trying a bit harder than the others, that’s all. But skip it? Come on. It would probably be my fifth favorite song on Revolver.
But like “She’s Leaving Home,” I enjoy “Good Morning Good Morning” more for its lyrics, John’s nominal second-person portrait of suburban malaise most likely drawing on his own collapsing marriage to Cynthia and his tendency to sit around, get high, and watch third-rate television shows until Paul would call him up and nag him to get back into the studio. Points given for how the busyness of the arrangement hides the despair underneath.
*****
Speaking of the despair underneath: may I discuss “Fixing a Hole” now?
“Fixing a Hole” is not the album’s most famous song. It is not the album’s most analyzed song. It doesn’t announce its importance, nor call attention to itself.
It is my favorite song on Sgt. Pepper.
If this album is supposed to be some sort of paean to communal hippie solidarity, then who let this song in here? “Silly people run around, they worry me, never win, and wonder why they don’t get in my door”? Sounds like the Summer of Love’s great antisocial anthem. But if so, it strikes me as an antisocial anthem that takes little joy in being so. If Paul is cursing the outside world, I sense him doing so with reluctance. There’s a proto-“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” or “Isn’t It a Pity” vibe to it, an air of promise unfulfilled. Paul would rather let people in his door, but if they haven’t managed to get themselves onto the same wavelength that he’s on, then screw ‘em. He’d rather just sit inside and paint his room.
Here is where perhaps, for the first time on the album, the third layer, the existential dread layer, comes to the fore, genuinely dominating a song. In that sense, it’s like the musical inverse of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and Getting Better.” Whereas those two alternate between moody, tension-filled verses and peppy choruses that seem to wipe all the dark stuff away, “Fixing a Hole” alternates between moody, tension-filled verses and a peppy, almost confrontational bridge, Paul sounding like he’s about to muster the strength to conquer his blues, only to find the obstacles too overwhelming and slinking back down in defeat somewhere around the word “door.” Apparently, humanity’s despair is too much for one man to overcome. He’s really only very small.
“Fixing a Hole” is also George’s one true Sgt. Pepper guitar moment. Perhaps he recognized his own frustration with the human race in the song’s sentiments, because the buried anger that Paul’s lyrics only hint at comes out like a viper through George’s guitar playing, which almost functions like a second lead singer. What would the bridge be without his see-sawing lick climbing up, up, up in the last bar, only to curl down under the start of the verse, almost like a question mark? And if you’re one of those people who thinks that Paul’s solos on “Taxman” and “Good Morning Good Morning” (the ones where he frenetically plays a bunch of notes at random) are fun and cool, let me show you what a real guitar solo sounds like. George knows how to let each note bite and sting.
And just when the song threatens to turn repetitive, in come the backing vocals, which transition nicely from chirpy morse code during the bridge to mournful oohs during the last verse. Nor does it hurt that Paul McCartney is, shall we say, a very good singer. He croons that “and I still go …” with a falsetto so icy, it could freeze the tropics. Listen to the weltschmerz oozing out of those last deliveries of “fixing a hole where the rain gets in!” I hear the simmering agony of a newly perceptive young man wishing all the “silly people” could see the world the way he now sees it – could join him in “taking the time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday” – but also recognizing that he doesn’t have the means to make them see. So many people will never “get it,” and that is something he can’t stand, but he’ll have to learn to live with it. There’s a bittersweet futility in every note of Paul’s vocal.
Seriously, don’t sleep on this one.
*****
The layers. The layers.
The shifting between layers is what I think gives the finale of Sgt. Pepper its power – or at least a good deal of its power (because an unhinged orchestral crescendo and slowly decaying piano chord don’t hurt). The album has been bouncing along between the second layer and the third layer for quite some time now, but then the first layer, the “fake band” layer, the one we’d long given up for dead, returns at the least expected moment (in the barnyard, with the roosters, perhaps from underneath a haystack?), only to wholeheartedly cede the stage to the terrifying third layer.
Longtime Beatles roadie Neil Aspinall explained in the Beatles Anthology: “I said to Paul, ‘Why don’t you have Sgt. Pepper as the compere of the album? He comes on at the beginning of the show and introduces the band, and at the end he closes it.’ A bit later, John came up to me and said, ‘Nobody likes a smart-arse, Neil.’ That was when I knew that John liked it and that it would happen.” Oh, that John.
The “Sgt. Pepper Reprise” is like, “Hey remember me? You thought we’d abandoned this nine songs ago? Gotcha!” As conceptual threads go, it may be one little brushstroke, but what a brushstroke. It gives the canvas that extra shade of chartreuse. The reprise raises questions the Beatles wisely refuse to answer: So was the rest of the album the “show” and are we its gullible audience? Or was the album the audience, and are we the show? Or is real life the show?
Note how, at this most important of moments on this most important of albums, John still can’t resist horsing around. While Paul’s count-in at the start of the reprise drips with attitude and commitment, John lets out a cheeky “Bye!” as if to say, “Let’s all laugh at how totally into this album Paul is.”
Well, I’m into it too, John. What’s impressive about the reprise is how it’s not simply the same old track they played at the beginning, but a creative reworking. Basically, the Beatles took the chorus of the first version (which, given how catchy it is, had arguably been underutilized), and turned the chorus into the entire song. It’s like they took the chocolate chips out of the cookie and just gave us the chocolate chips. And they turned the already ingratiatingly bluesy melody even more ingratiatingly bluesy with little ad libs like “Sgt. Pepper’s one and only lonely hearts club band …” Instead of “Oh God, this again?,” it’s more like “Oh boy, this again!” In some ways, it’s better the second time, Ringo laying down a beat so funky that the Beastie Boys sampled it without anyone batting an eye.
At this point, they might as well be singing, “We’re the Beatles, we’re awesome, other bands blow, we’ve kicked ass for thirty-five minutes, we can do whatever we want for a finale and you’ll probably like it.” This song is like their victory lap. Sgt. Pepper gives me the spine-tinglies in a lot of places, but perhaps in no place more than the drawn out “hearts … club … BAND!” and Paul’s giddy “Whoo!” slowly getting swallowed by applause. They did it. They really did it.
Splendid album, gentlemen. Well done. I’ve never heard better. Congratulations and … wait, what’s this? There’s more?
The applause of the imaginary crowd fades, and in its place is an acoustic guitar, a piano, and the scariest-sounding maracas ever committed to tape.
You know that layer of horror and menace that kept threatening to overtake the “tea and crumpets” layer? To paraphrase the little girl in Poltergeist, “It’s HEEEE-EEERE.”
All the disturbing imagery that kept briefly popping its head in throughout the album? With “A Day in the Life,” it takes command at last. I think it’s John’s aura of passivity, remoteness, and indifference that makes his seemingly mundane observations so disturbing. “Well I just had to laugh/I saw the photograph.” Had to laugh at the sight of a British aristocrat’s fatal car crash? “A crowd of people turned away/But I just had to look/Having read the book.” Had to stare at a harrowing depiction of war atrocities, merely out of a misplaced sense of intellectual duty?
John is like the man with no agency, wishing to break free, but trapped in the prison of the everyday. He’s the metaphorical version of Jean-Do Bauby, author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, who, after suffering a crippling stroke at the age of 43, was forced to watch his existence go by, wanting to alter it, or perhaps even wanting to “look away” like the crowd does, but finding himself only able to blink one eye. (I’ve heard that Bauby quotes “A Day in the Life” in his book, comparing himself to the “lucky man who made the grade” who also “blew his mind out in a car,” but I’ve only seen the film. Unlike John, I just had to look, having not read the book.)
I could go on about “A Day in the Life,” but I doubt I’d say much that would be news to anybody. If the album is a constant interplay between layers, “A Day in the Life” is like layers within the layers, the point where the album starts eating itself. It’s like the sound of the evening news as heard through the fragments of a stroke victim’s brain. Paul enters with a verse about waking up, catching the bus, having a smoke and … who is this? Is this the same person who’s been singing John’s verses? A different person? Is this the same person, but in a parallel universe, like a Mulholland Drive/Bette Elms/Diane Selwyn kind of thing? I know I’ve been giving Tim Riley a hard time, but he captures this aspect of “A Day in the Life” well:
The blurring of the dream life and the real world adds to all the confusion. We’re never sure whether Lennon’s section is the “real” world or if it’s merely the dream that Paul slips back into atop the bus. The alarm clock blurs these boundaries: is Paul waking from Lennon’s nightmare, or is Lennon imagining Paul’s generic day in the life? The song inside a song works like the play within a play: the interdependence of reality and illusion is telescoped into one setting.
Ah, but then comes my Favorite Part™. I suspect it’s your favorite part too. I’m not talking about the two atonal orchestral freak-out crescendos, although if you slapped together audio snippets of every death that took place during World War I and World War II and condensed them into two 20-second medleys, they might sound something like that. (Would this make Paul’s verse Weimar-era Germany, the final piano chord the atomic bomb being dropped on Japan, the high-pitched dog tone the Marshall Plan, and the run-out groove the Japanese holdouts who kept fighting for 30 years in the Philippines?)
No, I’m talking about the “Aaaaah.”
Paul sings, “Somebody spoke and I went into a dream,” and then there’s a … ghostly voice? A terrifying apparition? A disembodied spirit hovering beyond the mortal plane? I couldn’t tell you what it is, but it begins to sing “Aaaaah…”
That’s it. That’s my favorite part of “A Day in the Life.”
The key to all human endeavor resides with that “Aaaaah.” But the orchestra is right there with it, turning the affair into something equal parts dreamy and disquieting. I think it’s important that the orchestra makes an additional appearance – a normal appearance – during this section, tying the avant-garde craziness back to the song proper. In the original stereo mix, the “Aaaaah” travels from one channel to the other, like a banished creature desperately longing to return home, yearning to escape its quotidian prison of bus catching and comb grabbing, only for the orchestra to put it back in its place with a sardonic “BOMMMM, Bom-Bom, Bom-BOM.”
Yep. That’s the part.
Well, the last verse isn’t bad, either – the final suggestion that there’s another kind of life waiting to be discovered, if only it were possible to move past the old one (break on through to the other side?):
I read the news today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall
Why? Why are men wasting their time with nonsense? Why do we need to count the holes? Lift the veil from your eyes and see.
And then one last “I’d love to turn you on” – it’s almost as much a threat as an offer. To my surprise, despite his Revolver partisanship, I think Riley sums it up powerfully:
In the context of the album, the track begins as an encore and winds up a eulogy; it dismantles the illusory world the Beatles entered as Sgt. Pepper’s Band … But the Sgt. Pepper journey isn’t futile; its despair is ultimately hopeful. ‘I’d love to turn you on’ is a motto of enlightenment, of Lennon’s desire to wake the world up to its own potential for rejuvenation, not self-annihilation. If ‘A Day in the Life’ were a single, it would be unbearably pessimistic; as the final track to the Pepper road show, it cools the freak-out optimism and challenges its listeners to scheme beyond the numbing ordinariness that daily life confronts them with … Because of the larger context, it’s not ‘a song of wasteland,’ as Richard Poirier suggests. The final blow doesn’t summon the fate of modern man; it decries the tragedy of the fullness available and denied in our culture.
Or the fullness available and denied to individuals just trying to cope. When I was eleven years old, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to articulate why Sgt. Pepper spoke to me so intensely, but I think I can better articulate it now. My parents’ marriage was one of unhealthy, oppressive stasis. Among her many other issues, my mother suffered from the hoarding side of obsessive-compulsive disorder, collecting piles and piles of newspapers, magazines, junk mail, souvenirs, and trinkets, and refusing to throw any of the piles away. She was obsessed with superficial things – hiding, in the words of George Harrison, behind a wall of illusion.
Instead of helping her get treatment, or divorcing her, my father tolerated all but her most extreme behaviors, and asked his two sons to do the same. I was dimly aware that other families weren’t like this, but I wasn’t 100% certain. Looking back, I can sympathize with my parents having their struggles and challenges, but what I can’t sympathize with is their refusal to improve their lives or address their unhealthy behavior. Growing up with my parents, the guiding force I soaked up was one of stagnation. Stasis and stagnation. I had to admit, they weren’t getting better.
Then one day, I discovered this band from long ago, and this album they made that dared to propose a deeper way of looking at the world, that dared to shock their audience into awareness. And the existence of this band, and this album, showed me that reinvention was possible. This band could have chosen stasis and stagnation, but they opted for the unknown. They saw another path out there, and they wanted me to see another path too.
When you’re ranking albums, I guess you’re supposed to stick to the music. But I think when I was that age, the tale of Sgt. Pepper meant just as much to me as the music did. Change was out there. It could be done. I didn’t have to sit at home, like my parents did, counting all the holes in Albert Hall. Sgt. Pepper was like my first encounter with part-time Buddhism, and I gorged on it.
And yet it sits there, on all those lists, several spots below Revolver, “a Day-Glo tombstone for its time,” the cynics like to say, its wisdom ignored, its layers unnoticed. It sits there, the way it sat in the pile of records my parents never played, ignored by those who aren’t really listening to it, the silly people who disagree and never win. But if you’re curious, if you think you’re up for it, you can sneak into the cracks that run through the door, paint the room in a colorful way, and let your mind wander.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be taking the time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday.